Those criteria don't sound very vague to me. If a program is discontinued, why *should* the university keep the personnel running that program on staff? If they aren't doing anything, they are costly dead weight. Period.
“If a program is discontinued, why *should* the university keep the personnel running that program on staff?”
It is generally true (although I don’t know the details of the old policy at Wisconsin) that tenure doesn’t protect faculty if their entire program or department is abolished. What is disturbing about the new policy at Wisconsin is inclusion of program “redirection.” I would be upset, for example, if Virginia Governor McAuliffe decided to “redirect” tenured UVa sociology professor Brad Wilcox out of a job because Wilcox’s research shows that children fare best in intact, male-female marriages. In the current climate on university campuses, it is conservative professors who have the most to lose if tenure is abolished.