Editor's note: This story has been updated to include comments from faculty at a press conference Thursday.

STEVENS POINT - More than 100 faculty members and students at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point have signed a letter accusing the chancellor and provost of mismanagement and calling for their removal amid a contentious debate about the elimination of majors.

The letter sent to the UW Board of Regents on Thursdaysays the signers fear Chancellor Bernie Patterson and Provost Greg Summers "cannot steer us effectively through our current crisis, or the challenging years ahead" as the campus grapples with an $8 million structural deficit and student enrollment that has slid to a 45-year low.

"I want the Board of the Regents to understand I do have a lack of confidence in our administration and that is one of the most painful things for me to say. I’ve known these people for a long time and I’ve worked with them under a lot of circumstances. If I look at the track record, I don’t have confidence they’re going to lead us to a good place," Mick Veum, a UW-Stevens Point physics professor, said at a Thursday press conference.

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Patterson and Summers proposed earlier this month phasing out six liberal arts majors — history, geography, geology, German, French and two tracks within art — and infusing them into new interdisciplinary majors that are "career-focused." The proposal would restructure the university into "a new kind of regional university" and could lead to layoffs of faculty who have tenure job protections.

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The campus has 317 faculty members, including 98 on the tenure track, and 7,725 students. The 289 signatories included 106 current and former faculty and staff, 42 students and 141 members of the public.

The drama has drawn national attention as colleges across the country grapple with low enrollment in humanities majors.

Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin arguably paved the way in 2015 for what's happening at UW-Stevens Point today when they rewrote state law to make chancellors more like CEOs and put faculty members in advisory roles. Changes to law also expanded the reasons tenured faculty could be laid off.

Faculty traditionally have been equal partners in curriculum decisions in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

At the heart of the UW-Stevens Point no-confidence letter circulated by the faculty and academic staff union is a sense that faculty input to date has been "an empty charade." Of current faculty and staff who signed the letter, about 80 percent did so anonymously out of fear of retaliation from university administrators, according to the union.

The union, UW-SPARC, will take up endorsing the letter in a vote Friday.

DOCUMENT:Read the letter from UW-Stevens Point faculty to the UW Board of Regents

“We, as members of the UWSP community, write to oppose Chancellor Patterson’s restructuring plan and to express our lack of confidence in his administration. It fails to address our dire financial emergency, which results from years of mismanagement by Patterson’s own administration," the letter reads.

The letter's signatories also accused the administration of enabling sexual harassment on campus. The group cited a case where a university investigation found that then-Assistant Dean Shawn Wilson sexually harassed a woman on campus. Wilson's bosses then served as references for him so that he could get similar jobs at other universities and never disclosed the investigation. USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin exposed the case in an investigative report that prompted the UW System to revise its hiring practices.

The letter also cited a UW System report that declared UW-Stevens Point's bank management practices were unsatisfactory and that the university for years failed to follow basic accounting safeguards.

"I believe that the Board of Regents needs to ... take (the letter) very, very seriously and they need to think about whether or not anything needs to be done based on the information that is in there," said Veum, who signed the letter and has worked at UW-Stevens Point for 18 years. "It is factual. It’s not hyperbolic. It is not embellished. What is in there is accurate."

Faculty say they were ignored

Administrators didn't meaningfully collaborate in creating the proposal to cut majors and restructure the university, the letter says.

Authors of the letter believe the series of committees organized in the eight months between proposals had little effect on where the university appears headed. In April, one group reviewed an initial proposal to cut 13 majors and released a report critical of the idea.

A summer committee released a report on a range of alternative proposals. The last group gathered in September as an advisory and consulting body to Summers, who as provost is in charge of the university's academic division and was the proposal's chief architect.

"Rather than serious consideration of strategic alternatives, these groups’ months of labor amounted to an empty charade. Only a handful of administrators contributed meaningfully to the recent proposal," the letter reads.

Veum sat on the advisory group and felt he didn't do much advising to Summers.

"On Nov. 9, when we held our final meeting as an (advisory group) we were still asking what is the plan? We actually want to take a look at this," he said.

Veum, who said he did not write the letter, said the decision to voice a lack of confidence in university leadership didn't come up sooner because he and others felt there was still a chance for good faith collaboration.

Summers said faculty groups did influence the proposal, but their role was advisory, not decision-making.

"I understand people wanted to see everything ahead time, but that wasn’t the purpose of the advisory group," Summers said.

