Donald Downs is professor of political science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. John Sharpless is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As far as college campuses go, we’re a rare, endangered species: two long-tenured professors who lean right and libertarian. But we’re increasingly worried that in trying to take up another conservative crusade, our governor, Scott Walker, is going to silence the very voices he claims to support.

This summer, Governor Walker—a favorite on the Republican right for his opposition to unions—is pushing to change tenure rules at Wisconsin’s public colleges in order to save money for the state. Not surprisingly, conservatives in this polarized state have been more supportive of the governor’s proposal, whereas liberals, who make up the bulk of our fellow University of Wisconsin faculty, have tended to raise objections.


Typically, we would be on the conservative side. One of us (Sharpless) was a Republican candidate for Congress, coming within a few percentage points of upsetting Democrat Tammy Baldwin in 2000. The other (Downs) served on Sharpless’ campaign strategy and finance committees in that tight race, and publicly supported him in different capacities. Whether together or separately, we have often championed causes that have found support only among a minority of our UW colleagues.

But let us be clear: We harbor strong concerns about Walker’s proposed tenure revisions. Without tenure protections, professors like us who fight for free speech and liberty—values Walker himself espouses—could be even more at risk of being targeted on college campuses for our beliefs.

What exactly does Walker’s proposal entail? As part of the biannual budget bill, the Republican-led Wisconsin state legislature is considering a statutory revision that could fundamentally alter the status of tenure in the University of Wisconsin system. University bureaucrats and/or the Board of Regents, the UW governing body primarily consisting of Walker appointees, would have more leeway in tenure decisions, including the ability to fire tenured professors for reasons beyond economic necessity or “just cause” for termination, such as an act of moral turpitude, grossly unprofessional behavior or a felony. The proposed law also calls for restrictions on UW’s “shared governance” system—which has stood as a national model for decades, giving faculty, students and staff equal decision-making authority in certain areas of university policy.

The current Board of Regents remains dedicated to preserving basic tenure as a matter of official policy, and UW faculty appreciate their reaffirmation of the principle of tenure. But the budget bill’s new wording would at least introduce the potential to allow the dismissal of whole departments, programs and classes of faculty. And while drastic measures could, of course, be merited depending on circumstances, the proposed law does not clearly require a cause-based justification for firing, nor does it provide for a hearing for the parties involved.

The governor justifies the new rules as a way to cut state spending in order to balance the budget and protect taxpayers — core Republican values that should fortify his conservative bona fides as he eyes a 2016 presidential run. Although we have not been on board with all of Walker’s policies as governor, we certainly agree that the issue of future public debt presents a significant threat to Wisconsin and America, especially as the population ages. Conservatives in general have a stronger commitment to rectifying this problem without sending taxes through the roof. And let’s face it, higher education has not exactly kept its own economic house in order, to which the skyrocketing cost of education and resulting student debt so sadly point. In too many ways, we have not fulfilled our fiduciary obligations to society.

At the same time, we acknowledge that academics, to say the very least, are no more deserving of tenure-style job security than anyone else. In a world governed by the unprecedented economic forces of globalization and change, fewer and fewer Americans enjoy supportive job protections, which is why many of our fellow citizens construe tenure as an undeserved sinecure. We do not believe tenure is a “right” as some critics of the budget bill proposal have claimed.

Instead, the right at stake is academic freedom, which requires the honest and fearless pursuit of truth that lies at the heart of universities’ moral charter. Outnumbered and often targeted for our beliefs by members of the campus left, constitutional conservatives like us—who take individual liberty, freedom of speech and academic freedom very seriously—have long relied on tenure to protect our right to dissent and to preserve the free exchange of ideas in academia.

Today—perhaps more than ever—truly free speech on college campuses is under threat nationwide Think of the “speech codes” limiting what students and professors can say; the silencing of those who deviate from campus orthodoxies; and the “dis-invitation” of unwelcome graduation speakers deemed insufficiently progressive, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Brandeis University, George Will at Scripps College and even former University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau at Haverford College.

Our country’s most gifted comedians won’t preform at our nation’s universities for fear of—or disdain at—being jeered, rebuked, threatened or simply misunderstood. Just ask Jerry Seinfeld, who recently told ESPN that college students are intolerant of genuine comedy, which is by necessity often politically incorrect. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice.’ They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” In other words: Don’t laugh. It isn’t funny!

And let us not forget the growing ”trigger warning” movement that requires college instructors to warn students before they hear or read anything that might be traumatizing or even slightly discomforting. A student at Rutgers University recently recommended that discussions of The Great Gatsby be prefaced by a trigger warning. Now that’s a joke for Jerry Seinfeld.

And what about our sister Big Ten school, Northwestern University, where two students filed a Title IX complaint against feminist professor Laura Kipnis after she wrote an opinion column critical of what she termed “sexual paranoia” over student-faculty relationships on college campuses? Kipnis was cleared, but the episode proved that even dissident liberal voices that are muted on our college campuses. What is acceptable discourse is now so narrowly proscribed that no one dare speak.

It’s no wonder conservatives in our state legislatures, rightly or wrongly, think our universities—not just Wisconsin—are liberal insane asylums under the control of the inmates. We know for a fact that many legislators are reacting to the intellectual intolerance they believe reigns on campus. But if indeed campuses are rife with liberal-progressive and politically correct orthodoxy, why expose on-campus critics of that liberal hegemony to greater chance at banishment?

As leaders of a free speech and liberty movement at UW-Madison that has enjoyed considerable success over the course of the past 20 years, we can attest to the positive effects of tenure for those with conservative and libertarian beliefs. In the late 1980s, UW-Madison was a leading pioneer in the “speech code” movement that was sweeping higher education, as the faculty adopted rules prohibiting statements that “demeaned” individuals or groups on grounds of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and the like. Though well intentioned, in practice the codes opened the door to enforcement that suppressed ideas and individuals, while also chilling the honest presentation of intellectual opinions.

