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Three years in the past, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia College had a terrific thought—a profession capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “tutorial transformation” of public larger schooling and streamline his college.
For too lengthy, as Gee informed anybody who would hear, public universities had tried to be every little thing to everybody and sustain with elite personal schools. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a present—a “black swan second,” as he put it, that compelled academic leaders to ask questions “quite than fake to have solutions.” And that December, he started rolling out his personal plan to return WVU to an older agrarian supreme with majors that result in partnerships with state industries and lessons that enable college students to graduate into jobs.
This yr, as WVU confronted a funds deficit that directors estimated at $45 million, Gee’s efforts to reshape his establishment intensified. He spoke of investing in medical, nursing, cybersecurity, and enterprise levels to serve a working-class state with an getting older inhabitants suffering from illness and drug abuse. He would slash money-draining majors and lower required programs that run up prices for college kids. These youngsters, he insisted, are our prospects. Originally of the autumn semester, Gee terminated greater than two dozen majors and lower professors in different packages, in areas as diversified as overseas languages, public well being, jazz research, and neighborhood planning.
Some cuts had been actually baffling, given his insistence on WVU’s obligation to strengthen the state. The college determined to cease granting graduate levels in environmental-health sciences, schooling administration, and math. A lot of WVU’s 27,000 college students—Gee’s prospects—protested that this wasn’t what they wished. The school solid an overwhelming no-confidence vote within the president, to zero impact. Greater than 140 professors will quickly be with out jobs.
A rich man simply shy of 80 years previous, Gee fashions himself a reality teller. “Folks have misplaced religion in larger ed,” he informed me. “It’s an existential second.” Most state legislatures are spending much less per pupil than a decade in the past. All through larger schooling, whole pupil enrollment is declining. Too many universities resemble dinosaurs lumbering towards extinction, Gee argues. Sufficient with strategic plans, he informed the college: “We’d like strategic motion.”
West Virginia’s Democrat turned Republican governor and GOP legislators have performed their position in WVU’s unhappy drama, pointedly declining to share a penny of the state’s $1.8 billion surplus with their flagship campus. But this isn’t only a MAGA morality story. Gee has waved off speak of lobbying for extra state money as a salvation for the college.
The destruction of dozens of majors and careers at WVU, which serves many working- and middle-class college students, raises a elementary query in public larger schooling: When you’re a shiny child of modest means, which alternatives do you deserve? For many college students, their state’s foremost public college stays their greatest hope of breaching the partitions of sophistication distinction. Because the ax falls, that idealistic mission fades, and inequalities widen. A pupil at Cornell College, for instance, has a buffet of selections, together with greater than 4 dozen languages as diversified as Sinhala, Outdated Norse, Farsi, Khmer, and historical Greek. Against this, a pupil at West Virginia College will quickly have simply 4 selections—Chinese language, Arabic, French, and Spanish—and there is not going to be sufficient instructors for college kids to main in any of them. “No different state flagship college has forsaken language schooling for its college students or made the sorts of cuts to the humanities that WVU is enterprise,” the manager director of the Fashionable Language Affiliation, a nationwide group of language and literature students, wrote in an August letter to Gee.
WVU directors speak of utilizing expertise to putty over cuts. At one assembly, in keeping with two school members who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic, a dean steered to professors that the varsity may search a contract with Rosetta Stone, the language-software firm, to exchange misplaced lessons. “Maybe,” a college member countered drily on the way in which out of the assembly, “we must always simply rent speaking parrots.”
After I requested Gee in regards to the threat of irreparable harm to his college, he didn’t sound regretful. This second, he steered, known as for daring, and he relished that. “I’m audacious,” he informed me jauntily. He portrayed WVU as his laboratory and its present troubles as a take a look at of his energy. “When the legislature wouldn’t give me the cash I sought years in the past, I stated, ‘Okay, give me the liberty to make the adjustments I would like.’ They usually consider in freedom, they usually did.”
