The Wisconsin Legislature passed the 2015-17 biennial budget this week. The Senate went first, in order to accommodate the Mexican vacation plans of Sen. Frank Lasee, who early Tuesday sponsored an amendment repealing the state’s prevailing wage law, which in turn brought the final two Republican holdouts in the Senate on board. The Assembly passed it Wednesday, with 11 Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition.

The final hope for tenure, shared governance (on which do yourself a favor and read this immediately), and indefinite status in the UW System now lies with Scott Walker’s veto pen. Likewise for Milwaukee Public Schools, which face an uncertain future in the wake of the passage of the OSPP/MPS takeover plan. Rep. Dale Kooyenga, the plan’s cosponsor, was visibly drunk on the floor of the Assembly during the debate leading up to its passage. [Update: if you suspected Kooyenga’s LWI ravings were misleading and economically baseless, you were right!] Kooyenga is also a vice co-chair of the Joint Finance Committee. On Monday, he sheepishly claimed not to have understood the scope of the open records law evisceration he happily supported last Thursday. What exactly does it take to disqualify yourself from a spot on the Legislature’s most powerful committee?

In the absence of a Walker veto, Democratic legislators could demand the undoing of these budget items in exchange for supporting the public financing plan for the new Bucks arena, which will need fairly broad Democratic support to pass. But they would have to present a credible threat of being willing to let the Bucks leave. There may be more hope for a Walker veto.

Meanwhile, yesterday in Madison the UW System Board of Regents approved the System’s 2015-16 budget. Initial media reports Monday highlighted the differences in base budgets from 2014-15 to 2015-16 shown in Table A-1 of the Regents agenda. In fact, those differences mask a plethora of adjustments beyond this year’s cuts; for example, UWM Chancellor Mark Mone explained in an email Monday evening that UWM’s figures include an $18 million correction for federal financial aid that “has no impact on UWM’s actual revenues for operating purposes.” The allocation of the cuts across campuses, shown on p. B-3, amounts to between 2% and 4% of most campuses’ 2015-16 operating base budgets.

More ominous is the proportion of each campus’s 2015-16 operating budget that will come from the one-time use of cash balances. I have compiled those figures in the table below, with campuses listed in descending order according to the percentage of their 2015-16 operating budget that will disappear the following year. Look who’s no. 1.

Finally, System President Ray Cross secured a small victory by getting the Senate to treat $25 million of UW’s 2016-17 funding as a lapse. In other words, the UW System will get a $25 million funding increase in the second year of the coming biennium, but it will immediately give the money back to the state. The benefit for UW is that the System’s base funding level heading into 2017-19, on paper, will be $25 million per year higher than it otherwise would have been. That’s equal to a 20% restoration of this biennium’s $125 million-per-year cut.

With all due credit to Cross, however, this was not necessarily a difficult concession for Senate Republicans to make. In particular, lapses don’t count for purposes of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s calculations of structural deficits going forward: whereas the UW System gets to treat the lapsed $25 million as if it’s going to be spent the following year, the LFB and the politicians who tout its projections treat it as if it’s *not* going to be spent. The UW System lapse gets added to over $700 million in other lapses assumed in the second year of the coming biennium, all of which combines to paint an unrealistically rosy picture of the state’s fiscal health (and even under these manipulated assumptions, the state still has a $500 million structural deficit). The likelihood that the UW System will ever actually see this additional $25 million in yearly funding seems low indeed.

So, to recap: System leadership, through its “new partnership with the legislature“, has secured a largely symbolic commitment on future funding and nothing on tenure and shared governance, which are now at the mercy of Scott Walker. As campuses sprint towards the fiscal cliff, the one-time use of cash balances will keep many of them suspended, Wile E. Coyote-like, in mid-air. The coming year will be an exercise in looking down.

What to say about last night’s Motion #999, with which JFC finished its work and sent the budget back to the full Legislature? The effective elimination of state open records requirements for Wisconsin legislators and their staff has grabbed headlines and been met with bracingly universal condemnation. It is an abuse of power so breathtaking that the twelve Republican legislators who voted for it are literally walking away from reporters when asked for the names of its sponsors.

