Where would they go?

This Chronicle article asks whether faculty will be leaving public universities "in droves" due to budget droughts and political turmoils.

Here's what the author concludes:

It appears they haven’t. But the threat of departures has led to plenty of maneuvering behind the scenes, and to other consequences as well.
Many public colleges in Wisconsin, where legislators stripped tenure protection and $250 million in support, and in Illinois, where a state-budget impasse has left campuses in the lurch, didn’t lose substantially more faculty members to other institutions than in previous years.

But even if most professors are staying put, many have considered leaving. Some have quietly entered the job market, and others may soon follow. Meanwhile, universities elsewhere have escalated efforts to lure top scholars away from besieged competitors.

The top dogs can go where they want... just as the top universities can buy whomever they want.

But the reality is that most faculty, especially senior faculty, have no place else to go.  Who is in the market for a fifty something or sixty something English professor?  And even if a job comes up, the chances of transporting her/his tenure are probably nil.  That, indeed, is the main reason faculty need to cling to their tenure, if they are among the third of university teachers who still have it.

And so, it seems that politicos like Wisconsin's anti-labor governor and legislators can do pretty much what they want, without worrying about some mass exodus of faculty from their state university systems.

Anyway, that's how it looks from here.