At West Virginia College, in-state tuition, room, and board prices lower than $23,000—not even half the common price of attending a typical personal school. A couple of quarter of WVU’s attendees are first-generation school college students. One such pupil, Taylor DeLong, met me on the Blue Moose Café in downtown Morgantown, a pleasantly ramshackle school metropolis that sprawls throughout hills and edges the Monongahela River. She was sporting a Nirvana T-shirt. A 22-year-old senior, she has blond hair and the honeyed accent of her native Wyoming County, within the southern a part of the Mountain State. Her county suffers the plagues of opioid and meth habit, and has misplaced inhabitants steadily because the Nineteen Eighties. It’s, in different phrases, a microcosm of West Virginia, the place drug overdoses are spiraling and life expectancy is 72.8 years, the second lowest within the nation.
DeLong excelled in highschool. Her mother and father preached the virtues of schooling. However her father was a coal miner, and to tackle a private-college tuition appeared an impossibility. She enrolled at WVU, took lessons in philosophy, language, and worldwide research, and will really feel her mind coming afire. “If you’re from the place I’m from, there usually are not choices except you grow to be a blue-collar employee,” she informed me. “I knew there was a bigger world on the market. I knew it.” She speaks a number of languages and plans to take the foreign-service examination in a couple of months. Maybe, sometime, she’ll grow to be a diplomat.
However the college that made such a future conceivable is ailing. The funds for the varsity library was lower by $800,000 in latest months, and directors laid off workers and have suspended ordering new books. Liberal-arts departments can’t afford to repair photocopiers. English school are stretched so skinny that nobody may provide a category on Shakespeare. “We manage, did profit concert events and petitions and speak-outs, and the administration refers to us as ‘the youngsters,’ as if we all know nothing,” DeLong stated. “Their equation is ‘income from a significant equals worth.’”
The scholars protesting Gee’s plans have leaned into their state’s historical past, donning crimson bandannas in an homage to great-grandparents who wore the cloths in the course of the bloody coal strikes of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties. “Folks hear ‘West Virginia’ and suppose ‘dumb rednecks,’” she stated. “No, no. It doesn’t must be that means. Harvard and Yale will all the time have philosophy. We must be proud that programs like which can be nonetheless obtainable to ‘widespread folks.’”
“I really like my state,” DeLong continued, “but it surely appears like we’re systematically having the shit overwhelmed out of us.”
The following day on the Blue Moose, I met Hunter Neel, one other first-generation pupil, a shy younger man who grew up close to Morgantown. His mother and father had been absent from his life, he informed me. His grandparents—a carpenter and a homemaker—raised him. Languages entranced him. In late August, he enrolled in lessons for his grasp’s diploma in linguistics; in mid-September, the WVU Board of Governors voted to dismantle this system. One in all his favourite professors, Nicole Tracy-Ventura, who teaches utilized linguistics, obtained her layoff discover in mid-October.
Looming cuts threaten a world-languages division that, by most measures, is kind of profitable. The world-language division turns a revenue—it generates about $800,000 a yr extra in tuition income, the college estimates, than it prices to run the division. Its college students win extremely aggressive nationwide scholarships. This previous summer time, WVU introduced with fanfare that two linguistics professors, Jonah Katz and Sergio Puente-Robles, had been awarded a $250,000 Nationwide Science Basis grant to check pronunciation with a watch towards divining the origins of language. The college just lately informed Katz that he might be laid off on the finish of the spring semester. If he leaves, WVU will lose the grant.
Directors have promised that upperclassmen and graduate college students can nonetheless full their majors and graduate, however by that time any professor who can discover a new job could have left. Graduate college students will discover themselves in progressively larger lessons with fewer electives. Neel teaches undergraduate lessons to defer his tuition. He stated he has loans and no financial savings. If he transfers to an out-of-state graduate program, he dangers shedding a lot of his credit. He tries to sidestep panic. “I really like academia greater than I ever would have imagined.” He paused. “We’ve had this status as a state of uneducated hillbillies. College leaders are taking part in into it.” I requested him whether or not his household is aware of of his troubles. He tossed up his fingers; his tutorial world is terra incognita to them. “They only understand it’s dangerous.”