In its contempt for democracy, transparency, public input, and the public good, however, it is entirely of a piece with the K-12 and UW System omnibus motions that JFC passed in May.

Of the many bad things in the K-12 motion, the “Opportunity Schools and Partnership Program” (OSPP) outlined in section 39 is perhaps the worst. Known locally as the MPS takeover plan, it was proudly sponsored by Rep. Dale Kooyenga and Sen. Alberta Darling, both from the Milwaukee suburbs. (Kooyenga’s Assembly district includes a small slice of the City of Milwaukee; the district is centered on Brookfield and Wauwatosa, and was formerly represented by Scott Walker. Darling’s Senate district used to include a similarly tiny slice of the City of Milwaukee, including the block I live on; post-2010 redistricting moved her district entirely out of Milwaukee. [Correction: the post-2010 redistricting completely removed from Darling’s district the portion of Milwaukee’s east side that she formerly represented; there remains a small section of Milwaukee’s northwest side that falls within the district.])

The plan creates, in effect, a parallel school district within Milwaukee that will be empowered to seize MPS schools and turn them over to charter operators or voucher-taking private schools. While there is, in principle, a mechanism for returning OSPP schools to MPS after a period of five years, that mechanism carries qualifications intended to ensure that no OSPP school will ever return to MPS. This, alongside funding provisions for OSPP and MPS spelled out in the motion, makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the plan’s purpose is to bankrupt the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is a measure of Darling and Kooyenga’s contempt for the city and its people that they may sincerely believe that this would be a good thing for Milwaukee schoolchildren.

Aiding and abetting the plan is Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele (who, like, Kooyenga, occupies a post once held by Scott Walker). The K-12 motion stipulates that the OSPP district be run by a commissioner appointed by the Milwaukee County Executive. At a lunchtime forum last week, Abele pointedly declined to state his opposition to the plan. Last night he received his apparent reward, in the form of section 67 of Motion #999, which drastically expands the powers of the Milwaukee County Executive relative to the county board. Abele is thus fully complicit in a plan whose all but openly acknowledged purpose is to destroy the Milwaukee Public Schools. It is depressingly far from implausible to think that the 2018 race for Wisconsin Governor could pit the Democrat Abele against the Republican Kooyenga.

The last hope for removing the MPS takeover plan from the budget comes from JFC’s failure to include funding for a new Bucks arena in their final budget motion. Republican leadership clearly does not want to lose the Bucks; Scott Walker himself jetted back to Wisconsin recently to hold a pro-arena press conference, selling short our collective dignity under the slogan “Cheaper to keep them“. Some outstate Republicans have balked, at least at the prospect of including the arena funding in a budget which their Democratic counterparts will have the political good fortune of being able to oppose unanimously. Republican leaders, in concert with JFC, have thus stripped the arena funding out of the budget and are now daring Milwaukee Democrats to vote against it as a standalone bill. This is the all too rare moment where Wisconsin’s Democratic legislators have negotiating leverage. They must use it to get the MPS takeover plan out of the budget.

It’s difficult to overstate the awfulness of the MPS takeover plan. I am both a tenure-track UW professor and an MPS parent. It is no small thing for me to say that the OSPP/MPS takeover plan is the provision in this budget that I find most objectionable.

Speaking of the university, Motion #999 left unchanged the termination language from section 39 of the UW omnibus that will effectively end tenure in the UW System (there were likewise no changes to the proposed elimination of indefinite status for academic staff and student control over segregated fees). The past few weeks have seen top UW administrators insisting furiously that tenure will remain secure. Unlike legislators, who continue to push the half-truth that tenure is moving into Board of Regents policy, UW administrators have begun to attempt a more nuanced parse of the offending termination language itself.

The result has been a mess of mixed signals: the new party line among UW administrators is that the System can retain bona fide tenure even if the section 39 language becomes law, but that the language has created a damaging public misperception and sown mistrust among faculty and others, and so should be removed as a gesture of good faith. UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s Chronicle op-ed of last week exemplifies this argument, which has also appeared in emails from System President Ray Cross and in conversations with UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone reported by colleagues.

