The University of Wisconsin-Madison spent $8 million the last six months of 2015 fending off attempts to raid some of its most productive and accomplished faculty after international attention over state budget cuts and possible changes to tenure protections created faculty unrest. Credit: Mark Hoffman

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The University of Wisconsin-Madison spent $8 million the last six months of 2015 fending off attempts to raid some of its most productive and accomplished faculty after international attention over state budget cuts and possible changes to tenure protections created faculty unrest.

That's what Chancellor Rebecca Blank told the UW System Board of Regents on Thursday.

Of faculty members with outside job offers who have made a decision, 85% are staying, but many offers are still open and the university expects it will have to spend more money to keep them, Blank said.

It's unclear how many would have been in the job market, anyway, for reasons other than funding cuts and tenure changes inserted into state budget deliberations last June.

Blank ticked off a long list of universities that made job offers to her faculty the last six months of 2015: Cornell, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Northwestern, Oxford, Princeton, University of North Carolina, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota among them.

The College of Letters & Science — by far the largest school or college within UW-Madison — and the School of Education had double the number of faculty retention cases they normally handle in a full year, Blank said. The median outside offer was 30% higher than their UW salary, she said.

Blank's comments on faculty retention were part of her broader "state of the university" presentation during the first of two days the regents are meeting in Madison.

On Friday, the regents will discuss and finalize, but not vote on, long-anticipated changes to tenure protections for faculty. Those changes include how post-tenure reviews and below-standard performance determinations should be handled, and the process for laying off faculty if discontinuing an academic program for academic reasons or if a campuswide financial emergency led to that.

Last June, the Republican-led Legislature inserted language in a statute that could make it easier to dismiss tenured faculty but left it up to the regents to come up with a new tenure policy.

Discontinuing academic programs and changing the mix of degrees offered is nothing new for the UW System, but the ramifications of proposed policy changes are significant.

Since its creation in the 1970s, the UW System has dropped academic programs in response to market demand whenever campuses determined programs were no longer needed or viable.

In the past five years alone, 35 programs were cut, 15 were suspended, two were redirected, 29 were renamed. Over the same five years, 82 new programs were implemented.

But no tenured faculty members have been laid off when a program was cut. They were moved to other positions within the university, sometimes after the university paid for them to learn new skills.

Under proposed tenure policies, faculty would continue to be heavily involved in discussions about the future of individual academic programs, and keep due process and appeal protections.

But their role in the decision-making would be reduced to advising the chancellor. And faculty who earned tenure protections through an intensive, six- to seven-year evaluation process for the first time could be laid off if their programs were discontinued and no other positions in the university were deemed a good fit.

"The institutions have reassigned, and will continue to reassign, faculty members when it benefits their students, programs, colleges and the UW System as a whole," UW System spokesman Alex Hummel said. "When there is no right fit, chancellors need the flexibility and fair process for layoffs. The proposed policies give them that flexibility and better codify processes for faculty members."

Critics say the proposed policies would open the door to selectively killing programs for political reasons or to save money in the short-term. They say the changes create loopholes to bypass tenure protections.

Republican lawmakers quietly instigated the changes by removing tenure from state statute and directing the governor-appointed Board of Regents to establish its own policy. The change came without public input or rigorous research, which both alarmed faculty and created mistrust.

Proposed policy states program discontinuance leading to faculty layoffs would only occur "in extraordinary circumstances and after all the feasible alternatives have been considered."