Expecting deeper cuts than advertised

The no-confidence letter says university leaders are using the new plan to make it seem like they're cutting only six majors and laying off six to 10 faculty positions.

Budget targets for 2020-'21 provided to the four college deans make it clear the university will let go a yet undetermined number of tenure-track faculty, the letter reads. Summers said in September the university could cut up to 70 jobs but a final number is undetermined.

"Yes, it looks better on paper, but there’s this kind of expectation that there’s going to be massive layoffs and that the proposal didn’t address the underlying budget deficit problem," said Jennifer Collins, a political science professor and signer of the letter.

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RELATED:What we know about UW-Stevens Point's new majors cut, restructuring plan

In a campuswide email earlier this week, Patterson said the Point Forward proposal released earlier this month was not intended to be a detailed budget plan.

"We continue to work on a budget plan and will finalize it in the months ahead," Patterson said.

Faculty also criticized Patterson and Summers for hiring faculty in recent years "with no credible strategic plan"and then reversing the posture to potential layoffs in the next few years. The letter states that nontenured faculty who face layoffs will likely be the youngest and brightest who teach general education.

"This is what makes me sad. ... We knew our enrollments were going to drop. We knew we were a tuition-driven institution and we knew our revenues were going to go down and yet we still insisted on approving tenure track positions, which would then entice human beings to come with a false hope and set up a life in Stevens Point," Veum said. "We basically lied when we did that."

Patterson said the university has hired 29 assistant professors since July 2017, generally in "high-demand" academic areas or areas with a high service load. None of the assistant professors hired since then is in the six academic programs he and Summers want to phase out, he said.

Faculty members also questioned whether university leaders remain committed to the humanities in words only, the letter reads.

The restructuring would eliminate the College of Letters and Science. Potential layoffs would mainly come from social sciences and the College of Letters and Science, which houses the humanities and most of the general education program, the letter reads. Signers of the letter believe the restructuring would scatter the remaining humanities among other colleges and make them more vulnerable to future cuts.

"At the end of the day, the strategic direction seems to be the same. The packaging has changed," Rob Harper, a history professor and signer of the letter, said.

No formal 'no confidence' vote

UW-Stevens Point's governance groups have not taken a formal "no confidence" vote against Patterson and Summers.

Campus Common Council Chairwoman Mary Bowman declined to comment on the contents of the letter.

She said she was happy to see the letter come forward rather than have the council take a formal "no confidence" vote via a resolution.

"I think that would be divisive and just not a good use of the governance body’s time," Bowman said in an interview with USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "What the letter does that is helpful is it provides an outlet for expressing the concerns people have and to get those out in the open."

Bowman, who is an English professor, said her focus right now is filling in the details not provided in the framework released by Patterson and Summers.

"Regardless of what got us to where we are now, we have to find a way forward," Bowman said. "So, keeping those things separate is beneficial."

Chancellor and Provost respond

The letter criticizes Patterson and Summers for failing to act sooner in making the university leaner in the face of diminishing state funding, declining enrollment and a smaller high school population across the state. The letter says they prioritized expansion above all else.

Patterson noted in his campus-wide email in response to the "no-confidence" letter that it's been an ongoing effort "for many years" to address fiscal challenges on campus.

"The steps taken thus far may not have been noticed by everyone on campus because our goal has always been to minimize the impact on our academic programs," Patterson wrote.

Patterson said the campus has reduced its workforce by 89.4 full-time positions since fall 2014 without any layoff of tenured faculty. But declining enrollment has overshadowed efforts to close the budget gap, he said.

The proposal to eliminate majors, and possibly cut tenured faculty jobs, had to be put on the table in mid-November to meet requirements of regent policy in the event a layoff is requested as part of the next fiscal year budget, Patterson said.

In a statement to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, Patterson said he and Summers are "leading UW-Stevens Point through necessary change in a way that is responsive to student needs and relevant to regional issues."

"These have been challenging times, and change can be difficult," Patterson said. "We are committed to continue leading UW-Stevens Point with empathy, integrity and honesty and will continue to be forthright in our dialogue with faculty, staff, students and the community."

Summers said he previously had pointed out changing circumstances confronting higher education "with openness and honesty," and encouraged faculty to be involved in solutions to address fiscal challenges.

"Most faculty and staff members are confident in the leadership I have provided and are ready to move forward, to innovate, and to make the kinds of changes we've discussed for years," Summers said.

"These changes are difficult, but will position UW-Stevens Point to better serve the students and communities of central and northern Wisconsin."