Gov. Tony Evers had a chance to lift 5,000 instructional academic staff members into immediate power in the University of Wisconsin, but, instead, he chose to keep an impenetrable glass ceiling for the instructors who often teach the most and have the closest connections to industry and students.

Evers chose to keep power consolidated in the UW in the hands of a few elite tenured PHDs. In so doing, it screwed over thousands of hard-working full-time instructors in the university system.

The governor, in vetoing a bill that would have given instructional academic staff equal footing to tenured profs, chose to keep hundreds of instructors of color and women locked out of power in the UW.

Currently, you need to be a tenured professor with a PHD to sit on executive committees that determine curriculum, hire and fire, and distribute budgets in the UW. It’s not like that in some other states. This is called shared governance. The bill would not have harmed shared governance, despite what Evers wrote in his veto message. It would have expanded it.

Nor would the bill have taken power away from PHDs. It would simply have made them share that power with instructional academic staff, who often have more industry and teaching experience. Many have master’s degrees and even 25 years of industry experience. There are about 5,000 such instructors locked out of power.

They have no vote. They also can’t be deans. This has resulted in some programs being ruled by distant executive committees comprised of tenured professors with no background in the fields they’re making decisions for, while instructors with extensive backgrounds in those fields are silenced.

Evers’ veto message argues that the Legislature should not intervene in the UW, even though the Legislature is involved in many aspects of the UW already, including funding.

The bill was introduced by Representatives Piwowarczyk, Dittrich and O’Connor, cosponsored by Senator Cabral-Guevara.

Read the text of it here.

Read a column we wrote on the bill here.