Gordon Gee’s Last Stand

E. Gordon Gee likes to tell a joke that goes like this: When he first became a university president, in 1981, at age 37, he was doing a bad job. One day a couple of older professors told him as much. His problem, they informed the young president, was that he did not look or act the part.

Gee thought they had a point, so he ditched his bow tie, argyle socks, and khakis for a suit and an air of authority. But it made no difference. In Gee’s telling, he was still failing. Worse, his new costume made him miserable. Eventually he reverted to wearing what he liked and being who he was.

Over the years that Gee has told this story, the details vary but the punchline stays the same. Despite his poor start, Gee, now 80, is still a university president. As for the professors who insisted he change?

“Those guys are dead.”

The anecdote is classic Gee — funny, fabulistic, and oft repeated. Now in his second stint leading West Virginia University, his seventh and (almost definitely) final presidency, Gee’s made a career of telling and selling the story of himself in tandem with whatever institution he’s at the helm of. Over the past 42 years, he’s used his sense of humor to endear people to his vision and to defuse the discontent provoked by his big swings. Sometimes it works. Lately, it hasn’t.

At West Virginia, people are still reeling from one of Gee’s most controversial decisions yet. Last year he oversaw swift, deep cuts of faculty jobs and academic programs. Gee sees them as a painful necessity for securing the university’s future health and success. Many professors and some students see them otherwise. They argue that Gee has irreparably mangled the education that WVU can provide.

In September the faculty took up a vote of no confidence in Gee. At the meeting, after a resolution listing his alleged blunders was read aloud, with five minutes to defend his performance, Gee told a joke that went like this:

“If I had done all of those things, I’d probably vote no confidence, myself.”

This time, his quip did little endearing or defusing. Trust in Gee among a good share of the faculty had evaporated by then. Stephanie Foote, an English professor, said in an interview that she used to think that Gee “was really kind of visionary.” Now? “I think that he is a complete charlatan.”

Gee’s critics describe him similarly. A charlatan. Someone who puts on an “Uncle Gordon” show. Gee’s fans tend to observe the same qualities but conclude the opposite. His idiosyncratic charm and his knack for promotion are not knocks against him but assets. Yes, his language could resemble a politician’s, said Jose Amaya, who taught English at Ohio State University during Gee’s first presidency there. “But when Gordon said it,” Amaya said, “you knew it was real.”

Now, Gee is busy making real his vision of what a university should be. It’s a vision that could be adopted across a wide swath of higher education, as more colleges eliminate programs once considered essential in a quest to shore up enrollments and budgets.

For his part, Gee is resolute in his belief that he’s done the right thing. “We have fundamentally changed the direction of this institution,” he recently told me. “I think some people are just embedded in the way that it was.” Plastered on the walls outside his office are quotes and sayings underscoring the need for action. “If you stop to smell the roses,” one reads, “you may get run over by a truck.” Gee relies on similar maxims. He’d rather be the architect of change, he likes to say, than its victim.

Though the university has undergone a fundamental change, Gee’s approach to the presidency has not. Why would it? If his joke about his early failure contains some truth, Gee learned a long time ago to embrace who he is and what he wants, naysayers be damned.

After all, he’s still here. And those guys are dead.

On a recent Wednesday evening at Blaney House, the presidential residence on campus, Gee watched, amused, as a virtual rocket-powered car swerved, flipped, and crashed across a big screen set up in a formal dining room.

Two students who compete on one of WVU’s varsity esports teams were duking it out, for Gee’s benefit. They and their fellow gamers were at Blaney House to celebrate the program’s success over a buffet of tacos and bow tie cookies. One of the teams had recently clinched a national title in Rocket League, a video game that is akin to soccer “but with cars,” someone in the room had explained for Gee’s benefit.

On the screen, a pink SUV sped down the field to punt a ball several times the automobile’s size toward the opposing goal.

“President Gee, who do you think is going to win?” chirped a student on the sidelines.

“I have no favorites,” Gee replied. “I love you both.”

The students got a kick out of Gee, who first became a university president when Pac-Man was a novelty. Dressed in a sweater vest and polka-dot socks, Gee stood a head shorter than many in the room. He bears a passing resemblance to Orville Redenbacher, a comparison he likes to make himself, and is prone to asking enthusiastic questions laced with light profanity, such as, What the hell is Twitch? (It’s a live-streaming platform.)