The administration’s argument that tenure can be preserved under section 39 rests on what one might charitably call a Pollyanna-ish misreading of the modal auxiliary may. Here are the relevant passages from the beginning of section 39:

Layoff due to budget or program decision: Modify current law to specify that the Board may, with appropriate notice, terminate any faculty or academic staff appointment when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection, instead of when a financial emergency exists as under current law.

Specify that the Board may layoff or terminate a tenured faculty member, or layoff or terminate a probationary faculty member prior to the end of his or her appointment, when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.

In the terminology of the linguist Angelika Kratzer’s highly influential theory of modals, may and necessary here are interpreted with respect to different ordering sources, i.e., different sets of background facts and considerations. When JFC asks us to consider a situation in which the actions contemplated above are “deemed necessary”, it is necessity in view of what the university’s finances make possible, what the present educational imperatives of a university system are, and so forth. When JFC moves that such actions “may” indeed be taken in such a situation, it is possibility in view of what the law provides.

Cross, Blank, and Mone all claim to draw hope from the fact that the motion says may instead of must. This merely empowers the Board of Regents to take action under the (extremely broadly defined) circumstances specified in the motion, they say; it doesn’t force the Board to take any particular action. To which one can only respond: yes, how could it be otherwise? Imagine that may were replaced with must: this would create an absurd situation in which it would be necessary *in view of what the law provides* to fire tenured faculty when such an action is deemed necessary in view of budget and program considerations. In other words, it would be illegal not to fire tenured faculty in that case.

There is no hypothetical villainous must lurking here: may itself is the problem. Until now, budget necessities short of financial emergency (to say nothing of program necessities) have been situations in which it is impermissible, in view of what the law provides, for the Board of Regents to fire tenured faculty. The mere legal possibility, newly introduced by the JFC motion, *is* the problem. It is not a problem of perception or communication; it is a problem of law and power. UW administrators have made a show of staring this problem in the face, but they still dare not speak its name.

It hardly needs repeating at this point, but all of these extremely damaging changes to the state of Wisconsin—the gutting of open records laws, the planned dismantling of the state’s largest school district, the elimination of tenure in the UW System, and much more besides—were developed totally in secret by the twelve legislators who comprise the JFC majority, and passed on party-line votes within hours of being released to the public (or to committee Democrats, for that matter). The open records changes have drawn the harshest and broadest rebuke, but they are emblematic of a broader pattern of brazen disregard for the public that this committee has exhibited throughout the budget process. Chris Abele’s aligning himself with this committee in its attack on Milwaukee Public Schools is unforgivable. UW administrators’ steadfast refusal to question this committee’s false narrative of budgetary strain and scarcity has predictably led to a dire outcome for everyone but those administrators themselves. Meanwhile, legislative leaders invoke cash balances amassed by UW administrators as an excuse for slashing funding, while in the next breath calling for those very same administrators to be vested with newly broadened powers.

It is difficult to imagine a moral failure of leadership more absolute than the one we are now witnessing at almost every level in Wisconsin.

The attack on tenure and shared governance in the UW System is now attracting national attention. A coalition of twenty-one scholarly organizations issued an open letter denouncing the proposed changes. Others have since followed suit, including the AAUP. The higher ed media recognizes it for the signal event that it is. And the national political media has jumped at the opportunity to write more stories about Scott Walker, taking a subsidiary and almost prurient interest in the fate of the University of Wisconsin, which now takes the place of public-sector unions as foil to Walker’s all-conquering political persona.

