Under Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin has become one of the great laboratories of conservative governance, with a record of union-busting, abortion-restricting, voter-ID-enacting policies that are at odds with the state’s tradition of progressivism. Unlike neighboring Minnesota, which has remained far more liberal — and whose economy is doing far better than Wisconsin’s — the Badger State has seen its Republican establishment increasingly entrenched by enacting policies of fear, resentment and suspicion of the sort that were so well described in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

Given this record, it’s not surprising that the Republican-controlled legislature should go after universities, especially with the state’s ongoing budget woes necessitating steep cuts to education. And now the state’s Joint Finance Committee has voted 12-4 to eliminate tenure protections from the state statute, add limits to faculty participation in shared governance and make it easier to fire tenured faculty in good standing for ill-defined reasons of “program modification” or “redirection” rather than the previous requirement of financial emergency (which is already being abused to get rid of entire academic units and their professors across the country). Predictably, if frighteningly, the response of the University of Wisconsin system president and chancellors of the most important campuses has been weak-kneed and not at all comforting for the rank-and-file faculty who need the support of their senior administrators if the fight to protect tenure is to have a chance.

It is extremely difficult to underestimate the impact of this move on higher education in the United States. A comparable event would be Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing 12,000 workers, which completely changed the balance of power between labor on the one hand and government and corporations on the other. The breaking of the strike coincided with the rise of conservative policies as the guiding force of American governance. In the decades since, unions have become increasingly weak, as epitomized by Walker’s demolishing of collective bargaining rights for public employee unions in 2011.

One of the defining characteristics of this era is precisely the weakening of solidarity among unionized workers and between them and the greater public. The participation of workers in unions dropped from 28.3 percent in 1954 to about 11.3 percent in 2013 — a 100-year low. In just the last two years, the percentage of unionized public employees dropped 2 points, just as union leaders feared and conservatives hoped.

A similar process is already playing out nationally in academia. The share of the more than 1.5 million faculty (teachers at accredited two- and four-year colleges and universities) who are tenured or on tenure track is as low as a quarter by some counts — half the share of the 1970s and one-third of the 78 percent of the late 1960s, at the height of the postwar boom in university education. At the same time, the share of nontenured or adjunct faculty has skyrocketed to upward of 75 percent of teachers, while the number working in university administration and commanding outsize paychecks has grown massively. With the elimination of tenure, the drive to corporatize the university is reaching its end stages.