Just before noon on Monday, Tim Bragg crisscrossed the hallways of Woodburn Hall at West Virginia University. The senior poked his head into classrooms and encouraged his fellow students to abandon the day’s lessons for a protest instead.
“Hey y’all. It’s walkout time,” Bragg, a double major in history and women’s and gender studies, and a first-generation student, told an English class on the ground floor. He gave a 20-second spiel about WVU’s proposed cuts to academic programs and why he thinks they’re unjust. The plan — to eliminate 12 undergraduate majors and 20 graduate programs, along with 7 percent of full-time faculty members — has angered and galvanized many on the Morgantown campus since it was announced this month.
Four students got up to follow Bragg out of the building. One of them, Robbie Acree, a sophomore, said he was compelled to join even though his intended major of finance is not under threat. “If I’m gonna be part of an institution,” he said, “I at least want it to be respected by its students.” Acree and the others walked toward the student union. They joined hundreds of their peers who, along with professors and Morgantown residents, had gathered on the plaza for a lively, loud, and sweaty demonstration. Student organizers shouted into a megaphone about the importance of the disciplines that are now on the chopping block. They led the crowd, many of whom wore red to show solidarity, in call-and-response chants. Drivers in passing cars and trucks laid on their horns to show support. For the protesters, a fundamental question underlined their shouts and signs: What sort of education must a public flagship provide?
For months, WVU leaders have depicted the cuts as necessary triage in the face of an expected decline in enrollments. A report projecting the number of high-school graduates up to the year 2037 predicts that the State of West Virginia’s drop will be among the worst in the nation. Lopping off some academic programs now, while painful, will allow WVU to prosper in the future, university leaders have argued. The institution can mitigate an immediate $45-million budget deficit and devote resources to the degrees that get more students in the door and fill work-force needs.
But the students and professors who protested Monday view the university’s plan not as skilled surgery but a hatchet job. The positions and programs WVU is poised to eliminate are not accessories, they say. Rather, they are integral to the flagship’s mission, and their removal will damage the university, and the state, irreparably.
WVU ought to be an institution of “unbounded opportunity,” said Julia Condie, a senior and co-organizer of the student walkout. “It’s supposed to be the school where you can pursue a fulfilling and competitive education in a state where that’s severely needed.” If the recommended cuts come to pass, Condie said, “you cannot do that anymore.”
An ‘Overgrown’ Garden
In a speech this spring, Gordon Gee, WVU’s president, summarized what he called “headwinds” blowing against the university for some time. Among them was a lower college-going rate, a national narrative of distrust in what higher education can offer students, and rising costs. He deployed the metaphor of a garden in desperate need of pruning. Universities, he noted, “are wonderful at saying yes, and lousy at saying no,” and WVU has “been overgrown for a very long time.”
Cuts were coming. Over the summer, administrators, with the help of rpk Group, a higher-ed consultancy, examined data for the university’s academic programs, including enrollment, tuition revenue measured against expenses, and student-faculty ratios. After considering comments from departments and deans, WVU announced on August 11 what programs it was recommending for discontinuation. Though much of the outrage has focused on cuts to the humanities, WVU’s planned reductions include other fields, such as education, mathematics, and public health. Gee told The Washington Post that the cuts must happen so that resources can go toward academic programs in higher demand, such as engineering and forensics. “The people of the state are telling us what they want,” he said. “And for once, we’re listening to them.”
Monday’s protesters strongly disagreed that Gee and the university had listened in earnest. They contended that the university’s analyses often played down or ignored the targeted programs’ contributions to the campus community and to the state, and that university leaders had not properly grappled with what it meant to foreclose those avenues of study for future students.
Kim Malinowski, who graduated from WVU with an English degree in 2005, was so upset by the proposed cuts to the English department faculty that she drove about five hours from her home in Laurel, Md., to attend Monday’s demonstration. Wearing a red shirt, Malinowski sat on a low stone wall and talked about the kindness professors in that department had shown her when she developed aphasia, a language disorder that Malinowski said caused her to lose her ability to read and write for years. “They sent cards and talked to me and were very supportive,” Malinowski said.
Perhaps the most surprising proposed cut is to the world languages, literatures, and linguistics department. WVU recommended eliminating the unit’s entire faculty and using “alternative methods” of language instruction, such as, possibly, an app. Olivia Reiter, a senior marketing major with a Spanish minor, held a sign with the green Duolingo owl that read, “duolingo U.” Reiter is from Bellefonte, Pa., a town she described as lacking in cultural diversity. In her Spanish courses at WVU, professors “have taught me more than just language,” she said. “They’ve taught me culture. They’ve taught me how to be inclusive. They’ve taught me life lessons.” She worries about those lessons not being available for future WVU students to learn.
While speakers rallied the crowd, Marisa Porco, a 23-year-old graduate student wearing bright red socks, stood off to the side. Porco is in their second year of a master’s degree program in mathematics, which, along with the Ph.D. in mathematics, was recommended for discontinuation. They held a cardboard sign that read, “It’s the only math Ph.D. program in WV for Cauchy’s Sake!” (Cauchy was a French mathematician.) Should those program closures become final, Porco said they would be able to finish their master’s degree at WVU but would have to go somewhere else and spend “hundreds of dollars on application fees” in order to complete their Ph.D.
Porco also worries about the cuts’ potential effects on undergraduate students’ math education. The provost’s office recommended that the unit shed faculty members. If some professors are let go, and there are no more graduate students to be teaching assistants for entry-level courses, those courses will consist of “a teacher at the front of the room behind a computer, reading off PowerPoint slides,” in a lecture hall, Porco predicted.
The university has emphasized that the proposed cuts — which units can appeal and which WVU’s Board of Governors will weigh in September — affect 147 undergraduate students and 287 graduate students, less than 2 percent of the student body. (All admitted graduate students in discontinued programs will be taught out in their current program of study, university guidance says. Undergraduate students who have completed more than 60 credits hours will also be taught out. Those who have not will meet with their adviser to discuss options.)
To participants in Monday’s protest, the consequences of program closures will ripple out far beyond those 430-some students. Matthew Kolb, a senior and co-organizer, expressed concern that other universities will follow WVU’s lead. He criticized university leaders for, in his view, prioritizing tuition dollars over core values. “Is this a university that’s only supposed to serve people who can bring in money?” he asked in a phone interview Sunday. If this “ideology” succeeds at West Virginia and then at other institutions, “it will damage higher education in the entire country for who knows how long.”
Much of the frustration and anger expressed Monday was directed at Gee. Students held signs that read “STOP the Gee-llotine.” After about 45 minutes of speeches and chants, organizers led the crowd to the front of nearby Stewart Hall, the administration building that houses Gee’s office. Dozens of voices yelled, “Hey hey, ho ho, Gordon Gee has got to go.” Cruder chants that expressed the same sentiment caught on. As the day grew longer and hotter, students yelled their frustration at a building that, for them, symbolized the gutting of what a university should be.
Across the street, Amy S. Thompson looked on. Thompson, who wore red jewelry, red sunglasses, and red lipstick, chairs the world languages department. She, like her colleagues, had not imagined that WVU would recommend dissolving the entire unit. Since then, she’d been working on the department’s appeal, pulling 18-hour days.
When the demonstration started, Thompson said she got teary looking at all of the students who’d gathered on a steamy day to make themselves heard. It gave her, she said, “a little bit of hope.”
The department’s appeal hearing is Friday.