As he chatted with students, Gee delighted in his lack of familiarity with their world. “This is my interpreter,” he said, clapping a hand onto the shoulder of a sophomore who’d been translating video-game lingo and logic into something intelligible.

At one point, a freshman at the reception estimated that he spent about 50 hours a week playing his video game of choice, more time than many adults spend at their day jobs. When did he study? Gee asked. “Hey, I get A’s,” the student replied, holding up his hands in mock surrender.

Wednesday’s reception was about more than the varsity program’s winning streak. The university now offers an esports business and entertainment major, made possible through Academic Transformation — WVU’s term for how it evaluated what academic programs to end and what programs to add.

At the reception, Gee asked Chris Scroggins, who was hired to teach esports classes and manage the program, to give an overview of how things were going. Demand for the “academic side” of esports is high, Scroggins reported. Last he checked, more than 10 incoming freshmen had declared for the fall, and 16 students were enrolled in the minor. Classes for the minor are at capacity this spring, he said, and he was working with the university-relations office to get the word out about the major.

Gee seemed pleased. At his table were five students who competed in Valorant, a first-person tactical shooter game. All of them were from out of state, including one from Iceland. Gee remarked that it was esports — the competitive program — that had brought them to West Virginia. After posing for a photo and being presented with a jersey, Gee told the gamers that he loved that they love what they’re doing. And he loved that they find the university “an accommodating place” to do it.

Accommodating students’ interests is central to Gee’s ethos. He has preached the need for the university to “differentiate ourselves in the marketplace,” to offer academic programs that are “relevant” to today’s world and that feed “future needs of industry.” Put simply, the university must supply majors that get people to enroll and that will directly lead to good careers. The university’s announcement of the esports major hit those notes. In it, Maryanne Reed, the provost, touted esports as “a multibillion-dollar global industry with many job opportunities for graduates.”

That approach to academic programming is necessary now more than ever, Gee has argued. Last year the university announced a projected budget deficit of $45 million, which could grow to $75 million in the coming years if left unchecked. By that point, system enrollment at WVU was on the decline. It’d dropped by about 4,600 students since 2014 and could drop by thousands more in the near future. Things had to change. “I hate to use this word, but students are our customers,” Gee said in July at a Faculty Senate meeting, in the midst of Academic Transformation. “We need to accept that as a responsibility.”

What that responsibility ultimately translated to at WVU is cuts. Lots of them. The university axed 28 undergraduate majors and graduate programs — including every foreign language on offer — and 143 faculty positions, including tenured ones. The move incited students to protest and attracted national, negative attention. Though much of it focused on cuts to the humanities, positions and programs were chopped across the institution. Incoming students can no longer get a Ph.D. in mathematics or in higher education. They cannot major in environmental and community planning or biometric systems engineering. The division of forestry and natural resources lost six professors. The School of Education lost nine. The School of Public Health lost 11. Many of those people devoted some or the bulk of their careers to the university, only to be forced out.

“I’ve always thought of myself as a teacher,” said Lisa M. Di Bartolomeo, who taught Russian studies and other courses at WVU for 18 years and whose job was eliminated. “To lose that is losing a part of my identity.”

Throughout this process, professors questioned many things about Gee’s approach, including the way programs were evaluated. University administrators, with the help of rpk Group, a consulting firm, focused on metrics such as primary majors, faculty-to-student ratios, and how much tuition revenue the unit generated. People in flagged programs could, and did, challenge those data and their conclusions or provide additional context that attested to the programs’ value. Some of the preliminary decisions were mitigated or reversed.

But over all, the administrators’ metrics mattered more. To critics, Academic Transformation reduced education to “cold market logic,” as three professors put it in an open letter published in the Boston Review. That Gee adopted “the language of necessity and austerity is an abdication of his duty, in my view,” said Joy Connolly, president of the American Council of Learned Societies. The path the president chose is not one of “innovation and expansion of knowledge,” she said. “It’s a narrowing.”

Foote, the English professor, and her colleagues saw the scrapped programs and jobs as not extraneous but essential. “There’s a lot of stuff we don’t even teach here,” she said. “... We don’t teach ancient Greek. We don’t teach Swedish. We don’t teach Norwegian. We teach really basic things, and when those basic things are eliminated — c’mon. That’s not great.”

