Higher education, quite deliberately and utterly, destroyed academic freedom and having done it, they are now fighting to protect the mechanisms that ensure that they will sustain the oppressive environment that is today’s campus. Tenure gave the left the weapons to take control of the facility, and later the administration. It remains the tool that provides the discipline to control power.
I was a witness to how they did it while I was in graduate school. As an active duty Army officer enroute to the facility at West Point, I was an odd duck to say the least. I was among those fighting for tenure track, but I not in the fight and therefore had a vantage point to see and hear all without anyone really paying attention to me. This was a time when the World War II generation was approaching retirement and the Baby Boom was jockeying for those flood of replacement tenure appointment. It was not a fair fight.
The left was organized, ruthless, and determined. They worked together to dominate the search committees and the tenure deliberations. They knew who they wanted and they ensure that anyone not reliably left wing had no chance. My terrain was the Geography and the Geology Departments and the contrast between the two was telling. The Geographers included both cultural and physical adherents, but the culturists held sway. Even serious physical research scientists were subjected to a political filter. Geology was more conservative and controlled by the hard rock geologists, so they changed more slowly. But, over time, especially after I left graduate school, they surrendered as well.
At the University of Colorado, these two disciplines were at the national forefront of the climate change, in part because of the interaction with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NOAA’s Boulder offices. Those serious researchers, who believe in collecting data and following the scientific method, were eased out by people who had a political agenda. Once they had tenure, they were able to pursue their political goals.
Academic Freedom no longer exists and it was destroyed by the Academy. Unfortunately, this change in Wisconsin will be primarily symbolic. The statute support may disappear, but the rest of the structure will remain and it will still be controlled by the Leftists who run universities.
As one of the senior people in my department, I have seen a lot of searches and don't remember any case of a candidate being questioned about his or her political beliefs or ideology, and I don't remember ever being asked about mine when I was on the job market. My dissertation director (now deceased) was very conservative but he had been hired (in a humanities field) by what was already one of the most left-wing universities in the country.