Kansas has more than a few challenges these days.
Do we need to add a heaping dose of self-inflicted brain drain to the list?
Steven Lovett seems to think so.
Lovett is the general counsel and vice president for risk management at Emporia State University — an institution best-known in academia these days for a post-pandemic firing spree of nearly three dozen tenured faculty a few years back, part of a dramatic “realignment” driven by the university’s Koch-connected president.
Correlation isn’t necessarily causation.
But we do know that ESU’s enrollment dropped by 13% the next fall after all those faculty were turned out. So there’s that.
Now Lovett wants to spread that magic to the rest of the state’s public colleges and universities.
He has authored — in his capacity as a private citizen, he says — a bill that would gut tenure protections for roughly 2,800 faculty at higher ed institutions across the Sunflower State.
Technically, the bill declares that professors and instructors have no “property interest” in the tenure they receive from a university. Which means all those campus eggheads — researchers and scholars and teachers — would suddenly become really easy to get rid of.
No more due process. No more requirements that firings can only happen for a good, well-defined reason.
The bill is necessary, Lovett said Tuesday at a packed meeting of the Kansas House Judiciary Committee, because tenure protections leave the state’s universities unable to nimbly respond to changing budget and enrollment situations.
“Public universities are encumbered, culturally and financially” by those protections, Lovett said.
You know what? Lovett raises a fair concern.
Universities in Kansas and across the country face a baby bust-driven “enrollment cliff” that will most likely force big uncomfortable changes in how academia operates. Nimbleness will be the order of the day if those institutions want to survive. Everybody understands that.
‘Devastating impact’ on scholar quality
So it’s interesting that University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod, Kansas State University President Douglas Linton and Kansas Board of Regents CEO Blake Flanders — three men with a real stake in ensuring that survival — all showed up Tuesday to oppose Lovett’s proposal.
Why?
Because whatever problems might exist with tenure, it’s also the engine that powers higher education across the country.