Foote worries about a university education that is becoming, as she put it, “rigidly geared” toward getting students employed. “We want them to have a job,” she said, but “they’re entitled to have the same amazing, transformative, curious university experience a kid at Princeton is entitled to have, you know? They deserve that.” And it bothers Foote to think that Gee, and administrators involved, do not see it that way.

“I’m pretty sure that’s what their college experience was.”

In 1962 Gee stepped foot as a freshman onto the campus of the University of Utah, located about 170 miles west of his hometown of Vernal, Utah. Vernal is small and rural, the sort of place where the newspaper ran not just one but a series of articles on local Boy Scouts who were traveling to the organization’s national gathering. (Gee, one of the teenagers who was profiled, had “20 nights of camping to his credit,” The Vernal Express reported. He’d held leadership positions, including “troop scribe” and “den chief.”)

Gee was raised as, and still is, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He’s joked that he was 18 years old before he ever met a non-Mormon or a Democrat. The University of Utah was his chance to meet both, and Gee embraced it. He made friends, joined a fraternity, and “digested all of the fascinating knowledge that flowed from the lectures, professors, and books,” he recalled in a 2015 written address to new students. “For me, college was like opening a door to a brand new world.”

That door led to many places. In the midst of his studies, Gee went on a Mormon mission to Bavaria and learned both German and Italian. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history, Gee earned a law degree and a doctorate in education from Columbia University. Becoming a college president was not his goal. But he knew life in higher ed was what he wanted, perhaps as a law-school dean.

After administrative appointments at other institutions and a judicial fellowship at the U.S. Supreme Court, Gee’s aspiration came true. In 1979, when total college enrollments were growing steadily and public confidence in higher ed was robust, he was hired as dean of West Virginia University’s law school. James R. Elkins, now an emeritus law professor, described Gee’s leadership the way people would remember it for decades: He made bold moves that ruffled some feathers. While other new deans might study a place before acting, Elkins said, that was not Gee’s style.

To Elkins, Gee’s decisiveness was a plus. He remembers one evening they were both working late, and Gee came to the professor’s office to ask how to photocopy something. Elkins explained that the machine was not available after business hours. It’s dumb, Elkins told the dean, but that’s the way it was. To which Gee replied, essentially: “It won’t be that way tomorrow.” A different sort of dean would have made a promise like that and not followed up, Elkins said. Gee solved it immediately.

A lifetime of similarly confident decisions earned Gee supporters, as has his warmth and interpersonal skills. His recall for names and faces is legendary. Many people hold dear the handwritten notes that Gee sends to someone after a meeting or when he learns of an accomplishment or a setback. Richard H. Linton, president of Kansas State University, said he keeps a “feel good file,” and Gee is its most prolific contributor.

Wherever he worked, Gee became known for his unmatched zeal for the institution he was leading. “The indefatigable young president” would “be a cinch as a television evangelist if only he could be persuaded to give up the professorial bow tie,” read a complimentary column in The Daily Sentinel, in Grand Junction, Colo., when Gee was president of the University of Colorado in the 1980s. That same paper would mourn his decision to move on to Ohio State, in 1990, and found his departure slightly unbelievable. His commitment to CU “has been so complete, so unflagging, so absolute, that it’s difficult to imagine his leaving the state.”

But leave he did. In a 42-year career, Gee has led five universities — two of them twice. His shortest stint was at Brown University, from which, in an extreme about-face, he announced he was departing for Vanderbilt University after just over two years on the job. (Brown was a poor fit, Gee said at the time.) His longest stint is his current role at West Virginia. There, he became the interim president in 2014 and was initially excluded from seeking the permanent post, until the search committee and the Board of Governors changed their minds.

At different universities, Gee would enact a similar game plan. He’d raise funds aggressively and raise the institution’s profile. If at a public university, he’d travel the state to meet with people, and he’d establish close ties with lawmakers. He’d push forward ideas that generated opposition, which would not stop him. During his second presidency at Ohio State, for example, he led the charge to privatize the university’s parking. “Was it controversial? Yeah, it was controversial,” said Jim Lynch, then the university’s chief spokesperson. “Change is controversial on a college campus. But at the end of the day, he believed that it was the right move.”