Critics of American larger schooling, significantly those that satisfaction themselves on being hardheaded kinds, are inclined to dismiss sure levels as arcane and impractical. Majoring in linguistics, for instance, may appear frivolous to some, though it’s quite related to pure language processing and psychoacoustics—the fields that produced Siri and Alexa. One want solely look again on the Nineteen Eighties, when the telemarketer reigned, and jobs in laptop and knowledge processing had elevated by 182 p.c over a decade, and physicians and dentists practically doubled their employment of aides and directors. Synthetic intelligence and the web have wreaked havoc on all of these sectors, whereas a significant in philosophy or artwork historical past can lend itself to a profitable profession in regulation, in authorities, or at a tech start-up.
For the second, West Virginia College is one among two universities within the nation that permit college students main in puppetry. The joke writes itself: C’mon—puppetry?! Sometimes, fewer than a dozen college students a yr main in this system, though many extra college students take lessons. School and college students reported that at a gathering in September, as college students walked to the microphone to denounce funds cuts, a number of members of the board of governors rolled their eyes at mentions of puppetry.
But this system has valuable little overhead, its bodily plant a 12-by-20-foot room full of puppets and marionettes—a Jim Henson fever dream. Mary McClung, who teaches costume design, is the lone professor. A local West Virginian with a wry wit, she was a ceramic artist and sculptor till she determined she wished her creations to open eyes and mouths and are available to life. She arrange store at WVU and, like a pied piper, drew college students. “You might be designing environments, new pores and skin and eyeballs and characters. That is wealthy for college kids and guarantees a profession outdoors of cubicles.” Her former college students have discovered jobs in early-childhood school rooms, CGI labs, and Hollywood studios.
McClung has spun inspiring tales for years. It labored till it didn’t. This yr, directors informed her that the undergraduate puppetry main may presumably survive in shrunken type, however provided that McClung stuffed out numerous paperwork and lobbied the college senate and the administration. And she or he has her personal design and fine-arts lessons to take care of.
She sighed. No thanks. “There’s this sense now at WVU that schooling must be purely utilitarian. Like a vocational college. Who wouldn’t need to go to a college with a puppetry program?”
For many years, John Goldwasser has taught graduate math, which may quickly disappear. He informed me he’s close to retirement, and nearer nonetheless to despair over Gee’s cuts. However after I requested him about Gee himself, he chuckled with a grudging appreciation. Small in stature with an ebullient method, the president is a grasp salesman and fundraiser, a bon vivant with a powerful sense of his private model. That, for a lot of college boards within the twenty first century, is the platonic supreme of a pacesetter. “I’ve heard him speak to high-school mother and father and youngsters and he makes me need to be a pupil,” Goldwasser stated. “His greatest knack is getting rich folks to journey over themselves to open their checkbooks.”
Gee was raised as a Mormon in Vernal, Utah, then a dusty metropolis of three,000, and attended the College of Utah earlier than acquiring a regulation diploma and schooling doctorate at Columbia College in New York Metropolis—which he described, in a 1998 interview with high-school college students, as “Baghdad on the Hudson.” His style in trend ran to bow ties—of which he now owns 2,000—and in music to Dave Brubeck and Simon and Garfunkel. Then as now, he cultivated a picture as a wide-eyed, endearing sq..
There may be on the identical time a restlessness to him. After a stint as a judicial fellow to Supreme Court docket Chief Justice Warren Burger, Gee turned to academia and in 1981, on the age of 36, grew to become president of WVU. He spent 4 years engaged in vigorous fundraising and constructing earlier than packing off to grow to be president of the College of Colorado after which Ohio State. In 1998, he left for Brown College. He roiled professors and college students at this most liberal of colleges by inveighing, throughout a speech in his native Utah, in opposition to ethical relativism and web tradition. To nobody’s amusement, he lower funding for the college’s beloved Charleston String Quartet.
He give up Brown abruptly in 2000 to grow to be chancellor at Vanderbilt. (Former Brown president Vartan Gregorian informed The New York Instances, “I’m surprised, totally dissatisfied and dismayed.”) Seven years later, he returned to Ohio State to serve once more as its president. Alongside the way in which, he epitomized a motion to deal with peripatetic college presidents like company CEOs. By 2004, Vanderbilt was paying Gee $1.3 million, making him the second-highest-paid college chief within the nation. At Ohio State, his wage and compensation approached $2 million a yr. In a nod to his trademark neckwear, the varsity spent 1000’s of {dollars} on promotional bow ties and bow-tie cookies.
