1996 the Arizona Board of Regents attempted to re-evaluate tenure, fearing that few full-time professors actually taught university undergraduate students, mainly because the processes of achieving academic tenure underweighted teaching. However, faculty and administrators defended themselves and the board of trustees dropped its review. Finally, the University of Minnesota Regents tried from 1995 to 1996 to enact 13 proposals, including these policy changes: to allow the regents to cut faculty base- salaries for reasons other than a university financial emergency including poor performance; to fire tenured professors when their programs were eliminated or restructured if the university were unable to retrain or reassign them. In the Minnesota system, 87 percent of university faculty were either tenured or on the tenure track, and the professors vehemently defended themselves. Eventually, the president of the system opposed these changes and weakened a compromise plan by the dean of the law school before it then failed. The board chairman resigned later that year. The period since 1972 has seen a steady decline in the percentage of college and university teaching positions in the US that are either tenured or tenure-track. United States Department of Education statistics put the combined tenured/tenure-track rate at 56% for 1975, 46.8% for 1989, and 31.9% for 2005. That is to say, by the year 2005, 68.1% of US college teachers were neither tenured nor eligible for tenure; a full 48% of teachers that year were part-time employees. Racial and gender disparities During the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, it was assumed that as the disproportionately white, male cohort of U.S. tenured faculty members retired, they would be replaced by a more representative cohort. Although diversity in tenured faculty has improved since the 1990s, the current cohort is still not representative: in Fall 2020, 59.4% of tenured faculty in the United States were men and 73.8% were white, while in Fall 1991, 79.5% of tenured faculty were men and 90.4% were white. In Fall 2019, 4.8% of tenured faculty were Black and only 2.3% were Black women. Revocation In 1994, a study in The Chronicle of Higher Education found that "about 50 tenured professors [in the US] are dismissed each year for cause." While tenure protects the occupant of an academic position, it does not protect against the elimination of that position. For example, a university that is under financial stress may take