Scott Walker Stacks Regents and Legislators make UW Tenure Meaningless.

Let's start with the tenure problem created by the republican legislature. The GOP plan creates a loop hole to easily fire and lay off UW faculty and staff, no matter what UW tenure policy is in place:

jsonline: Under the GOP plan, it would allow tenured faculty and indefinite-term staff to be laid off or terminated "when deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection."

That's the tenure poison pill, and UW Pres. Cross isn't being honest:

UW System President Ray Cross said tenure would still exist, regardless of the layoff language the GOP plan would insert into state law. He said the Tenure Task Force, which includes faculty, can still define the terms that guide layoff language.

The republican plan would let tenure exist, but in name only. Otherwise, skies the limit when it comes to intimidation and political firings. Here's a report from WKOW. Check out the very last comment:

Tenure by definition offers protection for academic freedom, grounded in a conviction that creating knowledge and expressing ideas should be free from intimidation or retaliation. Under policy currently in state law, tenured professors can only be dismissed for just cause or a campuswide financial emergency.

The old rules disappear, thanks to our big government republican friends, intentionally.

From WISC, a little more on the faculty brain drain to come:

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public affairs at UW Madison said, “This is going to happen very quickly, within a couple of years if UW Madison and the UW System don’t keep a robust version of tenure.   You’re going to see these faculty poached away.” Moynihan says the loss of those top faculty members could make a troubled financial situation for the university even tougher. “Thirty percent of the UW Madison budget comes from federal research grants.  If star faculty, who won those grants depart that is going to create a huge fiscal problem for the university,” says Moynihan.