Ohio State officers ultimately uninterested in Gee and his model of wit. He informed an viewers in Columbus that coordinating Ohio State’s many divisions was “just like the Polish military or one thing.” A yr later, whereas speaking to Ohio State’s athletic council, he framed his opposition to Notre Dame becoming a member of the Large Ten Convention in non secular phrases. “I negotiated with them throughout my first time period,” he stated, “and the fathers are holy on Sunday, they usually’re holy hell on the remainder of the week. You simply can’t belief these rattling Catholics on Thursday or Friday.” Profuse apologies adopted, together with a college advice that he bear cultural-sensitivity coaching. As an alternative, he abruptly introduced his retirement. He now jokes that he was about to be run out of city. “I’m the inadvertent president at WVU,” Gee informed me. “I retired at Ohio State simply forward of the sheriff.”
When Gee reappeared because the interim president of West Virginia College in 2013, the board of governors assured everybody that he was not a candidate for the full-time place. Three months later the board supplied the job to him.
Gee’s admirers level to his stalwart protection of free speech and of a variety of views in school rooms and lecture halls. Seven years in the past, the breadth of WVU’s analysis and graduate choices led to its classification as an R1 analysis college, a sought-after laurel that the varsity appears more likely to retain, not less than for now. Up to now few years, WVU’s commencement and retention charges have risen, though these charges path the college’s counterparts in neighboring states. Gee’s wage, $800,000 a yr, is comparatively modest.
Nonetheless, hints of champagne tastes stay. The drive from Morgantown to Charleston, the state capital, takes about two hours. Gee and his high aides have made use of a 35-minute flight on a constitution jet. Up to now 9 years, the college has spent a complete of $11.7 million on constitution jets to varied locations, most of which of that are in West Virginia. “Using constitution flights is a part of effectively conducting the enterprise of an R1, land grant flagship college,” a college spokesperson informed me by electronic mail.
Gee has thought deeply in regards to the land-grant college, having co-authored, in 2018, a guide, Land-Grant Universities for the Future, and written essays on the topic. President Abraham Lincoln initiated the land-grant college system, of which WVU is one, in 1862, providing federal lands to states to determine colleges that, with out excluding classical research, centered on extra pragmatic disciplines akin to agriculture, science, and engineering.
Gee proposes to return to that supreme. He has argued for a land-grant college fiercely dedicated to packages that tailor tutorial content material to wants within the native market. However that begs a bigger query: What does it imply for a college to serve its state? Ought to it assist West Virginia employers discover staff and recruit new corporations? Or ought to it focus extra on serving to the state’s younger folks understand their aspirations, even when their goals occur to not contain well being care or enterprise college?
For higher or worse, WVU’s board has empowered its CEO president to press forward as he pleases. 4 years in the past, he selected a provost—the college’s chief tutorial officer, a extremely coveted place—with out a job search and with out consulting school. She was beforehand a WVU dean, lacks a doctorate, and made $435,561 in 2022. (She just lately took a voluntary 10 p.c pay lower.) The school senate protested. Gee supplied a disarming rejoinder. “Look, I’m 75, and I don’t have the time to do loads of searches,” he stated. “I didn’t seek the advice of you, I do know.”
Gee reveals a passion for large guarantees and grand gestures. “I’ve an edifice complicated,” he declared in his state-of-the-university deal with at WVU in 2014. All through his profession he has thrown up shiny state-of-the-art buildings. The college’s debt elevated precipitously on his watch at WVU, simply as Ohio State’s and Vanderbilt’s did. In 2014, he promised that enrollment at WVU would soar from 29,000 to 40,000 by 2020. It fell as a substitute. As Gee was employed partly for his administration acumen, this may need registered as a disappointment. After I raised the difficulty, Gee supplied a winsome snort. His imaginative and prescient accommodates grand failure a minimum of success. “I plead responsible that I had an aspirational 40,000 objective,” he informed me. “That aspirational objective didn’t happen.” The WVU Board of Governors was nonetheless reassuring; in July, it prolonged Gee’s contract by means of June 2025, which incorporates bonuses totaling not less than $1 million upon retirement.
