The UW Board of Regents recently approved the layoff of a tenured professor whose academic program had been discontinued, the first time it has exercised this authority since program cuts were controversially added in 2016 as a reason to lay off faculty.
The board on Friday signed off on the layoff of a UW-Platteville associate professor in the School of Education. University of Wisconsin System spokesperson Mark Pitsch did not respond to a question seeking the professor’s name.
No discussion took place, a marked contrast to how the tenure debate began when Republicans removed tenure protections from state law and the Regents wrote a slightly different version into policy.