West Virginia U. Changed My Life

By now most people who work in higher education have some awareness of the crisis unfolding at West Virginia University. This summer, for the first time in WVU’s history, administrators announced plans to lay off 143 faculty members, many of them tenured or on the tenure track. Twenty-eight programs are slated for closure, a lethal blow to a vital public institution in one of the nation’s poorest states.

Faculty and staff members at WVU are rightly outraged, and many have been active in the campaign to protest and publicize President Gordon Gee’s draconian cuts. But the most disadvantaged by the dismantling of the state’s flagship public university will be the young people of West Virginia, particularly low-income students, who are seeing their chance at a first-rate education disappear before their eyes.

I was once such a student myself. My family has lived in West Virginia since before it was called West Virginia. I grew up in a cabin that my parents built in a rural holler in Greenbrier County, where a drive to the nearest grocery store still takes at least half an hour on backroads and the highway. When I lived there, my hometown had one fire station, one school, one general store, one post office, one gas station, one stop sign, and three churches. There wasn’t much else. Today, there’s even less. The school is closed. So are the gas station and the general store. Many of the houses there are now abandoned.

When I was 12, my parents divorced. My father blew what money he had on a pricey lawyer who helped him secure full custody, and then convinced me that my mother had abandoned me. Isolated in our cabin, my father succumbed to the worst of Appalachia’s stereotypical vices. High on prescription opiates, stoned on weed he grew himself, and drunk on a daily fifth of cheap liquor, he stewed in jealousy and bitterness. He started stockpiling guns. He lost his job. He went on long benders and increasingly delusional tirades. In high school, I worried that I would not live long enough to do what I most wanted: escape by going to college. A month before my 18th birthday, however, my father was the one who died, from liver failure brought on by alcohol and drug abuse. He was 49 years old.

With my mother’s help, I sold our cabin to settle his debts, and won a scholarship to go a private liberal-arts college I’d dreamed of attending. Immediately and predictably, however, I floundered. Although I wasn’t at an Ivy League college, I recognize and remember the “feelings of loneliness, alienation, and plummeting self-confidence” that other students from low-income backgrounds report experiencing at elite institutions. As a scholarship student, I struggled to keep up with my coursework alongside classmates who seemed to have the luxury of taking their college degrees for granted. They were always persuading me to go to late-night frat parties where bottles of liquor and cans of beer were stacked into pyramids, backlit by blacklights. I felt out of place and unsafe among people whose lives had been so different from mine, uncertain if I really wanted the future this college seemed to be making possible for me.

By midterms, I was trying and failing to break up with a senior, a self-proclaimed big man on campus with a jealous streak and a taste for Southern Comfort. On the eve of finals week, he threw a party at his campus apartment. While his friends laughed and sang along to the music playing downstairs, he and I were upstairs having yet one more slurred, screaming fight. He threw a glass at the wall, and it shattered. When I went into the bathroom to calm down, he dragged me out by my hair. And then he grabbed a heavy wooden chair, standard dorm-issue, and started smashing it on the floor, over and over and over again.

No one who was partying downstairs came upstairs to see if I was OK. In what felt like a split and splitting second, I was running down the stairs, out the door, and across the parking lot in my socked feet. Back in my dorm room, I shoved all of my things into garbage bags and drove all night home to my mother in Greenbrier County. The only time I ever heard from anyone at that college again was when the bursar’s office sent me a letter, a few weeks into the next semester, letting me know that my financial-aid package had included a private loan that I would now need to repay.

Back home with my mother, in the town where she had made a life for herself after leaving my father, I picked up odd jobs to pay back that loan, and enrolled in a few classes at the local community college. In my off hours, I went on long, listless drives down one-lane roads that always seemed to take me past my father’s old cabin.

My mom knew that I dreamed of a different future for myself, and one day she reminded me that I could still attend West Virginia University for a mere $2,482 per year. I applied in May, and within a month we were caravanning four and a half hours north to Morgantown, so that I could move into an apartment of my own and start taking classes right away.

