[Cincinatus' Wife]

The president of the board and the UW-Madison chancellor have pledged to maintain tenure and academic freedom. But faculty are skeptical they will have the same ironclad protections against retaliation for controversial research, particularly the type of scholarship that can leave winners and losers in the marketplace.

Read "grant money" to fund progressive "studies" that market policy and legislation!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is poised to win a huge victory on education as the state legislature passed a budget that repeals state tenure guarantees while also slashing the budget of the University of Wisconsin.

The victory was enunciated by the acquiescence of the university, which recognized its defeat by passing a spending plan that implements Walker’s cuts. All that remains is for Walker to consummate his victory by affixing his signature to the budget.

The two-year, $73 billion budget approved Thursday makes a host of changes Walker has sought in the realm of education. Wisconsin’s school voucher program is expanded, and $250 million in funding is taken from the University of Wisconsin. That’s down from the $300 million cut Walker originally sought, but still a substantial haircut.

Bowing to the fait accompli, later on Thursday the University of Wisconsin approved its own budget, implementing the big cuts expected of it. About 400 positions will be laid off or will go unfilled, and the university’s budgets no money for pay hikes. The school’s situation is made tougher because the legislature has also frozen in-state tuition....." Source - The Daily Caller

[Cowboy Bob]

If Walker is not elected President or Vice-President, I would at least want to see his as Secretary of Education or Secretary of Labor.

[Pontiac]

This gives me a glimmer of hope that we could be seeing the reversal of Left’s dominance in academia.

I pray that it is true.

[nathanbedford]

Academic tenure is justified as a kind of ivory tower First Amendment. The argument goes that we must insulate Socrates from the mob, from the Pharisees, and from the government. Tenure like the First Amendment, the argument goes, is needed for unpopular speech even for obnoxious and repugnant speech because popular speech needs no protection. Further, the ivory covered campus is designed to be a petri dish of contentious ideas which might be very unpopular but which need protection.

The problem is we ask the taxpayer to fund a never ending demand for higher wages and richer retirements. The first amendment does not require the taxpayers to underwrite free speech. Let's look at an academic campus.

Is it likely that chemistry professors, physic professors, math professors or any hard science professor needs First Amendment protection? Well, possibly if he is speaking out about climate change. Ironically, he will need that protection only if he is speaking out against the prevailing academic doctrine favoring man made climate change. What does climate change have to do with chemistry 101, usually actually taught by a nontenured teaching assistant, in which the students must learn their tables? Very little or nothing. Why does a teacher at that level need tenure? He does not. Yet a professor teaching at that level gets tenure.

What about the professor who is teaching an advanced class concerning climate change? He is admittedly embarking on a controversial area of study and the argument goes that he needs protection to speak truth to power. We have already noted that it is only a professor who speaks out against climate change needs protection in today's environment. Why should that be so? Because the powers that be who the control 95% or so of our universities have one view on climate change. They are the same ones who hire and fire professors to teach chemistry 101 or to teach climate change at an elevated level. They have acquired a death grip over the faculty to the degree that our colleges resemble Soviets more than institutions dedicated to discovering scientific truth. We have invested in unnamed, unelected bureaucrats (because when professors act as bureaucrats they should be called such) who wield unsupervised, unaccountable power in secret to control personnel and therefore to control the subject matter of our tax funded educational system.

If the issue were only climate change we might have to concede the possibility that science is all on the side of the prevailing opinion on campus. But it is not just climate change rather it is every single scientific, political, cultural, economic or sexual issue which currently excites the interest of our teaching class. In everything at all times there is a deadly unanimity, a political correctness which has descended over institutions which justify their existence, as well is their right to tenure, because academic freedom is necessary to provide a place where Mavericks can thrive. On every issue all the time these perfectly safe professors are on the Marxist side.

The data are in and it is irrefutable, the Academy is utterly controlled by the left. The practice puts lie to the theory. Exercising a death grip on hiring and firing, Marxist professors and Marxist administrators ensure that only leftists may feed at the public trough and only leftists will be subsidized to indoctrinate our children.

The system of tenure professorships has perverted its very purpose and it is acting as a shield for a majoritarian ethos on our campuses and a sword against expression of minority opinion. The left would have us view the campus through the prism of the whole of society and regard the campus quadrangle as a besieged island of enlightenment in a sea of reactionary know nothingness dominating the general population. A sea of reactionary opinion is another name for democracy. An island of political correctness is another name for intellectual prison.

Yes speech needs protection on campus but tenure and cronyism have converted our campuses into places where political correctness thrives, were only leftist speech is protected and where conservative speech is ruthlessly suppressed.

We say that a preacher who ascends his pulpit to deliver himself not of the sermon but of a political polemic forfeits his claim on the taxpayers as a charitable institution -that is if he is a Caucasian preacher. Yet we do not say that a professor who uses his classroom to unburden himself of a leftist screed forfeits his claim to tax payer subsidies. Quite to the contrary his academic cronies have ensured that taxpayer subsidies will sustain him throughout his teaching career and even into retirement unto death's door. Note, it is his academic cronies who have thus favored him with public money and not the taxpayers or their representatives. If we abhor taxation without representation equally should we abhor appropriation without representation.

[DoodleDawg]

...president of the regents who oversee all 26 of the state's colleges and universities...

Wisconsin has 6.5 million people and 26 separate universities. Kansas has 2.9 million and they have 6. Have you thought of closing a dozen or so?

[Popman]

-——Wisconsin is unusual in enshrining tenure protections for university professors in state statute; at nearly all public universities, tenure is set by administrative policies.-——

So Walker is basically doing what is usual ....

The UW endowment is two billion plus dollars so a 250 million haircut over two years is not a huge number

[exDemMom]

Regina Millner, president of the regents who oversee all 26 of the state's colleges and universities, said repeatedly during an interview that she and her colleagues were conscious of the need to protect academic freedom for numerous reasons, including the imperative to compete for top faculty talent.

This argument would be more credible if university humanities/social studies/etc. departments weren't socialist echo chambers. The only place to get away from political correctness is in the hard sciences and math. Universities should not be socialist indoctrination facilities.

[KC_Conspirator]

Right, like the freedom to throw tax payer money down the drain for their political causes. Good for Walker.

[Verginius Rufus]

What are “outdated fields”? Ancient history? Medieval history? Greek and Latin?