Wisconsin
Regents accept UWM plan with system’s first mass layoff of tenured profs • Wisconsin Examiner
With only one dissent, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents approved a plan Thursday from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that will include the layoff of 35 tenured faculty members.
It would be the first mass layoff of tenured faculty anywhere in the Universities of Wisconsin system since state law weakened the system’s tenure protections nearly a decade ago.
The plan calls for dissolving the College of General Studies, associated with a pair of suburban two-year branch campuses, and its three academic departments. The UWM administration says that is a “program discontinuance,” allowing for the layoff of tenured faculty under a Board of Regents policy.
UWM’s College of General Studies was established as the vehicle for awarding two-year degrees from the two campuses, in Waukesha and Washington counties, when they were joined with UWM six years ago.
Falling “market demand” combined with shifting demographics have forced the closure of the two campuses, UWM Provost Andrew Daire told the regents’ education committee Thursday morning.
Nationally, the number of college-age students fell 39% from 2010 to 2021, Daire said, and while 12.9% of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in two-year colleges in 2010, that fell to 8.5% in 2022.
“Unfortunately, the numbers in Wisconsin are a bit more dire,” Daire said. Enrollment in UW’s 13 two-year campuses was just under 10,000 students in 2010 and fell 64%, to 3,556, by 2023.
The 13 campuses were merged into four-year UW schools in 2018. The campuses in Waukesha and Washington counties became part of UWM during that process.
Those two campuses have “seen significant decreases” with “almost a 58% enrollment decline since 2018,” Daire said. “We also cannot be optimistic in terms of future changes in enrollment.”
The cost per student in a two-year degree program “is more expensive than the cost on the main campus for bachelor’s, master’s and PhD students,” Daire said. “So the market demand and cost effectiveness is really what has gotten us to this unfortunate place of the program discontinuance and this proposal for faculty.”
Regent Policy 20-24, adopted in 2016, allows for faculty layoffs “for reasons of program discontinuance.” Under that policy, “faculty layoff will be invoked only in extraordinary circumstances and after all feasible alternatives have been considered.”
The board adopted the policy after the Legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker enacted changes that deleted tenure-related guarantees from state law and allowed tenured faculty to be laid off due to changes in university programming.
State Superintendent Jill Underly cast the only dissenting vote, both in the education committee Thursday morning, which recommended approving the UWM plan, and in the full Board of Regents meeting Thursday afternoon, which concurred.
“I’m just deeply troubled that tenured faculty members are being laid off due to program eliminations,” Underly said before casting her vote. “With a [UW system] budget that exceeds $6 billion I believe we could have found a way to preserve these positions, especially when their combined payroll represents such a small fraction of our financial resources.”
Underly said cutting tenured faculty would hurt the UW system’s reputation as well as the faculty members and their families.
She acknowledged that the two-year campuses’ financial straits needed to be addressed, but argued that “it’s even more important that the system has a real plan for our two-year colleges, and we currently don’t have one.”
Underly said she would oppose eliminating programs, colleges and tenured faculty without “a responsible plan for these colleges.”
Regent Kyle Weatherly, who voted to accept the plan, called it the best option and pointed the blame at the state for not keeping up with its past record of funding for the UW system.
“What we lack, in my opinion, is the political will to invest in those students and those businesses and ultimately, our state’s future,” Weatherly said.
He recalled that two decades ago, when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wisconsin taxpayers covered 37% of the cost of an education. “It is now half that,” he added.
“I feel that some of those my age and older, those in power, are at best unbothered and at worst, eager to pull up that ladder that my parents’ generation provided me,” Weatherly said.
Regent Tim Nixon said the system had fallen short in letting the two-year campuses — created decades ago — operate without considering how the world had changed since they were established.
But Nixon rejected the idea that the UWM plan was “an attack on tenure.”
“Tenure is a protection for teaching and research interests,” so professors in fields of study that might be controversial aren’t vulnerable to being fired, he said. It’s not a permanent job guarantee, however, he argued.
Nixon said the current situation for the two-year campuses reflected “a failure for years to deal … with systemic issues” and would hurt “loyal dedicated employees who did no wrong.”
He added that he would vote for the plan nevertheless. “I’ve got to see what’s best for the system,” Nixon said. “Going forward, this is where we are today. It’s not where I think any of us wish we were, but it’s where we are, and that’s what I have to look at.”
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New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
Wisconsin
Former Wisconsin judge to be sentenced after conviction in obstructing arrest of Mexican immigrant
Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, who was convicted of felony obstruction for helping an immigrant evade federal officers in a case that highlighted President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday in federal court.
Dugan, 67, faces up to five years in prison after a jury convicted her on Dec. 19. She resigned from her position as a Milwaukee County circuit judge two weeks later amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. She had been a judge for nine years.
Trump administration tried to make an example out of Milwaukee judge
The Trump administration brought the case against Dugan as the president pressed ahead with his sweeping immigration crackdown. Trump’s administration and his allies branded Dugan as an activist judge, while Dugan’s attorneys said during the trial that the Trump administration was trying to make an example out of Dugan to “crush her.”
Immigrant rights advocates and other Dugan allies argued that the administration was trying to use her case to blunt judicial opposition to Trump’s immigration efforts. The case became a bellwether nationally in the conflict between the judiciary and Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a fierce Trump loyalist running for Wisconsin governor, urged authorities to “lock her up” in a social media post following her conviction.
Dugan’s attorneys declined to comment ahead of the sentencing. Dugan did not testify during her trial, but her attorneys said she would be making comments to the court on Wednesday. That would be her first public comments on the case in more than a year.
Prosecutors push for ‘serious sentence’
Dugan’s attorneys argued that as a judge she was immune from prosecution. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, who will hand down the sentence, has rejected attempts by Dugan to vacate her obstruction conviction.
Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memo filed last week that Dugan violated her oath as a judge and put both law enforcement and the public at risk.
“Judges are entrusted with tremendous discretion, but there is a line they cannot cross,” Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling wrote. “The defendant crossed that line.”
Dugan’s attorneys argued she has “punished enough,” including resigning as a judge and facing threats of violence. They argued in her sentencing memo that she should not be sentenced to any jail time besides the part of one day she already spent in federal custody.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, the presentence report calls for 15 to 21 months behind bars. The judge is not bound by those guidelines.
Prosecutors said the average sentence for obstruction cases is 16 months, but they did not recommend a sentence.
“This was a serious offense, and it warrants a correspondingly serious sentence,” Frohling wrote.
No matter what she is sentenced to, Dugan’s attorneys said they plan to file an appeal.
Dugan’s case was a first for Wisconsin
Dugan’s case marked the first time that a state judge in Wisconsin went to trial on charges of obstructing immigration agents. She was found not guilty of concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor.
On April 18, 2025, immigration officers went to the Milwaukee County courthouse after learning 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz had reentered the country illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state battery case.
Dugan confronted agents outside her courtroom and directed them to the chief judge’s office because she told them their administrative warrant wasn’t sufficient grounds to arrest Flores-Ruiz.
After the agents left, she led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a private jury door. Agents spotted Flores-Ruiz in the corridor, followed him outside and arrested him after a foot chase. A week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan in the courthouse, leading her outside in handcuffs.
Flores-Ruiz was deported in November.
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