BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MILWAUKEE AAUP CHAPTER
We are reposting this statement, published today on the UWM AAUP chapter website, with permission of the chapter.
On Friday, May 3, UWM’s administration submitted a proposal to close the College of General Studies (CGS) and lay off all of its employees. This program discontinuance proposal is the formal vehicle for firing CGS’s tenured faculty members in conformity with regent policy, following previous announcements that the campus facilities at Washington County and Waukesha would be shut down. If carried out, it will be the first mass firing of faculty in the history of the University of Wisconsin System, a signal event in American higher education.
CGS was created in 2018 as an administrative unit to house the programs and employees at the Washington County and Waukesha campuses, which were transferred to UWM in the forced breakup of the UW Colleges. That initial decision to keep the satellite campus programs and faculty administratively walled off from their main campus counterparts—an arrangement not generally pursued at other receiving campuses—is what has made them available as a target for elimination under regent policy today.
The administration cites steep declines in enrollment and a proportionally large expenditure of state appropriations as reasons to view the continued operation of CGS as untenable. The enrollment declines are undeniable and are mirrored at every former UW Colleges location. Apart from the national trends the administration cites, they are the result of disastrous decisions, under conditions of needless austerity, to regionalize administration and advising within the UW Colleges going back a decade. As for state appropriations, the administration reports that these make up 48% of CGS’s budget, as opposed to 27% on average for the main campus units. Were CGS funded at that 27% level, it would need an additional $2.5 million per year to operate.
To summarize: UWM’s administration is proposing to take the alarming and unprecedented step of laying off over 40 tenured faculty members, along with many more academic and university staff, over a sum of $2.5 million, or four-tenths of one percent of the university’s annual operating budget.
The AAUP’s Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure contemplate the possibility of faculty being terminated as a result of a program closure “based essentially upon educational considerations.” The UWM administration cites a mix of educational and financial considerations. On the educational side, the administration focuses on CGS’s associate’s degree programs, ignoring the fact that those programs are largely unrelated to CGS’s traditional role serving bachelor’s degree students in their first two years. On the financial side, the rationale for this dramatic, last-resort mass firing event is a minimal cost overrun and a per-FTE expenditure figure calculated by pulling out CGS’s cost-effective First-Year Bridge Program. An administration that took seriously its obligations under the norms of American higher education would find another way to realize the targeted savings while retaining affected faculty and staff.
Finally, the administration’s proposal is notably silent on the CGS faculty’s statutory reappointment rights in Wis. Stat. s. 36.22(13). The implications for tenure and academic freedom at UWM are dire, and they demand the attention of the main campus faculty and the broader academic community. The financial bar for program closure has been set extremely low. The next program closure will involve fewer employees and thus be easier to undertake. And it will occur on the main campus.
