[T]he danger of this transformation to semi-private corporation is that System employees and faculty would lose their statutory protections (things like tenure, faculty governance, job security, and academic freedom are currently protected by state statutes) in favor of the contractual protections...
Public Authority: The End of Public Higher Education in Wisconsin? | Ragman’s Circles by Richard Grusin
This post is worth careful study if you are interested in what's happening to the university system in Wisconsin. Grusin later continues,
What [UW System President] Cross (and all UW System leaders) should be advocating for, if the move to a public authority must go through, is that the statutory protections of Chapter 36 be imported into a new Chapter 37, which will form the basis of the transformation of the UW System into a public authority. Anything less makes such protections subject to the whims of an appointed, not elected, Board of Regents.
He closes with this nice bit of rhetorical analysis:
The clever combination of granting “freedom” and “autonomy” to University leaders while simultaneously slashing even further the obligations of state governments to fund public higher education, will be a centerpiece of Walker’s presidential campaign and a model for Republican governors nationwide. To draw a Biblical analogy that might make sense to Walker’s evangelical base, if these proposed changes succeed, Scott Walker will have sold the University of Wisconsin System’s birthright for less than a mess of pottage, and Ray Cross is likely to go down in the history of public higher education as the System President on whose watch a once-respected public University System was reduced to a second-rate “public-service corporation.”