Going to WVU remains one of the best decisions I have ever stumbled into making. I got a job working as a cocktail waitress at the Holiday Inn just off the highway, in a hotel bar that was decorated with walls of neon-lighted waterfalls. I painted the living-room walls of my cheap basement apartment in Sunnyside a dark red, and after my shifts would end, at 2 a.m., I’d sit in an old chair I’d kept from our cabin and listen to my PJ Harvey and Tori Amos CDs on an old boom box. I felt certain that I was finally on my way somewhere, even if I didn’t yet know where.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t a very good student at first. I worked late, stayed out later, and skipped a lot — and I mean a lot — of classes. Accordingly, I ended up taking a class in 18th-century British literature for all the wrong reasons: because it fulfilled a requirement, because I thought it sounded easy, and because I’d started swooning over a graduate student in the English department. I was hooked, though, when we started reading Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels and Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, probably because both gave me vocabularies I craved for understanding the terror and the beauty that I’d found in Appalachia’s mountains.

More important, no matter how many times I skipped that class, no matter how many times I turned in an assignment late, no matter how many times my comments belied the fact that I hadn’t done all of the reading, the professor kept cheering me on. At the end of the semester, she pulled me aside and asked me if I was interested in majoring in English. She thought I would be good at it.

Everyone I encountered in my English classes at West Virginia University did something to show me the kind of life I could lead, and ended up leading: a life that hasn’t been defined by addiction and abuse, dead-end jobs and disappointments — a life that’s been filled with reading and writing, thinking and talking, learning and teaching. In WVU’s English department, I found my people, as they say, and I’ve been lucky to keep their company ever since. Faculty members in Morgantown welcomed their students into their homes, met us for happy hours, and introduced us to their colleagues who came to campus to give guest lectures. They took us and our work seriously; they treated both with genuine kindness and care; and as students, we did the same for one another in turn.

I completed my B.A. at WVU in 2001 and my M.A. in 2003, both in English. Inspired by the faculty members I worked with in Morgantown, I went on to complete a Ph.D. and pursue my own career as an English professor at a regional public university. At Wright State University, where I teach now, I’ve done my best to pay those experiences forward, to give my students a sense of the kind of life that a college education can help them to live, too. At least once a year, a student will come to my office hours after class to say some version of “I want to be you when I grow up.” And I remember how unlikely it seemed, when I was their age talking to my own professors, that I’d find myself on the other side of that desk. From time to time, I whisper quietly, incredulously to myself, “Now ain’t this somethin’.”

As the news about West Virginia University’s crisis turned from a trickle into a flood, my heartsickness soured into a hot, bilious knot of familiar anger at the base of my throat. I say “familiar” because here at Wright State we went through an eerily similar crisis several years ago. Our state funding and enrollments alike started to decline after a brief boom following the 2008 financial crisis, just like WVU’s. Shortly thereafter, our university’s president and his buddies decided, just like Gordon Gee and his did, that the best way to handle the institution’s impending financial straits was to spend more money on “public-private partnerships” and “revenue-generating schemes.” Within a few short years, our faculty and students learned, just as WVU’s faculty and students now have, that such partnerships and schemes largely entailed real-estate deals that may have generated revenue for a network of good old boys but brought only staggering debts for the university. More than $130 million vanished from Wright State’s coffers in a few short years.

Wright State’s faculty is unionized, so in 2019 my colleagues and I spent three weeks in subzero temperatures on a picket line to protest the mismanagement of our university. Technically we won. But it doesn’t feel that way. After the strike, Wright State carried out a retrenchment plan. Our hard-won contracts permitted retrenchment based on two criteria: financial exigency or declines in enrollment. Wright State’s bottom line improved, thanks to the cuts that had been made, the professors as well as the staff members who had left for greener pastures, and the sacrifices faculty members had conceded in order to get back to work. Our enrollments, however, continued to decline: A financial crisis and a faculty strike turn out to be bad news for a university’s public reputation.

In 2020, 113 faculty lines were slated for elimination here at Wright State, 49 of them in the College of Liberal Arts. Most faculty members who found out that the university planned to retrench them took voluntary separation agreements, and in the College of Liberal Arts we have since eliminated departments, reorganized our faculty into schools, and moved to a smaller building on campus. In the last decade, we’ve lost nearly 40 percent of our bargaining-unit faculty members here at Wright State, according to the records kept by our union.

