How Scott Walker is rigging who teaches in Wisconsin

Guardian - In Wisconsin, legislators have just lowered the high bar for dismissing tenured faculty at the direct demand of Scott Walker and the state Republican regime. Shared governance, in which the Wisconsin university system once led the world, has been reduced to a mere advisory process. In practice, this means that decisions about academic programs – and the faculty who work on them – will be made by administrators who are either themselves political appointees or who serve at the leisure of these appointees.

The consequences of these changes are likely to be immediate, concrete and negative both for the state of Wisconsin and for the community that depends on the knowledge the state’s university researchers create.

Organizations across the political spectrum have expressed concerns about the profound erosion of fundamental protections for science that are taking place in Wisconsin. They also fear that this development is part of a larger trend.