University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty are raising concerns over new workload requirements set to begin next fall that were passed as part of Wisconsin’s latest state budget negotiations.
Wisconsin Act 15 provides new requirements for University of Wisconsin System faculty and educational staff, mandating educators teach a minimum of 12 credit hours across the academic year, with an additional three summer credits for staff with 12-month appointments.
The new requirements were part of the bipartisan state budget agreement made in July between Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers to land a $256 million funding increase for the UW System, the largest in decades.
“It’s more funding for the university, and that's good, but it’s funding with all these strings attached,” Barrett Elward, co-president of the United Faculty and Academic Staff, told The Daily Cardinal.
While faculty and staff welcome the funding increase, UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Educational Policy Studies Taylor Odle highlighted a “growing concern among faculty” about the loss of educational autonomy and potential legislative deals that “don’t reflect the actual operation of the campus.”
According to Odle and Elward, much of the UW-Madison academic staff are already teaching at the minimum required credit level, in what Odle termed a “two:two load” — two classes per semester.
Odle stressed that faculty across the UW System care “very deeply” about teaching, but instruction is only one part of their job, in addition to research and developing courses.
Odle called UW-Madison “a powerhouse research institution,” with UW-Madison ranking fifth in federal research expenditures in fiscal year 2024.
“This provision necessarily makes doing the other part of our job — the part that brings in a lot of grants to the institution, that creates discoveries and patents and benefits the state of Wisconsin and the nation — it makes doing those things much harder by kind of constraining what we can and can't do,” Odle told the Cardinal.
As UW’s other R1 research university, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee will have similar workload requirements to UW-Madison. The remaining UW System universities will require educators to teach at least 24-credits each academic year.
Both Odle and Elward said Act 15 is overreach by the Legislature and criticized that the changes to faculty workload were negotiated quickly behind closed doors without faculty input.
Odle said UW System officials and legislators were rushing to come to a budget agreement and that the legislature required the workload provisions be brought in before releasing funding.
“Good public policy is not made with last minute concessions behind closed doors,” Odle said.
Elward said that view is shared across faculty and staff.
“These are opinions that I’ve arrived at talking to people that have been here much longer than I have… I talked to grad students, faculty, other academic staff, people at different campuses,” Elward said. “That's one of the nice things about being in a union, is you are connected to all these various workers that all believe in the university system and believe that workers should have more say, and that’s not what we’re getting.”
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin and Interim Provost John Zumbrunnen said on balance they believed Act 15 would give the university the “tools necessary to protect and further UW-Madison’s ongoing strength” while acknowledging some uncertainty during the implementation in an October statement to UW-Madison faculty and academic staff.
In an effort to address the non-credit work faculty engage in, the Board of Regents’ workload policy document, Regent Policy Document 20-25, contains guidelines for new buyout policies and exceptions to the minimum workload requirements. It also explains possible teaching equivalencies for out-of-classroom work with students, like mentorship. The document was approved by the Joint Committee on Employment Relations in December.
The UW System will now finalize the systemwide policy. From there, UW-Madison will work with campus, college and departmental areas to create university-specific policies that align with the new requirements.
“It remains to be seen how [the RPD] will be implemented,” Elward said.
Minimum workload requirements are a novel policy at the UW System, but at least 10 of the other Big Ten institutions have some form of workload requirement.