None of that, however, has been enough. This past spring, our Board of Trustees called for a comprehensive “Academic Efficiency and Effectiveness Review” that will be completed in the coming months; meanwhile, our administration and faculty union have failed, once again, to come to terms on a new contact. Even more programs and faculty lines are feared to be on the chopping block. Such fears have only been heightened by the fact that a Florida-style higher-education bill is back on the legislative agenda for Ohio, a bill that is as eager to eliminate tenure and the faculty’s right to strike as it is to silence any talk of gender, sexuality, race, and climate change on campus.

The news out of Morgantown, heartbreaking as it is, is just one crisis among many. I feel awful for the professors I know who might lose their jobs. (Recently, some of the junior English faculty members at WVU have reported that their jobs are safe, thanks to eight senior colleagues who have decided to resign or retire early. In my experience, though, once university officials find a way to justify cutting a few tenure lines, they’ll come back for more. And the faculty will probably wait a long time for those departed senior colleagues to be replaced, if they ever are.) I feel aggrieved for the students from rural Appalachia who may not have the same opportunities I’ve had, and incandescently angry at West Virginia University’s administrators and its Board of Governors. But I also feel frustrated with all of my colleagues across the country, and all of the journalists at national media outlets, who seem so shocked about what’s happening at WVU. Has no one been paying attention?

In the weeks since I started writing this essay, I’ve spent countless hours doomscrolling the news from Morgantown. I’ve talked on the phone to my colleagues, friends, and family back home in West Virginia. I’ve read Gordon Gee’s books and listened to his speeches. I’ve devoted whole weekends to attempting to piece together the players in the various political and corporate networks that underwrite a well-heeled administration, and to chase down the facts about West Virginia University’s finances and its real-estate deals. I’ve tried, once again, to get the story straight about my own institution’s history.

No matter how hard I’ve tried, however, I haven’t been able to make what’s happening at our country’s public universities make sense. I feel powerless, as a professor, to make the university I work for, never mind the universities that I support with my taxpayer dollars as a citizen, do the right thing: Ensure that students like I was will continue to have the opportunities that a university is supposed to give them to pursue the dreams — and the degrees — they deserve. Many days, I feel hopeless.

But then Kaycie swings by my office on campus. Kaycie, who started college at the age of 26, is a nontraditional student. No one in her family has a college degree. Her dad dropped out of school in the seventh grade. When she graduated from high school, she didn’t even consider going to college. Instead, she went to work on the assembly line for Ford. The factory room where Kaycie put the parts together for the cars was hot, without air-conditioning. The men beside her on the line were hot and bothered, too, by the young woman working beside them. Kaycie worked second jobs bartending and waiting tables, where the men were just as bad. When she’d had enough of all that, she went, as she describes it, “to hair school.” Then Covid hit, and Kaycie spent a year alone in her apartment, reading books, which, as she explained it to me, “have always been my solace, my escape.”

That’s when it hit her: She could go to college. And so she applied to Wright State, mostly just because that’s where she could afford to go. Even though she’d have to take on some debt to make it happen, it didn’t matter to her, because she was 26 years old and didn’t want the rest of her life to look like the life she had known so far.

Kaycie has since managed to double-major with high honors in English and French in just a little over two years, all while holding down a job at a waxing salon and taking care of her aging, ailing parents. She’s coming by my office because I’ve found a student-worker position for her that might ease her burdens. Rosy-cheeked with dark glossy hair, tattooed with a contagious, irreverent sense of humor, Kaycie asks me, “Have you heard about what’s happening at WVU? Didn’t you go there?”

We talk about it a little, and about the similarities to Wright State. I tell Kaycie that I’m writing an essay about it, and I ask if I could write about her, too.

“Definitely,” she says. “Tell them all about me. Because I’m going to get a Ph.D., and what I most want to study is Appalachian literature, and I’ve been thinking I might apply to WVU.”

And then she smiles, and says, “I hope WVU is still there when I’m ready.”