After a while, we discovered that the codes were being applied almost exclusively against speech deemed politically incorrect or otherwise inconsistent with burgeoning “progressive” ideology. For example, in 1990 a professor in one department was submitted to a highly questionable and ruinous formal investigation. What did he do? He simply said “ Sieg heil, comrades!” to two graduate students who had been taunting him for several weeks because of his conservative beliefs. The graduate students claimed that this remark—originally a Nazi salute but often applied to people who are acting in a bullying or authoritarian fashion—violated the faculty speech code because one of them was married to a Jewish woman and the other had gypsy relatives, groups both targeted during the Holocaust. Rather than dismissing the claim on its face, the administration ordered a formal investigation that ultimately destroyed the professor’s reputation. Even though he was ultimately not sanctioned (there was no evidence of culpability under the code in the end), the university refused to issue a public exoneration and would not even provide the professor with a record of the investigation.

As the Era of Codes gained steam, similar problems were erupting around the country. In 1991, a federal court finally declared the UW student code unconstitutional. But the faculty code persisted. In reaction, a group of faculty members joined us in forming an independent group known as the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights, which consisted of both liberal and conservative faculty members who decried what was happening. After much struggle over a three-year period, we led the way in convincing the faculty senate at Madison in 1999 to abolish the faculty speech code in the classroom, a decision that was unprecedented in higher education at the time.

Since the speech code vote, CAFAR and its allies among students and faculty have won other major victories and provided legal protection to more than 20 individuals whose rights were in jeopardy. A strong majority—though not all—of our beneficiaries have been those who dissented from liberal-progressive orthodoxy. In one more recent case, we protected the rights of a professor on another Wisconsin campus who suddenly encountered harassment in his department when he refused to sign a petition opposing Scott Walker’s famous 2011 labor reforms, which included doing away with collective bargaining for public unions. Now here’s the hitch. Tenure was instrumental to our movement’s success. Many individuals who joined our efforts were willing to do so because they knew their jobs would not be jeopardized in the process.

Another important factor that helped the Madison free speech to succeed was the power of shared governance, which allowed professors like us to have a voice in university policy. Indeed, the long tradition of self-governance at Wisconsin is based on two basic and deeply held American principles. The first is that the governed should have some say not simply in the laws that govern them but in their application. Hundreds of committees have a mix of administrators, faculty, staff and students. In return for our voice in policy, we share the burden of administration. The second principle of joint governance is predicated on James Madison’s notion of checks and balances, which entails the balancing of contending parties in a republican system of governance.

The present administration at Madison is strongly committed to academic freedom, and would not allow an untoward situation to arise. But administrations change and we cannot vouch for other UW campuses. Without sufficient tenure and shared governance protection, we could find ourselves back in the situation we confronted in the 1990s. Many colleagues would likely be less willing to speak with intellectual honesty in class, lest they offend campus orthodoxy. Think of the Madison professor who in 2007 was wrongfully and vehemently attacked nationally and internationally for pedagogically instructive examples he used in class to show why certain ethnic or national minorities fare less favorably in certain legal contexts. Although this professor ultimately avoided formal charges—partly due to CAFAR’s very public support—both conservative and liberal faculty members told us that the hostile reaction to the professor made them afraid to speak with intellectual honesty in class. In First Amendment jargon, this is known as a “chilling effect.” And these chilled individuals had tenure under the previous, more protective rules!

Students would be harmed by the new tenure rules, too. Liberal and conservative alike, they tell us that they would love to have more intellectual diversity and honest debate on campus. They want the intellectual adventure and controversy that is a hallmark of an education worth its salt (and cost!). But would faculty be more afraid to give it to them in the absence of meaningful tenure protections?

We recall a story we heard about what faculty members said to the legendary president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, when he raised the possibility of doing away with tenure at Chicago several decades ago. “Today we stand before you,” they said to Hutchins. “If we come to you tomorrow without tenure, we will not be standing. We’ll be on our knees.”

Ultimately, the prospect of such intellectual stultification is all the more troubling because some of the most famous cases in the nation’s long political battle over professorial tenure have been centered at UW. In 1894, the Regents rejected calls for dismissing Robert Ely, a left-wing economics professor who encountered political opposition for his pro-labor views. In so doing, the board adopted one of the most famous declarations of academic freedom, which included the following words: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere we believe the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

In 1910, another such controversy erupted at Madison involving the controversial sociologist Edward Ross. A decade earlier, Ross had been sacked at Stanford University after he attacked railroads for hiring Asian laborers and, in so doing, offended the widow of railroad tycoon and university founder, Leland Stanford. Following a short stint at the University of Nebraska, Ross was hired—on the recommendation of Robert Ely—to teach at Madison, where he continued his recalcitrant ways. Like Ely, Ross weathered the controversy when students rallied to his defense, dragging the more ambivalent administration and faculty along. (Students often appreciate genuine intellectual freedom more than their so-called betters!

Recognizing this moment in history, the Madison class of 1910 enshrined the “sifting and winnowing” quotation on a plaque donated to the university. For many decades, what is known as The Plaque has adorned the entry to the administration building atop of Bascom Hill. What has long made the Regents’ words meaningful are strong safeguards for tenure bolstered by a system of joint governance. When the University at Madison was integrated into the statewide system in 1970, tenure was also embedded in state statutory law, making the University of Wisconsin system truly distinctive. Professors like us felt proud, and confident that our thoughts, whatever they may be, were protected.

Standing in front of The Plaque, one can see the state capitol dome less than a mile to the east. But today that very dome casts a long, sinister shadow on the university.