Closer to home, the editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel issued a startlingly strong defense of tenure and shared governance on Friday. The party line on the proposed changes—which has been repeated by everyone from the members of JFC to the Regents to Ray Cross and Becky Blank—is that tenure protections are simply being moved from statute into Board policy. Many of us have been pointing out, to precious little avail, that this is a bit like saying that your shield will continue to protect you when your counterpart has traded in its sword for a weaponized drone. It is, frankly, amazing that the JS called bullshit here, and that they further decried Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s “willful misreading of the whole idea of academic tenure.” To be sure, the editorial board is not nearly so kind to shared governance, which it professes to exalt while in the next breath opining that chancellors “need control over the major decisions on their campuses including what courses of study are offered.” But for its defense of tenure, and its vindication of reality in the face of willful and near-universal obfuscation from both legislators and UW administrators, the JS deserves major credit.

Largely lost in the present furor is attention to the state disinvestment that has precipitated the tenure crisis in the first place. The JFC omnibus motion attacks the UW System from all sides. And while it’s hard to argue with people’s devoting their efforts to protecting tenure and shared governance, this has shifted attention decisively away from the massive $250 million cut to the System proposed for the next two years. For all the pugnacity of the JS‘s stance on tenure, there was not a peep about money. Even the sharply worded resolution passed by the UW-Madison faculty senate last week limits itself to a call for legislators and administrators to remove “non-fiscal language” from the JFC omnibus.

The irony of this should be obvious: ideological animus notwithstanding, the major purpose of getting rid of tenure is to clear the way for more cuts. It is an absolute certainty that Wisconsin Republicans intend to continue cutting state appropriations to the UW System for the foreseeable future. This is clear when Robin Vos asks, “[D]o we need to have every major on every campus, or should we specialize more or do a more collaborative process?” (Never mind that an administrator’s efficiency is a student’s lack of opportunity; see Chuck Rybak today for more.) It is clear when our newest Regent, the son of Walker’s preeminent political patron and gubernatorial campaign chair, talks immediately about cutting degree programs and says, “I think eliminating a campus is probably a pretty high mountain to climb,” relishing the challenge as much as lamenting the impediment.

Regardless of what happens with tenure and shared governance, the cuts are coming. They will be devastating, and they will be followed by further cuts in future biennia. Ultimately, saving the UW System will require more than the preservation of tenure and shared governance. It will require a reversal of the long-standing downward trend in state funding. And it will require a mechanism for ensuring that increases in state funding benefit students in the form of reductions in tuition. That is to say, it will require a management structure that undoes the present moves to concentrate power, CEO-like, in the hands of chancellors, who, among other things, can recoup lost tuition revenue by unilaterally increasing other fees.

For the moment, the attack on tenure and shared governance is performing its tactical purpose admirably, distracting attention almost completely from this year’s $250 million cut. But the JFC omnibus motion is a multipronged attack that calls for a correspondingly multifaceted defense, of which saving tenure and shared governance is but a single part.

In the wake of the UW System Board of Regents’ decision last week to “pretend to have tenure”, System leaders are coming to acknowledge more and more in their public statements the correctness of the worries they have simultaneously attempted to depict as alarmist. The very grave problem posed by section 39 of the JFC omnibus motion is finally on the public radar of UW administrators, though they continue to soft-pedal its severity.

Here is the relevant portion of Chapter 36.21 as it currently stands: “Notwithstanding ss. 36.13 (4) and 36.15, the board may, with appropriate notice, terminate any faculty or academic staff appointment when a financial emergency exists.”

The JFC motion hasn’t yet been publicly released in the form of proposed statutory language, but when section 39 is incorporated into statute, the relevant portion of 36.21 (or its replacement) will likely end up looking something like this: “Notwithstanding [potential replacements of to-be-deleted tenure/indefinite status provisions], the board may, with appropriate notice, terminate any faculty or academic staff appointment when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.”

The Board of Regents at its meeting last week did not even entertain the idea of adopting the current 36.21 language as Board policy, as it did with the current 36.13 language around dismissal. There may be a variety of reasons for this, but here is an obvious and politically disinterested one: the new statutory language emanating from section 39 will logically entail the old 36.21 language. Financial emergency is just a special case of the much broader conditions outlined in section 39, and so putting the old 36.21 into Board policy would be completely ineffectual. (On the other hand, specifying in Board policy that termination could happen “only when a financial emergency exists” would be a far more stringent condition, and so would contradict statute.)

