It's not possible that this is just a ploy to get around tenure, is it?

Tulane to lay off hundreds:

"Calling the multiple-year plan 'the most significant reinvention of a university in the United States in more than a century,' Tulane President Scott Cowen said the strategy is designed to help the university cut its storm-related financial losses and retrench in a city that, at least for the short term, has different needs.

About 230 faculty members will be laid off, 50 at the Uptown campus and 180 at the medical school. Those faculty cuts represent almost 4 percent of Tulane's pre-Katrina work force of about 6,000 people, said Yvette Jones, the university's interim chief operating officer. The university previously laid off 243 support workers -- those it deemed least essential to operations in the next 12 to 18 months -- as well as hundreds of part-time instructors and other workers."