A colleague of mine, a non-tenured instructor at a university, got fired recently. She didn't do anything terribly bad (context below) but she found out this week her contract is not being renewed for the spring semester. However the university said that they're going to pay her full salary for 1 year. And I'm very curious why they're going to do that. She's an at-will employee and can be fired at any moment for no reason whatsoever. So why would the University pay her a year salary when they don't have to? Is it because if she files for unemployment the university has to pay part of that or somehow their insurance rates go up? I know there has to be some financial motive behind it because the university never does things out of goodwill and caring for their employees.
Context: She teaches a lower level math course with a lot of students who are unmotivated and don't really make the requisite effort. A few of them who rarely come to class and don't turn in homeworks were on the verge of failing, so she confronted these students and told them they needed to work harder. They felt offended by her confronting them so they went to the department head who told this teacher it was wrong to shame students. And the teacher basically said she felt like she was teaching elementary school children and a department had did not like her attitude.
I'm not defending her actions or saying she couldn't have done better. I wasn't there or privy to the conversations, so I don't know the whole story. However as someone who teaches at the same University in the same department, I know how sensitive our students can be and I suspect she really didn't do anything all that egregious. She's an older teacher with standards and unfortunately the university is pushing these people out because they just want to increase their graduation rates to improve the university's ranking.