Gee’s story has one other twist, one which additional reveals the space between him and lots of of his college students. Gee will get alongside splendidly with company chieftains and a few years has earned half one million {dollars} or extra in further earnings and inventory choices from company boards. In 2000, whereas at Vanderbilt, he joined the board of administrators of Massey Vitality, a now-infamous coal-extraction firm. Then one of many largest mining operations within the nation, it supplied Gee good-looking compensation: He ultimately was paid between $192,000 and $235,000 a yr, plus inventory choices. However the board’s oversight was spectacularly ineffective. Twenty-three staff died in Massey’s mines throughout Gee’s years on the board. The federal authorities levied massive fines on Massey for environmental degradations. Gee, who served for some time because the board’s security and environmental chair, insisted to a pupil newspaper at Ohio State that Massey “has probably the greatest environmental information within the nation.” Later got here a cataclysm: In 2010, lower than a yr after Gee resigned from the board, an explosion at Massey’s Higher Large Department mine in West Virginia killed 29 miners. Federal and state investigations discovered “reckless” and “blatant” disregard for security. There have been lies, acts of intimidation, and two units of books, these stories discovered, these stories discovered.
4 years after the accident, WVU’s board of governors, a number of of whom had connections to the fossil-fuel trade, voted unanimously to nominate Gee because the president. An official WVU journal ran a listing providing 5 causes that “we’re gaga for Gee.”
Whereas reporting in Morgantown, I stored coming throughout folks whose lives had been reworked by WVU. One was David Mersing, who grew up in Terra Alta, a working-class city of perhaps 1,400 folks within the blue-green hills to the southeast of Morgantown. An detached high-school pupil, he joined the army and later labored as a truck driver earlier than turning into one other of WVU’s many first-generation college students. He obtained a bachelor’s diploma and doctorate in chemistry there. This soft-spoken 50-year-old has a spouse and three kids and teaches on the college, mentoring college students who in his story hear their very own.
He holds workplace hours practically day by day, and former college students routinely electronic mail to ask if they’ll lean on him for tutoring assist. “These youngsters are what I’m right here for,” he informed me. Then he paused and stared on the wall. “I’m unsure what the longer term holds in the event that they let me go.” Because it occurs, he’ll survive one other yr, as older colleagues in his division selected to retire to avoid wasting the roles of youthful school.
Gee informed me he’s not oblivious to such worries. However he insisted that cash issues or no, WVU should change. He pointed to a bleak nationwide panorama. Certainly, the president of Dickinson State College in North Dakota just lately proposed to chop majors in math, political science, info analytics, and music. The State College of New York at Potsdam just lately introduced {that a} steep drop in enrollment had compelled deep funds reductions and cuts—deeper, definitely, than those Gee is considering. When asserting cuts in chemistry, physics, public well being, and theater, Potsdam’s president broke into tears.
Whatever the toll on college students, school, and even some school presidents, the travails of public universities have grow to be a wealthy supply of enterprise for the consultants who advise beleaguered presidents on their choices. A number of years in the past, Gee and WVU paid $1 million to EAB, previously generally known as the Instructional Advisory Board, a Washington, D.C., agency, to collect knowledge on college packages, inspecting recruit and retain extra college students and their efficiency in numerous school majors. This previous April, the college gave a still-active contract price as a lot as $875,000 to the RPK Group to research that knowledge. The Maryland-based consultancy—which has had contracts with the American Affiliation of State Faculties and Universities, the Kansas Board of Regents, the Metropolis College of New York, and the colleges of Virginia and Missouri, amongst many others—presents higher-education purchasers its “Mission Market and Margin®” technique to “optimize” their enterprise mannequin and “align tutorial choices to pupil and labor demand.” (WVU declined to launch any suggestions or different work product from RPK.)
