Many faculty members spend their academic careers in pursuit of academic tenure, a lifelong guarantee of job security and a shield for academic freedom. But recently, the promise of tenure has proved tenuous for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s College of General Studies (CGS) professors, 35 of whom were laid off in August.
In August, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents unanimously approved the dissolution of CGS, formerly UW-Milwaukee at Waukesha, effectively laying off at least 35 tenured faculty — the first such firing of tenured faculty in the UW System since a 2015 law weakened tenure. CGS will close after this spring, UW-Milwaukee announced last March, citing declining enrollment and decreased revenue.
UW-Milwaukee is required under Wisconsin law to use its “best efforts” to assist faculty in securing alternative employment, as well as provide readaptation where it is feasible. Although over half of formerly tenured professors have retired or found alternative employment, many are still searching.
“We roughly had 64 faculty this time last year, and we are down to about 26 or 27 who have not yet found alternative employment,” Ron Gulotta, interim dean of UW-Milwaukee’s College of General Studies, told The Daily Cardinal. “I am not aware of any initiative coming from the Regents or from the University of Wisconsin System to assist faculty.”
When the layoffs were first announced, a number of CGS professors raised concerns the Board of Regents and UW-Milwaukee were violating the state statute. But UW System Media Relations Director Mark Pitsch told the Cardinal UW-Milwaukee and the UW System have followed the statute.
“UWM has been assisting the faculty who received layoff notices with finding other positions, within UWM and externally,” Pitsch said. “Several faculty have found other positions at UWM and other institutions through outreach and priority hiring programs. Eligible faculty were also offered retirement incentives, which 10 faculty accepted.”
The 10 faculty members who retired are included in the category of having found “alternative employment,” according to Gulotta. Although some faculty members have found employment with pay comparable to or greater than their current position, only one has secured a tenure-track position.
“Probably half of those that have found alternative employment got very active right away and found themselves [higher-paying] alternative employment,” Gulotta said. “The other half of those that have already retired or found alternative employment would fall into the category of having found alternative employment that is comparable in pay to what they were making before, but doesn't have the tenure. Among those that have not yet found another position, there's more resistance and bitterness to the whole situation, and those folks are struggling a little bit more than others.”
Multiple professors, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed disappointment with their treatment and the lack of assistance they received in finding new occupations. A professor at the College of General Studies told the Cardinal merged faculty from branch campuses are treated as “second-class citizens” and laid-off professors have received no support or communication from the Board of Regents in the form of financial assistance, severance or otherwise.
“UWM made a specific decision in 2019 to keep [the College of General Studies] siloed off from the main house to create our own program that duplicated main campus classes so we could be easily kicked away in the near future, and here we are… the way we’ve been treated is truly criminal,” said the professor.
Typically, university systems follow a reappointment program which requires institutions to rehire laid-off professors if a position opens for which they are qualified. The University of Minnesota System, for example, requires that if a position opens across any of its institutions for which a laid-off professor is qualified, the institution must rehire that specific professor. But the UW System has interpreted this rule narrowly, with UW-Milwaukee informing CGS professors in November that they should not expect to be reappointed to UW-Milwaukee anytime within the next three years.
Faculty and staff who are laid off do have access to a priority referral program (PRP), which allows them to submit job applications before the general public and have their applications considered first. However, most of those positions have been “janitorial” jobs or “administrative assistantships,” according to the anonymous professor.
“Nobody that I know has taken any jobs through the PRP, since they are mostly non-teaching jobs and all of them are non-tenured jobs,” the professor said. “These referrals are offered to anyone laid off from UWM, and the portal is clearly designed for staff and not faculty.”
Only four professors have taken jobs using the referral program thus far, Gulotta said. He expects four more of the 26 or 27 faculty members who have not found another position or retired will accept PRP jobs in the following month. Retraining efforts include a job fair held in November 2024 and a series of workshops hosted by UW-Milwaukee human resources focusing on interview preparation, resume building, job searching and “re-inventing yourself,” according to Gulotta.
Professors also have the opportunity to apply for non-tenure-track positions at UW-Milwaukee through the First-Year Bridge program, which teaches remedial courses for select students entering the school. The program was previously housed through the College of General Studies but migrated to the College of Letters and Science after its closure along with other CGS offerings.
UW-Milwaukee justified the layoffs by referring to the CGS campus closure in Waukesha as a “program closure,” but since many of its programs continue at UW-Milwaukee, the anonymous professor said that their claim is misleading.
“We can now begin applying for our old jobs, which have been downgraded into easily exchangeable adjunct professorships,” the professor said, adding nothing from CGS was closed save for the branch campuses. “The campus closure was not a program closure, but UWM Legal made that case, and this rationale was used to fire tenured faculty.”
Gulotta has supplemented efforts from UW-Milwaukee’s human resources department with unused funding from previous years of the College of General Studies to assist professors with job-finding.
“I've been able to reallocate some funding from my budget to offer to my faculty and staff to engage in some forms of credential building or updating through professional development activities,” Gulotta said. “That's probably been the largest effort, but that's being done in-house, not by the university and certainly not by the UW System.”
Besides the leftover funding used to support professors, around $7 million of unused CGS funds will be re-allocated for UW-Milwaukee’s use, according to the professor.
“Half of this could have been used to save jobs and careers and to fill positions badly needed… Of course, the Regents either weren't told of this or they didn't care,” the professor said.
Some felt that their college had never been given a fair chance to begin with, because recruiting efforts had been minimal, according to the professor.
“UWM's case against us is that the College of General Studies was seeing an enrollment decline, which was in no small part due to UWM failing to begin any real recruiting for the branch campuses. Local high schools in West Bend and Waukesha hadn't seen a representative of the UW System since 2018 or 2019, which tells us UWM's plan all along was to let us fail,” the professor said.