And inevitably, Gee would have to say he was sorry for something. “There’s nobody better at a strategic apology than Gordon,” said Michael Schoenfeld, who worked for Gee at Vanderbilt as the vice chancellor for public affairs. He’s given many over the years. (Just Google “Gordon Gee gaffe” and take your pick.) Frequently, it was Gee’s penchant for a joke that necessitated the mea culpa. Said Alex Shumate, a former longtime trustee at Ohio State: “When you engage in humor as often as he does,” there are going to be “foot faults.”

Those “foot faults” were fatal, or at least wounding, during Gee’s second time there. He announced his retirement days after the Associated Press reported disparaging jokes he’d made about other universities and Roman Catholics. Shumate remembers Gee’s leaving as a “mutual agreement.” Gee, for his part, has said he left Ohio State “just ahead of the sheriff.”

Despite that ending, Gee and Shumate remain friends. Perhaps that’s because Gee inspires a level of admiration among (at least some of) those he’s worked with that’s rare. John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, sung Gee’s praises to me over the phone while exercising on a stair climber. Asked about Gee’s faults, Jack Hershey, who was Ohio State’s associate vice president for state relations during Gee’s latter term there, said, “I’m probably, honestly, blind to some of his weaknesses.”

Others are not.

Starting with his brief term at Brown, Gee began to say each presidency would be his last, bolstering the impression that his loyalty can be bought by the highest bidder. His hiring away from Vanderbilt to Ohio State “changed the landscape of compensation for public-college presidents,” The Chronicle would report. He became the first of them to win a pay package surpassing a million dollars. By the time he retired from Ohio State, Gee’s total compensation reportedly topped $2 million, not including his more than 100 other sources of income outside of the university. He told The Wall Street Journal years earlier that sitting on corporate boards “is a hobby for me,” noting he does not drink, smoke, or play golf.

It’s not only his pay that’s been a lightning rod. The Journal, which investigated efforts to rein in Gee’s spending at Vanderbilt, reported that Brown had renovated its presidential home for Gee for a cool $3 million. That price tag included the cost of building, breaking down, shipping, then reassembling a conservatory originally made in England. In 2012, the Dayton Daily News obtained records that show Gee, then at Ohio State, “stays in luxury hotels, dines at country clubs and swank restaurants, throws lavish parties, flies on private jets, and hands out thousands of gifts,” and the university picks up the tab. Among the eye-popping sums was $532 spent on a shower curtain for a guest bathroom. A communications director for a liberal think tank told the outlet at the time: “I don’t expect Mr. Gee to live like a monk. I just don’t think he should be living like Donald Trump.”

When it comes to his spending, Gee has defended himself by saying he’s raised many times those amounts for the institutions he’s led. Essentially, he’s worth it, he argues. But his critics point out that other presidents have successfully drummed up donations without their universities paying, say, $64,000 for bow ties, bow tie pins, and bow tie cookies to distribute.

For those who mourn the extent to which colleges have become ruled by money, Gee’s fund-raising skills are no salve. They’re an indictment of the status quo that Gee helped usher into existence. As Paul F. Campos, a law professor, wrote in 2013 in a scorching critique: “If he had been born at another time, Gee might have sold patent medicines or swampy real estate or a new political party. Instead, he spent the past three decades selling the ever bigger business of American higher ed.”

Gee’s also been criticized for expanding his senior administrative staff and paying those leaders top dollar, and for not keeping his board fully abreast of his spending. Vanderbilt’s board erected stricter guardrails on the latter. And Ohio State’s board members tried to rein in Gee’s tongue. In 2013, when they learned of those gaffes later reported by the Associated Press, they came up with a “remediation plan” for Gee. He needed to choose public speaking engagements more wisely and find professionals to help him with communications. Should “future instances” occur, trustees told Gee in a letter, he could be fired. He resigned a few months later. When asked about the restrictions, Gee previously told The Chronicle that he does not “play well in a tightly orchestrated environment.”

There’s perhaps no better case study of Gee’s refusal to accept limits than when he returned to West Virginia. In 2018, he was accused of engineering an “unprecedented hostile takeover” of the state’s Higher Education Policy Commission. Not only did Gee object to a plan that the commission had put forward regarding state appropriations, he also reportedly plotted to create a separate panel and to replace the commission’s chancellor with an ally to WVU. (At the time Gee admitted to The Chronicle he’d worked to create the other panel but denied having anything to do with the chancellor swap.)