But darkish claims of doom are price interrogating. Kentucky sits on West Virginia’s western border and has solely modestly higher median household incomes and poverty charges. But its flagship public college enjoys document enrollments, to not point out vibrant foreign-language departments and math doctoral packages.
Arkansas has social indicators just like West Virginia’s. However the College of Arkansas has expanded choices and aggressively recruited college students from different states. Lisa Corrigan, a communications professor there, has examined the doings at West Virginia College. “The demographic cliff is a product of the consultant-industrial complicated,” she informed me. “It is a manufactured disaster. At Arkansas, we’re drowning in college students.” Regardless of all of the speak of streamlining, demand seems sturdy for a large variety of lessons at many flagship public universities.
In the meantime, at WVU, directors are making cuts that look puzzling even by means of a purely utilitarian lens. The administration has lower recreation majors and a resource-management doctorate at the same time as West Virginia officers speak of economies constructed on outside sports activities and the restore of waterways and forests. The state suffers a extreme scarcity of public-school math lecturers, but the college has lower the one math doctoral program within the state.
Gee is undeterred. He stated WVU nonetheless has tons of of majors and graduate packages. “If the nation has 30 glorious math Ph.D. packages, why does West Virginia want one too?” he requested me. Addressing the mounting assaults on his stewardship of WVU, he added, “I can’t settle for a story that I’ve mismanaged the college. I’m leaving in 2025. That makes me very courageous.”
Wanting on the hole between Gee’s rhetoric and the agenda he’s pursued, one struggles to inform whether or not his phrases have which means. Lots of the packages that Gee has focused provide college students paths to profitable careers or strengthen the state in methods it desperately wants. Some are even tracks that he’s praised previously as important. I reminded Gee that solely seven years in the past, he gave a speech arguing that world languages and linguistics had been ever extra important in a contemporary world. But he insists now that if language weren’t required for a lot of majors, most college students wouldn’t take the programs. “We’re getting rid of world languages as a result of our college students wished to put off it,” he stated. “Our college students are uninterested in our telling them what programs to take.” He recounted a dialog he had with a WVU pupil who informed him, “I took 4 semesters of Spanish, and I landed in Madrid and couldn’t even get a taxi.” With the air of a person tossing a trump card on the desk, Gee requested me, “What does that inform you?”
What got here to my thoughts was my dialog with Taylor DeLong, that senior from the mountain hollows. She spoke of how her lessons supplied undreamed-of consolations. She studied overseas in France. One night she met a pair from Argentina. She informed me, “I spoke with them for 2 hours in Spanish.” She glowed. “To be a well-rounded particular person, to have a way of this world, that’s what this schooling gave me.”
The aspirations of a Taylor DeLong may not cajole conservative state legislators into opening the purse for WVU. And maybe this rural state can’t hope to influence a younger lady like her, bent on serving in an embassy in the future, to spend her profession right here. Though one may think a distinct imaginative and prescient, by which a Wyoming County lady of wordly accomplishment returns to WVU to show a category or give a lecture and so enriches her alma mater.
An existential query—to borrow one among Gee’s favourite adjectives—hangs over this deconstruction and reconstruction of a 27,000-student state college. When you tug at a thread right here, a seam there, and packages unwind and careers finish and professors and graduate college students are despatched packing, are you able to simply sew up what’s left? Gee may attempt to reorient WVU round its medical college, neuroscience heart, and enterprise college, however the attraction of these colleges may rely on being woven into the material of a grander college.
Will a whip-smart aspiring neuroscientist select Morgantown, after cuts to the humanities and to a math doctoral program that may entice like-minded college students? Will younger folks in West Virginia really feel “socialized to go away,” within the phrases of the famend Appalachian novelist and essayist Ann Pancake, as a result of shrinking alternatives? (Pancake informed the Mountain State Highlight that she has herself determined to go away WVU this yr due to the cuts.)
I needed to marvel: What may need transpired had Gee emphasised the ethical urgency of making grand choices for working- and middle-class college students? What if he had taken the case for constructing a high college on to West Virginians? As an alternative, the inescapable impression he leaves is of a school president—a person with expertise, power, and willpower—who settled for a utilitarian imaginative and prescient and straitened selections.
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