System President Ray Cross and UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank are apparently now working actively to remove the section 39 provisions from the budget, and this is indeed welcome news. At the same time, they are attempting to reassure everyone that something like adequate tenure protections can be maintained even if section 39 stays in. This was stated by Cross in his weekend email to chancellors (as reported by Karen Herzog yesterday) and by Blank in her message to the UW-Madison community today. Here is the relevant excerpt from Blank’s message: “Section 39 isn’t a command or directive. It merely authorizes the Board of Regents to lay-off faculty for the stated reasons. The Regents can decide when and how they want to invoke that authority.”

In other words, Cross, Blank, and other UW administrators are attempting to hang a meaningful set of tenure protections on the “deemed necessary” hook in the anticipated statutory language. They think they have found a loophole; I’m not a lawyer, but count me as highly skeptical. The problem comes down, once again, to the difficulty of finding a way to articulate conditions under which the actions could be “deemed necessary” that doesn’t conflict with statute, which will specifically outline a broad set of conditions of just this type. For instance, the proposed conditions certainly couldn’t limit such actions to cases of financial emergency, for reasons outlined above.

The Board of Regents can, as a matter of informal practice, “decide when and how” to use the powers granted to it by the Legislature. But it cannot formally adopt a written policy that forbids it from using its statutory authority. That would be, in the most literal sense, against the law. (And of course, this whole discussion sets aside the very open question of whether the present Board of Regents has any interest in forswearing the broad firing powers that JFC wants to give it.)

The only hope for tenure in the UW System is for section 39 to be removed from the budget. As my colleague Richard Grusin put it yesterday, Wisconsin is about to go from being the only state with tenure in statute to being the only state with broad provisions for firing tenured faculty in statute.

A final note: it will be important for UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee faculty to maintain their current mobilization in the event that the section 39 language becomes law. The threat against tenure and shared governance (including for academic staff and students) is a universal one. In practice, the firing ax, if and when it falls, is likely to fall first and most heavily at the UW Colleges and the 11 four-year non-doctoral campuses, far from Milwaukee and especially from Madison. For all the ideological animus behind the attack on tenure and shared governance, the motivation is perhaps most immediately a financial one. The Madison faculty’s preeminence in winning external funding means that the savings from firing the average Madison faculty member is likely lower than at any other UW campus, and in many cases there would be a large net cost to the System; and likewise, though to a far lesser extent, for Milwaukee.

As our state government turns the austerity screws, those who fare best under its logic must not abandon the principled fight that, for the moment, has united faculty across the UW System.

Reader, I was there: at yesterday’s meeting of the Education Committee of the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, held here at UWM, where a resolution on tenure was taken up; where faculty from UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee addressed the Regents about the importance of tenure and questioned the motivation for altering its legal status and definition; and where a symbolic but nonetheless significant amendment asking the Legislature to remove nonfiscal items from section 39 of JFC’s omnibus motion #521 of last Friday was snuffed out, on a party-line vote, in a bit of well-orchestrated parliamentary sabotage.

The existing statutory protections for tenured and tenure-track faculty in the UW System consist of two parts, one limiting the grounds for “dismissal” and the other providing an override permitting “termination”. Chapter 36.13 says that faculty “may be dismissed only for just cause and only after due notice and hearing”; but Chapter 36.21 adds that, notwithstanding those and related provisions, “the board may, with appropriate notice, terminate any faculty or academic staff appointment when a financial emergency exists.” In other words, a faculty member can be fired and their position refilled only if there is “just cause” for doing so; but if a financial emergency forces the elimination of the position altogether, a faculty member can be fired absent any independent just cause. The various penalties and other difficulties attendant upon declaring a financial emergency are severe, and the existing protections for faculty are correspondingly quite strong.