Gee’s “got a big strut” and “some sharp elbows,” said Jenny Allen, who was on the commission at the time. Ultimately, he wanted “as much of the state appropriation as he could get, with as little oversight as he could possibly manage.” Gee would say so himself, she said.

Gee did not say so himself. Asked about Allen’s impression, the president insisted that the commission at the time was “in many ways anti-university.” What Gee wanted, and what his role required, was to make sure that WVU was treated “fairly,” he said.

As West Virginia University adjudicated which programs to cut last summer, the baggage Gee had accumulated over his career weighed him down.

He was known for making bullish predictions, for his big spending, and for expanding campus footprints — he has joked he has an “edifice complex.” Those qualities came back to haunt him after the university announced its projected budget deficit last spring.

In a March 2023 speech, Gee attributed the shortfall to several factors outside of the institution’s control, including a lower college-going rate, rising costs, and the Great Dropout — a drastic shift in attitude about the value of a degree. Hence the need for action. “Imagine a garden that is filled with flowers but is never pruned,” he said. “It is difficult to see the beauty when it is overgrown.

“So my friends, we have been overgrown for a very long time.”

Gee has also made a more provocative argument: that this pruning was necessary, deficit or not, to help return the university to its land-grant mission. He thinks that West Virginia and other such institutions have strayed from their initial purpose by attempting to imitate each other, rather than focusing on their distinct areas of excellence. If Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Morrill Act into law, could see “some of the things that are being done at land grant universities,” the dead president would “turn over in his grave,” Gee would tell me.

As people scrutinized the cuts and Gee’s justification for them, the president’s eternal optimism started to look more like overconfidence.

Gee had earlier pledged that the university system’s enrollment would reach 40,000 students by 2020 — an audacious goal given the numbers at the time and the state’s population decline. Those students never came. Meanwhile, WVU, like other flagships, increased its spending. Adjusting for inflation it rose by 38 percent between 2002 and 2022, while enrollment grew just 7 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The university spent its money on many things, including building renovations and maintenance, student services, and private air travel for Gee, which the president has justified as necessary for his role. Since 2008, a Chronicle analysis found, certain types of debt owed by WVU nearly tripled.

Amassing debt is not inherently a bad move. Larry Ladd, a senior consultant at AGB Consulting, said that a university cannot remain competitive without modern facilities. WVU makes the same point in a summary about its debt obligations. The summary points to the university’s high grades from credit-rating agencies. It also allows that, given “the amount and types of investments WVU has made over the past decade and is currently considering,” any “additional capital investment” over the next 10 years “will be very targeted.”

Those assurances of level-headed decision making did little to persuade Academic Transformation’s strongest critics, who questioned why Gee and the university’s senior administrators did not see the budget crunch coming sooner, and why programs and professors should pay the price for it. Some of them were quick to wave away external factors or pinned blame entirely on Gee. But university leaders also largely declined to admit mistakes or to entertain the possibility that internal decisions contributed to their circumstance, at least publicly.

(Except for Rob Alsop, then the university’s vice president for strategic initiatives. At a Faculty Senate meeting in June, he said he wished he’d “seen around corners better” two years ago. “I had someone tell me last week if this were the private sector, I may not be around because I let things go too far,” he said. Alsop is no longer at WVU.)

Over late spring and summer, the criticism grew more intense, both in the news media and in the WVU community. The growth strategy executed under Gee “has been a failure” and the university’s projections were “wildly inaccurate,” reads an anonymous post that says it was written by concerned employees. Gee attended Faculty Senate meetings and could be tone deaf at times. Asked in May if administrators were considering taking voluntary pay cuts, Gee replied that he’d given about $3.5 million to the university, much of it going toward scholarships. It’s an impressive sum, but it underscored Gee’s impressive wealth compared with the incomes of professors in the audience. He then invited everyone “to start thinking about the Day of Giving.” Needless to say for faculty members who worried their jobs were at risk, donating was not top of mind.

As weeks dragged on, Gee sounded more worn down. He would repeat points he’d made before to little impact on his audience. A leader hailed for his communication skills began to resemble a flagging presidential candidate delivering the same stump speech after he’d already lost Iowa and New Hampshire.

Eventually, the story Gee was telling diverged so much from the one that faculty believed that he called out their “misrepresentations” at a September meeting.

