Unions representing faculty and staff across the University of Wisconsin System demonstrated outside a UW Board of Regents meeting Thursday, urging the board to push chancellors to meet with their unions and protesting mass faculty layoffs later approved by the regents.
Dozens of union members protested for more than two hours in the shadow of Van Hise Hall, where afterwards the Regents approved a UW-Milwaukee plan to layoff 35 tenured faculty members, the first such firing in the UW System since a 2015 law weakened its tenure protections.
Tait Szabo, a tenured UW-Milwaukee philosophy professor whose layoff would be approved hours later, criticized the decision, calling it a “Scott Walker-size bomb on higher education.”
“It will set the precedent because now the policy is in place and it will have gone all the way through the regents,” Szabo said. “They're ready to use it all across the state.”
All regents present, except for Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly, voted in favor of the decision, though some said they felt forced into the decision by insufficient state funding and the lack of a long-term plan for the UW System’s branch campuses.
Outside Van Hise, unions representing workers across eight schools said they have all asked their respective chancellors for a “meet and confer” relationship — regular conversations on working conditions and labor issues — but been rebuffed.
Representatives from the teacher’s union American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin (AFT) hope establishing such a relationship would help prevent actions like those the Regents took on Thursday and UW System leadership’s decisions to close campuses, lay off faculty and staff and cut academic programs.
“Given where we are, a collaborative effort between administration and UW System workers has never been more important,” AFT-Wisconsin said in a petition showcased at the event.
Budget shortfall decisions made without union input
The Board of Regents meeting comes as the UW System faces a dire financial situation due to declining state support over the past decade. Challenges to institutions’ financial sustainability led UW System leadership to close six branch campuses since May 2023.
Jon Shelton, president of the Faculty and Staff Union at UW-Green Bay and the vice president of Higher Education for AFT-Wisconsin, told The Daily Cardinal UW system administrators made the decisions without faculty input.
“We're tired of being left out of the conversation,” Shelton said. “So what we decided to do was to come down to the Board of Regents meeting and publicly ask that the Regents tell our chancellors that they should meet, that we deserve a seat at the table.”
The president of United Falcons of UW-River Falls, Neil Kraus, connected the mass layoffs to students, faculty and staff being shut out of the decision-making process, which he said showed the importance of having that relationship with chancellors.
Madeline Topf, co-president of the UW-Madison Teaching Assistant Association (TAA), told the Cardinal these “meet and confer” relationships are completely legal under 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, the state law that effectively eliminated collective bargaining rights for most public workers.
The TAA, which represents all graduate student workers at UW-Madison and is a plaintiff in a lawsuit to end Act 10, has reached out to UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin various times for a meeting but has been turned away, Topf said.
In a statement, UW-Madison spokesperson John Lucas said Mnookin meets regularly with UW-Madison’s student government and other campus shared governance groups. Lucas said that under state law and regent policy, shared governance groups are the “exclusive vehicles” at UW-Madison for representation and communication regarding faculty, staff and graduate student working conditions.
However multiple union leaders criticized the idea that shared governance could substitute for direct meetings between unions and their employers.
Speakers noted UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone advanced the layoff proposal to a Regents vote despite the UW-Milwaukee Faculty Senate’s rejection of his plan, which they argued showed the shortcomings of shared governance in defending public education. Student-led efforts to increase shared governance authority have been ongoing throughout the UW System for over a decade to little avail.
The strides towards increased rights have come through other means, union leaders said. Topf pointed to the six weeks of paid parental leave for UW system workers the TAA helped secure this spring.
“After decades of faculty senate meetings and shared governance special committees, all it finally took was collective action,” Topf said.
Instead, union leaders said campus administrations have the authority to listen to faculty and staff beyond the Faculty Senate, if they chose to do so.
Around noon, UW System President Jay Rothman and multiple Regents walked past the demonstrators on their way into Van Hise. Rothman referred a request to comment to UW System Spokesperson Mark Pitsch, who did not immediately respond to the Cardinal.
At Thursday's meeting, the Regents also passed a 2025-2027 budget proposal that would provide an additional $855 million in state funding to address declining state funding.
Gavin Escott is the campus news editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has covered protests, breaking news and written in-depth on Wisconsin politics and higher education. He is the former producer of the Cardinal Call podcast. Follow him on X at @gav_escott.