The current talking point among Republican legislators and many Regents is that tenure is being moved from statute into Board policy. Quite apart from the question of why one would do this in the absence of a desire to weaken tenure protections (the oft-repeated point that Wisconsin is the only state where tenure resides in statute is just an observation, not an argument), this way of framing the matter obscures what is actually happening. The dismissal provisions of 36.13 are being deleted from statute and copied into Board policy; but the termination override language of 36.21 is being drastically expanded in statute by JFC in section 39 of the omnibus motion. The Education Committee yesterday, and the full Board today, voted not to exhort the Legislature to drop the expanded termination language from statute. If that language becomes law, the restraints previously imposed by the financial emergency condition will be completely removed, and essentially any program change, reorganization, or downsizing initiative can be used as a reason (or a pretext) for terminating faculty.

Animus towards tenure is of course not only a Republican trait: some of the most zealous “school reformers” of recent years are Democrats who have taken aim at tenure for K-12 teachers and principals. More generally, the project of putting private interests in the way of massive public cash flows is a fully bipartisan one.

But the present attack on faculty tenure in the UW System is also part of a particularly Republican project. Specifically, UW faculty tenure is an obstacle to the broader project of dismantling the state. With state appropriations to the UW System having been continually cut (by both Democratic and Republican administrations) over the past fifteen years, we are now at the point where cutting further would require firing faculty. The law is being changed accordingly. As we now know, this is being done with the tacit approval of the Board of Regents, who will oversee the downsizing necessitated by this year’s cuts and those that will surely follow in the future.

Meanwhile, the Regents also moved at this week’s meeting to dramatically expand their power relative to faculty in chancellor searches, in line with the newly downgraded role of faculty in university governance spelled out in the JFC omnibus motion.

There is a slim hope that tenure in the UW System might be saved, but it will require the removal of the section 39 termination language from the budget. The Board of Regents will not advocate for its removal; perhaps individual Regents might. It is incumbent upon faculty to do what little is in their power to generate goodwill with legislators, particularly with those few Republican state senators who might swing the budget vote. One specific action that can be taken is for faculty senates across the UW System to pass resolutions in support of a future cap on tuition increases for resident undergraduates. This might rankle administrators, who have argued vehemently against any such cap, but it would be a good thing for students, and faculty should support it independently of present concerns over tenure. It also happens to be a major concern of State Senator Steve Nass (R-Whitewater).

In all likelihood, we are headed for the elimination of tenure in the UW System in all but name, and its messy fallout: certainly lawsuits, probably censure by professional organizations, possibly even loss of accreditation and access to federal student aid. Some faculty will leave for other universities; many more won’t be able to, for a variety of reasons. But all UW System faculty will have one eye on the door from here on out.

In the wake of JFC’s disastrous UW System omnibus bill passed last Friday, here are a few reflections on the role of UW System administrative leadership in getting us to this point and the consequences for the various parties involved. An assessment of outcomes, if you will.

From the perspective of faculty, academic staff, classified staff, and students, System leadership’s strategy of accommodation and non-confrontation with the Legislature looks like a spectacular failure. Tenure and shared governance are gone; indefinite status for academic staff is gone; students’ role in shared governance is gone. We have a $250 million cut, an unfunded tuition freeze, and no “stable and predictable” funding increases scheduled for the future. The notion that the much-touted “flexibilities” somehow depended on the public authority structure has likewise been shown to be false: section 19 of the omnibus bill exempts the UW System from state law governing purchasing and procurement by state agencies. It’s two sentences long; easy peasy.

From the perspective of System administrators, things look rather different. While tenure can be nominally reimplemented in Board of Regents policy (even if section 39 of the omnibus bill kills it in practice; but please do sign this petition!), shared governance is definitively neutered in statute. Legislative leaders have loudly declared their intention to make chancellors more like CEOs, and our local right-wing think-tank community wants to go even further. Against this backdrop, UW System leaders’ public statements in response to JFC’s omnibus bill—statements whose overriding tone is one of gratitude undergirded by obsequiousness—make perfect sense, even as they alternately disgust and infuriate the rest of us. Amid the general calamity for faculty, academic staff, classified staff, and students, there is an alignment of legislative priorities with administrative interests.

