Legislative panel approves new teaching requirements for UW faculty

A Republican-led state legislative committee approved new teaching requirements for Universities of Wisconsin faculty Thursday, a condition of the bipartisan state budget passed this summer.

The Joint Committee on Employment Relations approved the UW’s proposal, separately approved by the Board of Regents, which requires faculty on most campuses to teach at least 24 credits a year. The requirement is lower at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, which are classified as research institutions. There, professors will have to teach at least 12 credits a year.

The motion passed 5-2, with only Republican support. Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer, D-Racine, criticized what she described as overinvolvement on the part of the GOP-held Legislature in the business of the state university system.

“We have a governing body for the UW system. That is the Board of Regents. That’s not us,” said Neubauer. “They have the expertise and time to actually understand the challenges facing the system, whereas it just feels like this body is often playing political games.”

Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August, R-Walworth, said it is the Legislature’s job to provide oversight of public institutions like the UW System.

“The UW System spends billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars every year,” he said. “And if we’re just going to say that the policy should be that the Legislature has no role in oversight of that taxpayer money, I just — I can’t even believe that.”

Along with the teaching requirements, the committee also approved changes to the process of transferring general education credits between UW campuses.

And they approved a plan for how to distribute $27 million, approved in the state budget for the purposes of attracting “faculty in high-demand fields of study.” That plan would split $25 million across campuses based on workforce data and other guidelines.

An additional $2 million would go specifically to UW-Madison to support faculty “in areas that advance diversity of thought and the foundation of free markets,” as described in the state budget.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who early in budget negotiations threatened the UW system with broad cuts, praised university leadership for their participation in negotiations.

“We are now … actually going to have a requirement where people who are being paid to teach are actually going to teach,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, argued that university faculty do more than stand in a classroom.

“I do think this is a slippery slope of monkeying around (with) the university system, and we don’t really have any business there,” she said.

The committee proceedings come months after Governor Tony Evers moved forward a series of raises for state employees, including university employees. Those had also been approved in the state budget, but unlike previous years, where the raises would need to also receive committee approval, Evers bypassed that process, saying a Supreme Court ruling gave him that authority.

That move came two years after Republicans in the employment relations committee held up approved raises in a successful effort to curtail diversity efforts at the UW.