For one thing, Gee, who joined the meeting remotely, insisted his goal of enrolling 40,000 students never affected “bricks-and-mortar decisions.” For another, that the university’s debt load had increased by 55 percent since Gee’s return — a figure that’d been circulating — was “simply not true.” (That percentage seems to stem from The Chronicle’s August analysis that found certain categories of debt at WVU rose from about $625 million in 2014 to nearly $963 million in 2022. The story does not point to Gee as the sole reason but says debt-fueled spending that began before his presidency and continued during it contributed to the university’s “current predicament,” as did other factors. PolitiFact determined the rise attributable to Gee to be about 34 percent.)

“We will have disagreements along the way around how to meet the challenges of the day, and of course I can accept that,” Gee said. “But I will not accept the narrative being promulgated that we have mismanaged this university, or we are making it a lesser university. That is absolutely far from the truth. And if anyone can show me the data that supports that,” Gee said, smiling into the camera, “then I would be interested in seeing it.”

During the Q. and A., Amy Weislogel, an associate professor of geology, spelled out why some professors had grown so frustrated with Gee. Scores of people had voiced opinions contrary to his, yet there’d been “no recognition” that those viewpoints could hold some merit, she told the president.

Gee acknowledged the “chasm” and said trust must be built. But at the moment, he did not have much confidence that “a group of our faculty are being honest with either our students or ourselves.” The way those professors have characterized things is “false,” he said. It’s “misinformation.”

“Of all the people in the world,” he said, “our faculty should be trained to deal with facts and not fiction.”

By then, bridging that chasm seemed difficult, if not impossible. The faculty had voted no-confidence in Gee, 797 to 100. He’d failed on many fronts, the resolution maintained, including that he did not “fully and honestly disclose the source of the budget shortfall,” nor did he “clearly communicate how recommended cuts correspond with the larger goals of Academic Transformation.”

Gee, for his part, had seen it coming. He told his board earlier in the year that, should they go ahead with the cuts, he’d likely face such a vote and lose it, J. Thomas Jones, a board member, told me. Gee has “taken a lot of heat” for being the “mastermind,” Jones said, but the board pushed the president and his team to move this process forward.

After the no-confidence vote, the board chair issued a statement unequivocally backing Gee. The university “must continue to act boldly,” it read. Gee “has shown time and again he is not afraid” of doing so.

For many presidents, a statement of absolute faith from their board can actually be the kiss of death, according to Teresa Valerio Parrot, who runs a higher-education public-relations agency. It may not give a president wiggle room to mend fences with their campus community, Valerio Parrot said.

Of course the exception to that rule, she allowed, is probably Gordon Gee.

On a Wednesday afternoon in January, an undergrad lingered by a lunch table in WVU’s student union so that she could engage in a rite of passage: taking a selfie with the president before she graduates.

“I’m a junior. I need to have one,” the student told me. She waited patiently as Gee chatted with three other students, asking them his typical questions: What were their names? Their majors? Where were they from?

Finally, there was an opening. The junior got her photo. After taking the picture, Gee asked her, “You and I haven’t met before?”

The student shook her head no.

“It’s about damn time,” he said.

When he can, Gee keeps his lunch hour open, for wandering and question-asking and occasional autographing. (A student asked Gee to sign his iPad cover, which was styled to resemble a black-and-white composition notebook. The president happily obliged.) The habit is central to his approachable appeal, and it suits his disposition. He dislikes lunches as well as dinners. In my presence, he consumed very little apart from his two daily Diet Dr Peppers, typically drunk at 10 a.m. and at 3 p.m. At the esports reception, he filled one small taco shell with chipotle chicken and plunked a single tortilla chip onto his plate “just to be polite,” he’d later say. When it comes to eating, “I’m an airplant,” he said.

Those in Gee’s orbit tend to run on “Gee time,” meaning they can expect the president to be late to things because he’s in no rush to leave a conversation. His two work days that I tagged along for were spent on that clock and touched many corners of the institution. He met with a potential major donor (“I had a great visit! They want to give us money,” he reported to a dean), posed for a photo with the nursing school’s therapy dog, a Great Dane named Gus (“I can ride that dog,” he joked), congratulated the robotics team on its first-place finish (“That’s a big damn deal,” he told the bashful students), and met with a bevy of senior leaders, offering his view of how certain hires were performing (“He’s a rainmaker. There’s no doubt about it.”).