The question is what will be left for our newly empowered chancellors to preside over. The question is perhaps most pressing for the system flagship, UW-Madison. While Madison is the campus best able to weather the financial challenges of the $250 million cut, it is also the campus most vulnerable to the financial fallout of faculty poaching and defection: it has the farthest to fall. As scholars depart and take their external funding with them, the $250 million cut in state support will represent an ever larger proportion of the System’s total budget.

The big fish in UW administration are getting bigger, and the pond is getting smaller. The rest of us may have to evolve and take our chances on dry land. God help the students.

Today was finally the day for the UW System: a $250 million cut over the 2015–17 biennium, tenure removed from statute, shared governance severely curtailed, no public authority. UW System President Ray Cross and the Board of Regents’ response? Declare victory!

Before JFC’s omnibus bill was even passed, Cross and the Regents announced that they would move immediately to enshrine tenure in Board policy at their meeting next week. Meanwhile, one of the two longest and most detailed items in the bill, item 39, is basically a step-by-step guide for firing tenured faculty. The circumstances under which the Board can do this, per JFC’s wording, are essentially limitless: “a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection”. Look for the Legislature to direct the Board to make broader use of these powers in the future should it prove insufficiently keen to do so at the outset. (Update: Item 40 strikes indefinite status for academic staff from statute for those who don’t have it by June 30, 2015, and prohibits its reimplementation in Board policy.)

Also included in the omnibus motion are items removing students’ control over the segregated fees that they charge themselves (items 32 and 37), placing control instead in the hands of campus chancellors; deleting a prohibition against universities’ using students’ social security numbers as their student ID numbers (item 63; who knew the identity theft monitoring lobby held such sway with Wisconsin Republicans? update: read this); and making the Waukesha County executive a chartering authority for charter schools that will receive public funding (buried inside item 70).

The very long item 70, devoted to creating “additional charter school authorizers”, is of a piece with last week’s JFC omnibus K-12 bill, which has garnered national media attention for its cruel and gratuitous assault on public education. That bill set in motion an expansion of Wisconsin’s system of publicly funded private-school vouchers, creating an entirely new government entitlement for the estimated 80% of anticipated voucher applicants who already attend a private school; the cost over the next ten years is pegged at between $600 million and $800 million. It also put forward a plan, authored by two Republican JFC members from the Milwaukee suburbs, to privatize Milwaukee’s “lowest-performing” public schools, on the model of disastrous “recovery” districts that have been created in cities like New Orleans and Detroit; see Jay Bullock’s column of this week for a thorough take-down. And it included a provision removing all licensing requirements for public school teachers; I shit you not.

In short, Wisconsin Republicans have declared total war on public education. Both the K-12 bill and the UW bill were negotiated and written totally in secret by committee Republicans, with the details released to the public only hours before the final, fore-ordained votes were held. Moral and political commitments aside, this leaves one to wonder whether those legislators who are quickest to cite “market-based” considerations have even a basic understanding of what Wisconsin’s comparative advantage is. Wisconsin has a hard-earned and well-deserved reputation for its excellent public schools and universities. Without those, what is the point of living in Wisconsin as opposed to some other state? Set aside the fact that no UW campus will ever be able to recruit a top-tier scholar again. Why would anyone choose Wisconsin as a place to raise their family? Why would anyone in their right mind move to Wisconsin after this budget?

The budget still has to pass the full legislature, after which it will be subject to one of the strongest and most wide-ranging gubernatorial veto powers in the country. Some of the truly crazy stuff may yet come out. But a lot will stay in. Public K-12 and the UW System will be badly, perhaps irreparably, damaged.

A lot has already been said today about UW System leadership’s handling of the budget mess, and about Ray Cross’s leadership and negotiating tactics and strategy. I will leave the last word to Board of Regents President Mike Falbo: “With President Cross’s leadership, this new sense of partnership has helped us get to where we are today.”

Today it’s official: no new revenue.  The much-hoped-for one-time cash infusion that Republican legislators were counting on in order to paper over the budget disaster they’ve created will not be forthcoming.  Despite having crossed all their fingers and toes, the Spring Revenue Fairy left them nothing.  How disillusioning!  It’s the kind of thing that makes some people stop believing in trickle-down economics.

