Back in 2015, Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker thought to burnish his culture warrior cred in advance of a bid for the presidency by taking arms against the University of Wisconsin.
Walker cut the state university’s budget. His handpicked board of regents gutted tenure protections for its faculty.
He and his legislative allies disdained the university’s traditional role of producing broad-based academic scholarship to deepen its students’ understanding of the world and talked instead as though the university were a glorified vocational or trade school — “connecting students and workers with the skills needed in today’s workforce,” as a university spokesperson put it at the time. (...)
Critics predicted that Walker’s policies would exacerbate a faculty flight caused by the university’s low pay compared with that of its peer state universities, while reducing its competitiveness for federal research grants.
That’s exactly what happened. UW administrators said their professors were being poached by academic institutions — not only Ivy League schools and elite public institutions, but universities that could never have hoped to attract Wisconsin faculty in the past.
Local newspapers and education journals published columns by UW teachers explaining regretfully why they were leaving the state. Retention bonuses paid to dissuade valued professors from moving soared into the millions.
The university slid down the rankings of recipients of federal research and development grants — from 10th among recipients of National Science Foundation grants in 2010, to 16th in 2021. The university’s overall research and development spending, the third-highest in the country in 2010, fell to eighth in 2021.
Walker’s presidential aspirations didn’t last long. He announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination in mid-July 2016 and was out of the race by the third week of September. He did leave a significant partisan legacy, however: His model for appealing to a rabid far-right electoral base by targeting higher education institutions and their faculty has been taken up by Republican politicians in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. You can expect the movement to expand, spreading intellectual benightment across red-state America.
In its most common form, these attacks focus on efforts to foster diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. Banning “DEI” has become a rallying cry for the mob, augmenting attacks on the previous shibboleth of critical race theory (CRT).
In Florida, House Bill 999 would bar any program espousing “diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory.” Majors and minors involving “Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems,” are outlawed. (“Intersectionality” is the concept that race, class and gender are all interrelated in ways that can foster discrimination and social oppression.)
Such strictures and others are invariably paired with the evisceration of tenure protection. The reason is obvious: Restrictions couldn’t be imposed on university faculty members unless the teachers feared for their livelihoods if they flouted the rules. Tenure is what protects teachers from punishment for resisting political interference, so it has to go.
The changes in tenure rules take many forms. Some allow for reviews of tenure grants after specified periods — five years, say, or even annually. Others take the decisions out of the hands of departments and turn them over to political appointees. (...)
Tenure “reformers” typically describe their goals as depriving undeserving layabouts of an unwarranted privilege. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a driving force behind a bill that would permanently forbid public universities in the state to grant tenure to any new hires, explained after the Senate passed the tenure bill that “tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job.” [ed. ... supreme court justices excepted, of course.] (...)
Universities in these states are on the glide path to uselessness, especially since the assault on higher education is unfolding in the same states that are at war with women’s reproductive health and voting rights. Already we have seen faculty candidates, college-age students and medical professionals checking these states off their lists.
Walker cut the state university’s budget. His handpicked board of regents gutted tenure protections for its faculty.
He and his legislative allies disdained the university’s traditional role of producing broad-based academic scholarship to deepen its students’ understanding of the world and talked instead as though the university were a glorified vocational or trade school — “connecting students and workers with the skills needed in today’s workforce,” as a university spokesperson put it at the time. (...)
That’s exactly what happened. UW administrators said their professors were being poached by academic institutions — not only Ivy League schools and elite public institutions, but universities that could never have hoped to attract Wisconsin faculty in the past.
Local newspapers and education journals published columns by UW teachers explaining regretfully why they were leaving the state. Retention bonuses paid to dissuade valued professors from moving soared into the millions.
The university slid down the rankings of recipients of federal research and development grants — from 10th among recipients of National Science Foundation grants in 2010, to 16th in 2021. The university’s overall research and development spending, the third-highest in the country in 2010, fell to eighth in 2021.
Walker’s presidential aspirations didn’t last long. He announced his candidacy for the GOP nomination in mid-July 2016 and was out of the race by the third week of September. He did leave a significant partisan legacy, however: His model for appealing to a rabid far-right electoral base by targeting higher education institutions and their faculty has been taken up by Republican politicians in Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. You can expect the movement to expand, spreading intellectual benightment across red-state America.
In its most common form, these attacks focus on efforts to foster diversity, equity and inclusion on campus. Banning “DEI” has become a rallying cry for the mob, augmenting attacks on the previous shibboleth of critical race theory (CRT).
In Florida, House Bill 999 would bar any program espousing “diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory.” Majors and minors involving “Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems,” are outlawed. (“Intersectionality” is the concept that race, class and gender are all interrelated in ways that can foster discrimination and social oppression.)
Such strictures and others are invariably paired with the evisceration of tenure protection. The reason is obvious: Restrictions couldn’t be imposed on university faculty members unless the teachers feared for their livelihoods if they flouted the rules. Tenure is what protects teachers from punishment for resisting political interference, so it has to go.
The changes in tenure rules take many forms. Some allow for reviews of tenure grants after specified periods — five years, say, or even annually. Others take the decisions out of the hands of departments and turn them over to political appointees. (...)
Tenure “reformers” typically describe their goals as depriving undeserving layabouts of an unwarranted privilege. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a driving force behind a bill that would permanently forbid public universities in the state to grant tenure to any new hires, explained after the Senate passed the tenure bill that “tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job.” [ed. ... supreme court justices excepted, of course.] (...)
Universities in these states are on the glide path to uselessness, especially since the assault on higher education is unfolding in the same states that are at war with women’s reproductive health and voting rights. Already we have seen faculty candidates, college-age students and medical professionals checking these states off their lists.
by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | Read more:
Image: AP