Gee does not care for meetings, but he has a standing one with Reed, the provost. On a recent Thursday, they gathered in his office. Surfaces are covered in memorabilia from presidencies past and with framed photographs that showcase Gee’s fiancée; his adult daughter from his marriage to his first wife, Elizabeth, who died of cancer; and his twin granddaughters.

With the cuts now in the rearview mirror, Reed updated Gee on efforts to identify academic programs in which to potentially “invest.” The answers lie, in part, in internal enrollment trends and market data. For example, neuroscience has room to grow, Reed told Gee. Whereas in forensics, “we own the market.” Minutes later the provost told the president, “Enrollment, you know, it’s what we need.”

The two also chatted about the esports reception. The students, Gee reported, were as “happy as could be.” They touched on the new esports major, which is offered through what WVU calls its College of Intercollegiate Programs. “I think it’s really cool,” Reed said of the field. “It’s very interdisciplinary.”

It’s easy to think someone, particularly a skeptic of Academic Transformation, could conclude the opposite. That the university’s North Star should not be whether a subject matter is “really cool” and a potential enrollment driver. During their meeting, I told Gee and Reed that I could imagine someone learning WVU had invested in an esports major, yet had done away with, for example, its Spanish major, and basically asking, “What the hell?”

Both the president and the provost noted that students could still take some language classes at WVU. (The university originally recommended eliminating all of the world languages, literatures, and linguistics department’s faculty but, after the appeal process and board vote, kept seven positions.)

More broadly, Reed emphasized that the university must figure out what students want to study. She pointed out that in the fall of 2023, only one incoming freshman had declared a foreign language as a primary major.

“So my response would be — why would we continue to offer programming that students don’t want? Why are we here?”

Why are we here? It’s a question more universities are being forced to answer, in the wake of incomparable budget troubles. The University of Connecticut has forecast a $70-million deficit. The University of Nebraska at Lincoln has finalized $12 million in cuts. Pennsylvania State University has floated nearly $100 million. Everyone — those who loathe Academic Transformation and those who defend it — agree it’s a sign of what’s to come. As Gee put it, during his meeting with Reed: “We represent that crossing of the line.”

Gee is secure — or at least he seems it — with the path he led the university down. “I’m certain we have made some mistakes,” he told me in his office. But “I think, fundamentally, that we’ve done the right thing.” On his coffee table was a September edition of The New York Times Magazine, with the cover: “Not U. Why do more and more Americans think college isn’t even worth it?” He’d held it aloft during a Faculty Senate meeting last year to emphasize the difficulty of higher ed’s position.

During this conversation, Gee was more subdued than he is in public. He spoke from a rocking chair that he favors because of his bad back, one leg crossed over the other. The previous day, he attended physical therapy for his second hip-replacement surgery. While Gee is still energetic and committed to his daily regimen, aging is unavoidable. He exercises on a treadmill each morning but instead of jogging at 5 miles per hour like he used to, he now walks at 3.2.

Come July of 2025, Gee’s contract will be up. He reflected on the career he’d had for the past 15,410 days, give or take, and the more than 500 days he had to go. (An anonymous X account that says it’s run by a WVU faculty member counts them down.) He enjoys being a university president as much today as when he started. Though, if he were to begin his career again in the present day, he said, he did not think he’d have much of a shot at getting selected. More and more, university presidents are those who offend the fewest people for the longest amount of time, Gee likes to say. It’s a mold he does not fit. Right now, “if there were 10 candidates for a university presidency,” he said, “I’d be No. 10.”

Gee thinks the transition away from the job he’s known for most of his life will be difficult — “I’ll probably have hives,” he joked. But he’s also looking forward to finding more time for himself. He’d like to stay connected to the university, but he wants to avoid becoming a sort of phantom presence for WVU’s next leader. He never liked when former presidents hovered in the background, refusing to move on.

Earlier that day, Gee observed that he probably “wouldn’t have been brave enough” to carry out Academic Transformation at the beginning of his career. But decades of experience forged a level of comfort with campus turmoil that enabled him to do something so divisive. While Gee remains unpopular with a faction of his faculty, presidents at other universities are calling him up, asking him how he did it. “I’m talking to two AAU presidents right now who are both facing the same thing,” Gee said. He does not think the WVU “playbook” will work everywhere. But he thinks that those institutions have to do something. From Gee’s perspective, there is no choice.

“You’re either going to change now,” he tells them, “or you’re going to be irrelevant.”