A recommendation from the UW-Milwaukee chancellor could lead to the layoff of 32 tenured faculty.
Tenure, regarded as a safeguard for academic freedom, is something many work years to receive. Tait Szabo, an associate professor of philosophy, is in his 17th year as a Universities of Wisconsin employee and 10th as a tenured faculty member. For the last five months, he and many others at the college have dealt with the possibility of losing their jobs.
"Academics is such that you don't really have great prospects of leaving one tenured position and going to another," he said. "Most of us are probably facing having to find a new career at this point in our lives."
Szabo and his colleagues have had a looming threat of layoffs over their heads since March, when the Universities of Wisconsin announced the closure of its UW-Waukesha campus not long after closing its UW-Washington County campus. Both campuses were home to the College of General Studies, created in 2018 to integrate both branch campuses into UW-Milwaukee. But now that both of these campuses will be shut down, the staff at the college was left in a state of limbo as they waited to hear what would happen with their positions.
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