The Battle for Higher Education in Wisconsin

This article is part of a series, "Expanding Union Rights in Public Higher Education."

In June 2024, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the latest in a series of University of Wisconsin system campus closings: UW–Oshkosh is closing its Fox Cities campus, meaning that more than half of the system’s thirteen former two-year campuses are now either shuttered or on the road to closing for good. At one of these latter campuses—Waukesha—the UW–Milwaukee administration is taking the unprecedented step of seeking to dismiss tenured faculty members.

Things change in higher education, of course, and there’s no reason every brick-and-mortar campus must stay open until the end of time. But these closings—and the ruthless effort to kick to the curb more than forty tenured faculty members who made commitments to the enterprise of higher education in Wisconsin—is the consequence of years of disastrous management of what was once one of the premier systems of public higher education in the nation.

Much of the blame lies, unsurprisingly, with Republican politicians in Wisconsin who have, as in other states like Florida and Texas, weaponized race, gender, and sexual identity to capitalize on the sometimes legitimate grievances of working people without college degrees about what I’ve called the “education myth”: that is, the notion that only those who invest in the right postsecondary degree deserve a decent livelihood. Beginning in 2011 with the election of Scott Walker as governor, Republicans undertook a scorched-earth campaign. In 2015, what Walker called Act 10 for the UW system dramatically removed all statutory protections for shared governance and anointed chancellors the “chief executive officers” of their campuses. In turn, university administrators, including some chancellors who almost surely vote Democratic in every election and purport to believe in shared governance, began to use their newfound power to crush faculty and staff efforts to help them weather this storm, making feckless decisions that have left public higher education far more tenuous in our state.

And yet, the twin pillars of forced austerity and administrators’ capitulation to the Republican agenda have led to an enormous insurgence of faculty and staff organizing on our campuses. Whatever myths might have once existed that higher education workers in Wisconsin lived in a tower of any kind, much less an ivory one, have been demolished in the past decade. In some respects, academic workers in the UW system are no different from workers at Starbucks: overworked, undercompensated, lacking the resources to do our jobs well, and, according to our administration, little more than fungible resources to be discarded the moment we become inconvenient. And we have decided that if our administrations are going to treat us like Starbucks workers, then we will do what our brothers and sisters have done elsewhere: organize. Our ultimate goal is to win collective bargaining rights and to negotiate, together, for sustainable working conditions and the resources our students deserve. In the meantime, we are engaged in a struggle for a meaningful “meet-and-confer” relationship as an intermediate step to build the collective power necessary to save public higher education.

Some historical context is necessary to understand how we got to this point. In 2009, Democratic Governor Jim Doyle signed into law a bill to extend bargaining rights to all UW system employees, including, for the first time, faculty members, and on many campuses university employees voted overwhelmingly for the union to act as their bargaining agent. Before the faculty of any university could negotiate a contract, however, Scott Walker and the Republican legislature rammed through Act 10. The massive protests against the law were insufficient to stop it, and Act 10 has indeed seriously injured the labor movement in our state.

The law forces most public employees to hold a recertification vote annually, and recertification requires winning a majority of the entire worksite (not simply a majority of those voting). The prize for winning recertification is the ability to bargain within severely constrained parameters: Except for some police and firefighters, public employees can bargain only for base wage increases that are capped at the rate of inflation. Though it costs a good deal of time and energy, many unions still choose to recertify to show management that the workers are united.

UW workers, unlike other public employees in the state, cannot even vote to certify our union as a bargaining agent. Even within these parameters, though, we have our First Amendment rights to advocate collectively for better working conditions, and the challenges we have faced have forced us to organize to avert the worst.

In addition to revoking our collective bargaining rights, Republicans in 2011 also began to make a series of brutal budget cuts (there were more in the next two budget cycles), and the bleeding stopped only in 2017, when Walker undertook an unsuccessful run for a third term as governor. Since taking office in 2018, Democratic Governor Tony Evers has done his best to turn back the tide, proposing large infusions of funding to replace some of what the UW system has lost since the Walker years—an amount easily over $1 billion. The Republican legislature, however, has pared Evers’s proposed funding increases down to virtually nothing in every budget. At the same time, Republicans in the legislature increasingly centered their vitriol on what they first called liberal, then woke, professors, who supposedly indoctrinated future generations of Wisconsinites. In the most recent iteration of these continuing attacks, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos used a procedural move to withhold funding for capital projects and pay raises for UW system employees until the UW system agreed to fire all of its employees who did work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

And how has our administration responded to such challenges? At both the UW system and the individual campus levels, with almost complete capitulation. The campus closures of the past year, for example, happened not because our state has no students but because chancellors abrogated their duties to advocate for their institutions by treating a manufactured budget crisis as a failure to enroll enough students.

Before 2017, there were two different UW systems: one for the thirteen four-year campuses and another for the thirteen two-year campuses (called the UW colleges). As four-year institutions like mine expanded their efforts to enroll as many students as possible, they recruited many students who would have typically gone to UW colleges. Predictably, with most of the UW system universities becoming open access (and with increased pressure from the state’s technical college system to enroll more students, too), colleges like those at Waukesha hemorrhaged students.

Then, in 2017, without seeking any input from affected faculty, staff, or students, UW system President Ray Cross forcibly merged the two systems. Now the debt of the two-year colleges whose students the chancellors had been enrolling was on the books of the four-year colleges.

Chancellors have responded by cutting student resources to the bone. In just the last academic year, UW–Oshkosh cut about 20 percent of its entire work­force, UW–Platteville laid off over one hundred staff, the chancellor at UW–Parkside upheld the dismiss­als of several beloved lecturers because of budget cuts, and, on my campus, our chancellor sought to eliminate degree options for students. It is, as former United Faculty and Staff President Chad Goldberg has called it, a massive dereliction of duty for chancel­lors to simply let their institutions fall apart without criticizing claims of austerity at a time when our state enjoys a historic budget surplus (currently about $4 billion).

