What Happens When a Poor State Guts Its Public University | Do West Virginia kids of modest means deserve the humanities?

> Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.

> This year, as WVU faced a budget deficit that administrators estimated at $45 million, Gee’s efforts to reshape his institution intensified. He spoke of investing in medical, nursing, cybersecurity, and business degrees to serve a working-class state with an aging population plagued by disease and drug abuse. He would slash money-draining majors and cut required courses that run up costs for students. These kids, he insisted, are our customers. At the beginning of the fall semester, Gee terminated more than two dozen majors and cut professors in other programs, in areas as varied as foreign languages, public health, jazz studies, and community planning.

> Some cuts were truly baffling, given his insistence on WVU’s obligation to strengthen the state. The university decided to stop granting graduate degrees in environmental-health sciences, education administration, and **math**. Many of WVU’s 27,000 students—Gee’s customers—protested that this wasn’t what they wanted. The faculty cast an overwhelming no-confidence vote in the president, to zero effect. More than 140 professors will soon be without jobs.

> West Virginia’s Democrat turned Republican governor and GOP legislators have played their role in WVU’s sad drama, pointedly declining to share a penny of the state’s $1.8 billion surplus with their flagship campus. Yet this isn’t just a MAGA morality tale. Gee has waved off talk of lobbying for more state cash as a salvation for the university.

> The destruction of dozens of majors and careers at WVU, which serves many working- and middle-class students, raises a fundamental question in public higher education: If you’re a bright kid of modest means, which opportunities do you deserve? For most students, their state’s main public university remains their best hope of breaching the walls of class difference. As the ax falls, that idealistic mission fades, and inequalities widen. A student at Cornell University, for example, has a buffet of choices, including more than four dozen languages as varied as Sinhala, Old Norse, Farsi, Khmer, and ancient Greek. By contrast, a student at West Virginia University will soon have just four choices—Chinese, Arabic, French, and Spanish—and there will not be enough instructors for students to major in any of them. “No other state flagship university has forsaken language education for its students or made the kinds of cuts to the humanities that WVU is undertaking,” the executive director of the Modern Language Association, a national organization of language and literature scholars, wrote in an August letter to Gee.

!ping RURAL&ED-POLICY

i know this is a hot take but this is actually fine in general, the only real issue here was how it was handled (it was pretty abrupt and disruptive) and some of the specific cuts (cutting math graduate degrees seems unwise, at least at most universities math grad programs are an important resource for the undergrad math classes. a grad student is perfectly capable of teaching college algebra)

but the general idea that WVU should not be offering much in the way of humanities degrees seems basically correct. humanities degrees are a luxury good, and if you are really passionate about it there are approximately a billion other places where you can go get one. not every university needs to cater to every single possible whim that the admitted student might have, it’s totally reasonable for a public institution to focus its efforts on things that will pay dividends to the public

this is coming from someone who got a B.A. philosophy entirely on the dime of the Floridian taxpayer, and I can assure you that while I loved my program and had ridiculous amounts of fun taking my classes, those classes have provided approx. $0 in returns to the taxpayer — my computer science minor, meanwhile, has paid for itself many times over.