UWO faculty, staff, students stage walkout as slashed budgets jeopardize jobs, educational opportunities
On Tuesday, October 3, something unusual was happening at UW Oshkosh; Students still walked between classes and dorms, professors still gave lectures in classrooms across campus, and administrators still typed away at emails and paperwork. However, making its way from Culver Center to Polk Library was a crowd of roughly 200 faculty, staff, students, and community members protesting the changes that have been enacted at UWO in response to the university’s $18 million budget deficit. Among these changes were layoffs, furloughs, increased teaching loads, and larger class sizes, all of which were announced by administrators without the input of professors and students they will impact.
After upper administrators issued an unsatisfactory response to a petition written by the United Faculty and Staff of Oshkosh, the group, which included Dr. Misty McPhee, a professor of environmental studies at UWO and participant of the protest, decided that it was time to organize.
“What we want is accountability and an invitation to work with the administration, and we didn’t get that,” McPhee said.
Another goal of the protest was to raise awareness about the issue, especially among students and the local community.
“Students have been paying attention, signing the petition,” Dr. Paul Van Aucken, chair of the Sociology Department at UWO and one of the organizers of the event, said. “There are a lot of them that participated in the march on Tuesday, and that’s a really positive thing. Administrators listen to students more than they do to faculty members.”
Getting students involved in events like this month’s protest is important not only because it draws the attention of administrators, but also because it helps students understand what the university’s cost cutting plans might mean for their education and success.
Jeffrey Pickron, a professor of history at UWO and founding member of the United Faculty and Staff of Oshkosh, suggested that this budget deficit is greatly impacting students and their education.
“Students don’t know all the experiences, all the knowledge they might have had if the university hadn’t been gutted by the state and administration. I think that’s the saddest part,” he said.
Myles Dixon, who is currently in his third year at UWO, understands that the success of students hinges on the ability of professors to devote time to research and working with students one-on-one. Already, he has seen grades being put in later than usual, which he believes is the consequence of professors being overworked.
“The future of students relies on the future of the system,” he said.
Athena Dedow, a UWO sophomore, is also concerned about how the budget crisis will impact her education.
“I have these amazing professors who are passionate and good at what they do, and they are being forced to leave,” she said.
As a transfer student from UW Milwaukee, Dedow found the financial crisis especially shocking because of the confidence she had had in the programs as she was entering Oshkosh.
“I think that people felt betrayed to not find out until mid to late August that this was going on,” she said.
Students are not the only ones worried about what a struggling university means for their future. Many staff, and even some tenured professors, are fearful that they will be laid off or see major pay cuts in the coming weeks and months. McPhee, who is now experiencing her third furlough at UWO, says that she has not seen this before.
“A huge, huge difference in this crisis is the fear of speaking up,” she said. “We had tenured faculty who said ‘No,’ refusing to sign the petition out of fear of retaliation.”
These feelings of fear are even greater for university staff and non-tenured professors, known as instructional academic staff at UWO. These staff are not protected by their contracts from layoffs as faculty are, and two weeks after the protests, administrators sent long-awaited notices to roughly 140 staff who are being released from their positions at the university. This is in addition to 76 university employees who took incentivized early retirement this year. These figures do not capture the true extent of job losses, though, as many instructional academic staff expect that their yearly or bi-yearly contracts will simply not be renewed.
“We’re essentially being disappeared without fanfare,” Pickron said. “It’s going to be well over 300 people.”
Pickron himself belongs to the cohort of instructional academic staff, and his silent removal from the university has been particularly jarring.
“They’re actively abrogating my contract,” he said. “I signed the contract at the end of September, after they announced the layoff. Now, they’ve been slowly giving away the classes that I was going to be teaching next semester.”
The classes that instructional academic staff were teaching before the layoffs, will now have to be taught by faculty, who are not being given research leaves next year. The increased teaching load is concerning to McPhee, who will be teaching an extra class next year.
“Students are scared about the loss of opportunities,” she said. “My ability to mentor students is going to go down.”
Dixon has also heard student concerns that some university services may be threatened by the budget crisis, a possibility which he says worries them.
“People want their classes, programs, and clubs to run,” he said. “All of those are essential to the college experience.”
UWO has, over time, become more reliant on instructional academic staff to teach classes when there are not enough tenured professors to teach them. This has allowed faculty to devote more time to research, and saved money for the university because instructional academic staff have lower salaries than faculty do.
“It’s filling in holes. That’s what we do,” Pickron said. “We fill in holes that exist because of budget shortfalls that, I would argue, result from an intentional underfunding of the UW system.”
Raising awareness about the role of the state legislature in the current budget crisis was another of the goals set by the organizers of the walkout protest. If state officials do not begin to reinvest in the UW system, some fear that other universities will encounter the same issues that UWO is now. For this reason, representatives of UW Green Bay participated in the walkout at UWO, and organizers at UW Madison also staged a protest on October 3.
“It’s the worst right now at UWO, but it’s not just us,” Van Aucken said. “It really points back to this bigger budget issue at the state level. If people can put pressure on elected officials to support the UW system, that’s really the ultimate goal.”
For now, there is little sign from state leaders or UWO administrators that the requests of faculty, staff, students, and their communities are being heard.
“They acted like it didn’t even happen, and that’s so sad because they need to be paying attention to how many people care about what is happening,” Dedow said.
The United Faculty and Staff of Oshkosh, as well as other organizations across the UW system, are, however, determined to continue fighting for recognition. They see it as a matter of justice for the communities supported by Wisconsin’s universities.
“The only way out is collective action,” Pickron said. “If you don’t stand together, you fall separately. You fall one by one.”
by Aria Boehler
Published October 30, 2023
Oshkosh West Index Volume Volume 120 Issue 2