And then there is our current UW system president, Jay Rothman, who responded to Republican efforts to gut our campuses by telling chancellors, in a now-public email sent in late summer 2023 (uncovered, fittingly, by a student journalist at UW–Madison), to make the “difficult decisions” to cut academic options, especially for “low-income students,” and to do it quickly. Then, in November, Rothman capitulated to Speaker Vos, freezing DEI resources for our students. Vos has already gloated that the next legislative cycle will bring even greater attacks.

At this point, UW system faculty and staff under­stand that our administrators will cut and cut until there is nothing left but a chancellor’s office, a market­ing plan, and an army of adjuncts. It is up to us to save public higher education.

In Wisconsin, our higher education unions are all affiliated with AFT-Wisconsin. In addition to serving as the president of UWGB-United, our faculty and staff union, I am also the vice president of higher edu­cation for the state federation. I’ve worked with other locals across the state to see what they are doing, and it is exciting. We are fighting for the future that we and our students deserve.

In 2015, AFT-Wisconsin locals organized a his­toric series of no-confidence votes in the UW system president and the board of regents. Then, in 2017, we organized a statewide campaign, called “Fund the Freeze,” to get public officials to pledge to sup­port the requisite budgetary allocation to fund the state’s ongoing tuition freeze. (Evers made this pledge a cornerstone of his campaign platform for higher education in 2018 and took steps to unilaterally implement it when he could, in 2022.)

In 2018, SPARC, our local in Stevens Point, successfully defended the campus from the administra­tion’s attempts to completely gut the humanities. The fight garnered national media attention and prompted a visit from AFT President Randi Weingarten. In 2020, our locals played a major role in preventing Jim Johnsen, an administrator from Alaska with a history of cutting academic programs, from becoming UW system president.

In 2022, our locals at UW–River Falls and UW–Oshkosh organized to prevent campus administrations from outsourcing custodial services and laying off workers who provided vital services.

Last fall, our union stood with students against Vos, publicly calling him out for giving us a false choice between the faculty raises the legislature had already approved and resources we knew our students needed. (As I was quoted saying in Inside Higher Ed at the time, “Not that we want to forgo a salary increase, but if it’s a choice between that and our stu­dents’ needs, we’re going to stand with our students.”)

In September 2023, following years of patiently building critical mass on our campus and finely honing the tools we can use outside collective bargaining, we held a statewide higher education summit, convening leaders from almost every one of our local unions.

After that summit, a group of six locals formally asked our campus administrations to engage in a regular “meet-and-confer” relationship. Meet-and-confer is essentially a way for unions and management to exchange ideas. While it is a step short of collec­tive bargaining, it ensures that, in higher education, faculty and staff have a seat at the table as administra­tors make decisions about the allocation of campus resources. After decades in which our administration has made disastrous unilateral decisions based on the blind acceptance of austerity, it’s time for our voice to be at the center of the decision-making process.

Though meet-and-confer consists of a nonbinding series of meetings, it is nevertheless viewed as a threat by chancellors, who want to keep every ounce of managerial discretion. That’s why, when our six locals asked for meet-and-confer last November, the chancel­lors either ignored us or told us no.

Our next step has been to show our chancellors that ignoring us is a mistake. United Faculty and Staff of Oshkosh organized an overwhelming no-confidence vote this past April, and the chancellor’s failure to meet with the union was a major reason the measure had so much faculty support. At UW–Green Bay, our union held a weeklong demonstration election on campus. With in-person voting at the Green Bay campus and our three “additional locations,” we asked our colleagues to drop by and vote in support of meet-and-confer. The result, in a public vote count, was almost two hundred “yes” votes (and only one “no” vote).

Other locals built on the meet-and-confer campaign. It is not an accident that one of the locals asking for meet-and-confer—the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) at UW–Madison—played an essential role in mobilizing UW–Madison workers in a push for paid parental leave, which the administration, under pres­sure, finally agreed to provide beginning in April 2024.

In spite of all the darkness we have faced over the past decade and a half, there is light on the horizon, and it is in large part because of the work our unions have done. As of this writing, a Madison judge has just made a ruling that, pending appeals, he would restore meaningful collective bargaining rights to most public employees in our state. That lawsuit won’t restore bargaining rights for most academic workers, but with the possibility of a legislative majority for Democrats, collective bargaining rights for everyone in the UW system could be on the horizon, too.

In the meantime, meet-and-confer will allow us to use the power we’ve built to ensure that we have a seat at the table and to build broad support for our movement. Our administrations don’t want to hear it, of course, but meet-and-confer will also help them avoid disastrous decisions: As the leadership of the TAA has pointed out, had UW–Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin met with the union, she could have saved herself a lot of public criticism over her heavy-handed mismanagement of the protest encampments in May. Governor Evers has supported meet-and-confer in the very similar circumstances of UW Nurses United, which is also barred from bargaining under Act 10 but won a version of meet-and-confer nevertheless. We expect him to support our efforts as well.

With or without the governor’s support, however, we will continue organizing for power. Collective bar­gaining is one tool for building power, and we will get it one day. Until then, we will use other tools. We’ve learned in Wisconsin that we cannot rely on anyone else to save us. And with the work we’ve been doing, we are not only going to save public higher education, but we are also going to build the system, together, that we and our students deserve.

Jon Shelton is professor and chair of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. He is president of UWGB-United and vice president of higher education for AFT-Wisconsin. He is also the author of two books, including The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy. His email address is [email protected].