With the rude if predictable demise of the fantasy, the media has wasted no time in trotting out the “tough choices” narrative to frame the late-stage budget negotiations that will take place in its wake.  Should you for some reason fail to appreciate the abject dishonesty of this narrative, allow Chuck Rybak to disabuse you.  Here’s a rule of thumb: the degree to which the media is carrying the GOP’s water with this framing is directly proportional to the pissiness of the beat writers’ tweets when they get called out.

Walker and legislative leaders immediately announced that they would move some money around to spare public K-12 from the $127 million in cuts that Walker proposed in February.  The details apparently involve monkeying with the timing of scheduled payments, not coming up with any actual new money, with the result that there will be an even bigger hole to fill two years down the road.  Guess where Walker plans to be then?

Where does this leave the UW System?  Can the state ship a briefcase full of cash across the International Date Line for us, too?  Alas, things are more or less where they were: JFC Co-Chair John Nygren still says he wants to reduce the cut, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald still says the UW can go to hell, and Scott Walker and Ray Cross are still talking about flexibilities.

Speaking of which, the other big “no” of the week was announced yesterday: no public authority.  It’s hardly a surprise at this point, but it’s still good to see the proposal officially dead in this budget.  It was never a serious idea.  It was never clear why the touted savings and flexibilities couldn’t be achieved via statute, or what purpose the proposal served other than to distract attention from the massive proposed budget cut.

What remains very much up in the air at this point is the status of Chapter 36.  In Walker’s initial budget proposal, the creation of the public authority went hand in hand with the near-total excision of Chapter 36 from state law: the UW System, tenure, shared governance, Downer Woods, everything.  All of it was to be put in the hands of the Board of Regents.  Now that the public authority is off the table, the only sensible thing for the legislature to do is to retain Chapter 36 intact, in its entirety, in state law.  You don’t push someone out of the plane when you’ve just thrown away their parachute.

Don’t be surprised if they take a quick stab at stitching a new one, though.  JFC now says it won’t send the budget back to the full legislature until the end of May.  UW is slated to be one of the last items voted on.  That’s lots of time for bad ideas to be floated, but also lots of time for UW supporters to organize and lobby legislators.

If nothing else, the existential uncertainty surrounding Chapter 36 should light a fire under the faculty at Madison: the System flagship is the campus best able to shield itself from budgetary threats (even if to the detriment of the rest of us), but on matters of tenure and shared governance, no one stands apart.

Not much news on the state budget front this week.  Why not?  After all, it’s late April, and the Joint Finance Committee has been getting set to wrap up its work and send the budget back to the full legislature for a while now.

In fact, JFC decided not to meet at all this week.  Instead, they have postponed any further meetings and votes until after the April revenue estimates are announced, which is set to happen this coming Monday.

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the ridiculousness of this situation.  The Wisconsin legislature’s very powerful budget committee, whose job is to help set state spending priorities for the coming two years, is waiting on a near-term revenue estimate to determine the fate of public K-12 and the UW System (and much else besides).  Legislators who have wide latitude to craft budget policy in order to achieve their professed goals are throwing up their hands and praying for rain.  The elected leaders who have it in their power to restore full funding for public education in Wisconsin are instead eyeing the Department of Revenue like a bunch of TV weathermen camping out for Punxsutawney fucking Phil.

Will spring tax receipts see their own shadow?  The governor’s office has been hinting furiously that there won’t be much new revenue to work with.  And with our Republican-run state government having deliberately tied one hand behind its budgetary back, that means the proposed cuts likely won’t be reduced by much.  Walker today suggested that he would support a reduction in the cut to UW’s two-year colleges, which, thanks in part to their getting only about a quarter of the per-student funding that Madison enjoys, are facing a true existential threat from the cuts.  UW System President Ray Cross, meanwhile, unaccountably spoke against the idea of sparing the UW Colleges.

Monday should be interesting; more anon.