HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Losing Hope In Wisconsin. “With Wisconsin legislators poised to remove public university tenure from state statute, many faculty members were hopeful that a Board of Regents committee would respond forcefully Thursday. But the committee meeting ended with faculty leaders feeling that they had been let down. . . . The shared governance changes also are alarming, Fichtenbaum said, since ‘tenure and shared governance go hand in hand. Tenure is largely seen as being a protection for individuals being able to exercise individual academic freedom, but shared governance is really faculty collective academic freedom, in the formulation of academic policy, budget priorities, the hiring process and the very process of granting tenure.'”

When higher education was a booming industry, and when Democrats controlled most state governments, turning academia into an activist arm of the Democratic Party seemed like a good idea. Now academia’s seen as bloated and dysfunctional, the party it’s tied itself to is at record low influence in state governments, and the chickens are coming home to roost. It would have been better to have stayed out of politics, and focused on providing value to students.