West Virginia Commission Seeks Equity for Colleges. But Behind the Scenes, Gordon Gee Pulls Strings.

West Virginia’s Higher Education Policy Commission in March released a report, mandated by state lawmakers, calling for changes in how the state allocates money to its four-year public colleges.

But the plan has found a powerful enemy in E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University — the state’s flagship and a higher-education Goliath that enrolls a large portion of the state’s public-college students.

The commission’s initial recommendations would have given more money to some of the state’s smaller and rural colleges and, eventually, would have taken some from West Virginia University.

Gee, who has led five institutions, including Brown and Ohio State Universities, told The Chronicle that the plan was “wrong-headed” and a “Robin Hood approach.”

His objections raise policy issues that are familiar in many states where lawmakers wrestle with the same question: how to fairly and effectively distribute limited tax dollars among institutions with very different missions and needs.

Now Gee is on a mission to squelch the report and limit the role and influence of the commission. “I’ve been doing this for 38 years,” Gee said, “and I’ve never seen a centralized authority that has this kind of negative impact.”

Gee admits he worked behind the scenes to create a different panel that will instead consider how higher education is organized and governed in the state. The chairman of the new panel: Gee himself and two co-chairs.

But where there is a Goliath, there is always an underdog — in this case, several. Leaders of the state’s smaller, lesser-known colleges say Gee is using his political clout at their expense. They charge that he has installed one of his subordinates as chancellor of the policy commission and has stacked the new blue-ribbon panel with his supporters.

“The transactional sequence of events that occurred leading to the abrupt replacement” of the commission’s chancellor “is astonishing and has raised serious questions among our academic peers about how West Virginia conducts business,” Mary J.C. Hendrix, president of Shepherd University, wrote in an emailed response to questions from The Chronicle.

‘A Real Stake’

Hendrix and Gee are at odds over a policy dilemma that has confounded state-policy makers across the country.

Flagship institutions, like West Virginia University, have higher costs for facilities, faculty members, and research. But they also get more money from their state, per student, and have more reliable sources of revenue, such as fund raising and research grants. And they tend to attract better-prepared and, often, wealthier students from other states, and even other countries, who are willing to pay full tuition.

By contrast, rural and small, regional public colleges, like Shepherd, generally have lower costs. They pay their faculty members less and often have fewer facilities to maintain. And they get less money from their state, per student, although their students are place-bound and may have more academic needs and less income to pay tuition.

To try to resolve that dilemma, the West Virginia Legislature asked the policy commission to devise a clear plan that would reward enrolling in-state students and would promote new and better ways to produce more college graduates.

The commission recommended a formula based on the mission of each of the state’s 11 public four-year colleges, with consideration of the kinds of students they enroll, how many credits their students earn, and the kinds of degrees they receive.

Hendrix said the commission’s report was a good first step, since her institution has received the smallest appropriations per student among the state’s public colleges for more than two decades. “I have been Shepherd’s president for more than two years,” Hendrix wrote, “and have learned that the funding has been essentially politically driven.”

Gee argues that as one of the state’s land-grant universities, WVU fills a crucial, historical role in educating the state’s residents and supporting its economy. “I have a real stake in all this,” Gee said.

Despite rumors of a power grab, Gee said, he is not interested in taking over the state’s higher-education system or decreasing the appropriations of any other college. “No institution should be afraid of us.”

A Country-Club Dinner

But the events since the release of the commission’s report have played out more like the plot of a television drama than the deliberations of a policy dispute.

In late June, Gee and an aide to the state’s governor summoned two members of the policy commission to dinner at the private Edgewood Country Club, in Charleston, W.Va., the capital. At that meeting, according to several sources, Gee and the aide laid out plans to convene the governor’s blue-ribbon panel and to replace the commission’s chancellor, Paul Hill. Hill declined to comment for this article.

Gee confirmed some details of the dinner, but said the meeting concerned only the blue-ribbon panel, which was officially announced a week later in an executive order by Gov. James C. Justice, a Republican.

Under the order, the new panel’s mission was to look at the structure of higher education in the state. But it also called for putting the commission’s proposed new appropriations formula on hold. At a news conference announcing the new panel, the governor called on the state’s smaller four-year colleges and universities to rely on the guidance of the larger institutions.

“What we want to do is take advantage of the expertise of our larger universities, and let them help us to find a way to preserve our smaller institutions, and give them the opportunity of thriving as well,” Justice was quoted as saying in a local news report.

A week after the panel was named, the policy commission held an emergency meeting and voted to end the national search to replace Hill. He had already announced his retirement but agreed to serve until a permanent replacement was found — a process that could have taken several more weeks or months.

In Hill’s place, the commission named an interim leader, Carolyn Long, who was then president of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology, essentially a branch campus of Gee’s institution.

‘Ms. West Virginia’

Just one of the commission’s 10 members, Jenny Allen, the chief operating officer of a nonprofit group, voted against Long’s appointment. She declined to be interviewed for this article, but said in an email that “it has not been a secret that President Gee wishes WVU was free to do whatever it likes. But by answering to the HEPC, he is answering to the taxpayer, through the oversight we have a legal duty to provide.”

At the same meeting, the commission’s general counsel, Bruce Walker, resigned, saying that his participation could violate the state’s rules of professional conduct. He declined to comment further, citing attorney-client privilege.

Gee denied that he’d had anything to do with Hill’s replacement, but said the previous chancellor was ineffective. “He is a fine person,” Gee said, “but I don’t think he did a very good job.”

Long, by contrast, “is the most effective higher-education leader in the state,” Gee said. “She is Ms. West Virginia.”

Michael J. Farrell, the policy commission’s chairman, was another person reported to have attended the country-club dinner. He declined to comment on that event.

But Farrell said he had called for replacing Hill and suspending the search for his successor because the governor’s panel had created too much uncertainty. No candidate for the job would want to go to West Virginia knowing that the commission’s role could be changed or even eliminated in the near future, he said.

Farrell said he doesn’t agree with all of Gee’s positions on how higher education should be governed or paid for in the state. And he takes the long view, noting that the issues under discussion have been around for more than a decade.

“This is the first time that the executive and legislative branches have taken the political risk of looking for more efficient ways to deliver the same services without raising tuition and maintaining the mission of each institution,” he said.

Any changes, he said, will require action by lawmakers, not just the recommendations of a couple of panels or even a powerful university president.

“Would President Gee and West Virginia University like to be completely out from under the Higher Education Policy Commission?” Farrell said. “I think that is one of their positions, but they haven’t been able to convince the Legislature.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.