Unions representing faculty and staff across the University of Wisconsin System demonstrated outside a UW Board of Regents meeting Thursday, urging the board to push chancellors to meet with their unions and protest mass faculty layoffs later approved by the regents.
Dozens of union members protested for more than two hours in the shadow of Van Hise Hall, where afterwards the Regents approved a UW-Milwaukee plan to layoff 35 tenured faculty members, the first such firing in the UW System since a 2015 law weakened its tenure protections.
Tait Szabo, a tenured UW-Milwaukee philosophy professor whose layoff would be approved hours later, criticized the decision, calling it a “Scott Walker-size bomb on higher education.”…