The University of Louisiana is voting today on a proposal to make it easier to remove tenured faculty. The reasons are economic–and the reactions, centered on concerns about academic freedom and job security, are anything but:

The University of Louisiana system’s Board of Supervisors plans to vote Friday on a proposal that would make it easier to dismiss tenured professors—a move that has upset faculty members throughout the system’s eight campuses, as well as national faculty organizations.

“This could impact the quality of education offered in the classroom and the ability to recruit qualified people, including at both faculty and administration levels,” said Jordan E. Kurland, associate general secretary for the American Association of University Professors.

System officials say the contemplated changes are driven by a tight budget. The proposals “are solely precipitated by a set of decreasing resources,” said Randy Moffett, the system’s president. “There are no other intentions.” State financing for has been reduced by 17 percent since the 2008 fiscal year, and Mr. Moffett is anticipating another drop of approximately $95.3-million in the middle of 2011 when federal stimulus funds expire.

Still, some professors fear that three parts of the proposal could drastically reshape academic employment.

Under one of those, a “reduction” of a program could become a legitimate cause for terminating tenured faculty members. Currently, tenured positions can be cut only because of financial exigency or the complete discontinuance of a program.

Mr. Moffett said the proposed new language was added to include special circumstances left out in the currrent policy, such as the restructuring or scaling back of specific academic programs.

Lisa Abney, provost at one of the system’s campuses, Northwestern State University, said such a change would provide more flexibility so the university wouldn’t have to eliminate entire programs in response to budget cuts. Her institution has undergone an extensive restructuring to deal with financial constraints—including the merging of three departments and the elimination of seven different majors. Six tenured faculty members were laid off as a result.

But the language worries professors. A tenured professor at a system campus, who did not want to be named for fear of being targeted for a job cut, said the main concern is that the word “reduction” is vague. The professor said that it could be interpreted arbitrarily, especially in universities with tense faculty-administrative relations.

The professor said the proposal has already created a “poisonous atmosphere” at his institution because many colleagues are afraid to speak in opposition, fearing they could be fired if the measure is passed.

And so on. The proposal also includes a measure that would reduce how much notice the university has to give tenured professors that it plans to downsize–from upwards of a year to three months.

This is not the first such standoff we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last. Tenured faculty have been warring with administrators over costs, efficiency, and academic freedom for years. Still, in the present economic climate, these battles are intensifying because the economic pinch is getting tighter. There is an endgame quality to the argument at this point. And while faculty are right to be worried, they polarize the debate and ensure the outcomes they don’t want when they dig in their heels, refuse to take economic reality into account, and persist in taking intransigent positions that look, on the surface, to be noble and idealistic, but are actually, in the end, enormously self-serving. The concern here is not academic quality. If it were, the professoriate would be up in arms about how poor academic quality is these days and would be taking steps to do something about it. Rather, the concern is job security. And while that’s a legitimate concern, it’s also the case that tenure is an exceptional, arguably ineffective, expensive perk that is no longer sustainable at most of our colleges and universities. This is a frightening and worrisome fact, from the faculty perspective, but it is a fact.

That said, I’d like to see what the University of Louisiana is doing to reduce costs and shrink its administration. To take an example drawn from one of its campuses: The University of Louisiana at Lafayette ranked 89th out of 196 surveyed schools in a recent study of administrative bloat. In recent years, the number of admins per 100 students has risen by 43.9 percent, while the number of faculty has only gone up 9 percent. Enrollment, during the same period, has gone down by 1.4 percent. If there’s a need to trim academic programs, surely there’s an even greater need to reduce the bureaucracy? Then there’s athletics. Louisiana-Lafayette heavily subsidizes its sports programs–and has increased those subsidies substantially in recent years. In 2008, more than half of the school’s $11 million athletics budget came from “allocated revenue,” or in-house subsidies.

If Louisiana’s faculty members want to have a productive conversation with the administration, they need to engage with them on the level of economics, budget allocations, administrative spending, and sports subsidies. And there is plenty to discuss there. “Why are you funding football at the expense of academics?” is a much stronger question than “Why won’t you let me keep my tenure when the university is going broke?”

UPDATE: The vote has been postponed.