MADISON, Wis. – There is a sense of crisis in the air as the University of Wisconsin opens for the fall semester, according to media reports.

It’s not prevalent among the students. While college is expensive, and there is always concern about covering the cost of books, tuition, room and board, state officials have tried to make the situation more tolerable by freezing tuition at 2013 levels.

In other words, state leaders made it more difficult for university officials to pass on the costs of their wasteful spending to poor, struggling students.

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But there is reportedly a great deal of alarm among university faculty, due to a change adopted over the summer during the state budget process that removed tenure from state law books and made it a matter of university policy.

Tenure, of course, provides a great deal of job security for veteran faculty. That immovable status has traditionally given veteran professors the ability to negotiate for very high salaries and expensive benefits through their union.

Laying off the older, more expensive help has never been an option for college administrators, so the help just keeps getting more expensive.

But as DailyCaller.com points, out, the new policy means that “tenure itself has been weakened so that it doesn’t offer the protections it once did. Previously, only ‘financial exigency’ (an urgent budget shortfall) could justify the firing of a tenured professor. Now, tenured professors may also be laid off whenever it is ‘deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.’”

That change in tenure policy, pushed by Gov. Scott Walker and legislative Republicans, also gives the university’s Board of Regents more power to lay off tenured professors when deemed financially necessary, and to force them to teach more classes, if deemed necessary.

Those are among the tools that the Republicans gave the university to help deal with $150 million in budget cuts.

The tenure change is similar to Walker’s landmark Act 10, a 2010 law that stripped away collective bargaining privileges from K-12 teachers unions, allowing public schools to dramatically cut runaway labor costs.

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Allowing the university to lay off, or get more work out of tenured professors, would be good for the school, its students and and the taxpayers who support it, based on the following published observation from the Wall Street Journal:

“What tenure does well, however, is allow high-paid faculty to keep collecting paychecks while untenured academic staff and teaching assistants conduct the classes.

“The average ‘nine-month’ professor at the UW-Madison earns $123,500 in salary, before benefits. Yet only 47% of the campus’s classes are taught by faculty. According to the UW-Madison chancellor, taxpayer-funded faculty taught an average of 3.41 classes a week in 2013 and spent an average of 21.3 hours a week on research.

“The end result is that students wind up paying rapidly rising tuition for professors they’ll rarely see.”

If the professors are too busy with research to teach classes, that means their research must be all-encompassing and crucial for our society and the world, right?

That depends on one’s definition of “crucial.’

According to WSJ, “Earlier this year, UW-Madison faculty published a study in which they wrote songs for cats and then tested whether the felines liked them.”

An emeritus professor of psychology was quoted as telling the university’s news service that  “We are not actually replicating cat sounds. We are trying to create music with a pitch and tempo that appeals to cats.”

Gov. Walker is clearly not impressed with the results produced by faculty research.

“Maybe it’s time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work,” the governor was quoted as saying by the Wisconsin State Journal. “This authority frees up the UW administration to make those sorts of requests, which I think are needed not only here but across the country.”

However wasteful and foolish the tenure system is, UW professors certainly seem to like it. They screamed in anger over the summer when the tenure reform was approved, claiming the move was a threat to their academic freedom to teach what they want.

According to the WSJ, “More than 350 professors signed a petition urging the Board of Regents to reject the ‘elimination’ of tenure, and four professors showed up at a regents meeting with tape over their mouths. In response, the regents quickly adopted tenure rules identical to the ones that had been ensconced in state law.”

But even the decision by Board of Regents to cower in front of the angry professors was not enough to calm them. There is reportedly widespread discontent among faculty as school opens for the fall semester.

“After a summer of turmoil over budget cuts and tenure protections, chancellors in the University of Wisconsin System now must convince faculty and staff that all is not doom and gloom as a new academic year begins this week,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Some veteran  professors have reportedly accepted offers from other universities, a trend that’s likely to continue since most other schools around the nation still have the type of antiquated tenure rules that Walker and the Republicans jettisoned in Wisconsin.

Ironically, one university official has pledged to increase the labor budget, rather than cutting it, to keep veteran professors on board.

“We’ll do what we need to do to retain our top faculty,” UW-Madison Chancellor Becky Blank told the Journal Sentinel. “That will give us an even deeper deficit, but there is no choice here that makes sense, other than retaining our top faculty. If we don’t do that, all the other work we’re doing is beside the point.”