What’s New
Amid pending academic-program cuts and job losses that have provoked campus backlash, West Virginia University’s faculty voted no confidence in President E. Gordon Gee on Wednesday. The chair of WVU’s Board of Governors said that “misinformation” influenced the resolution and that the board fully backs Gee’s leadership.
The Details
The University Assembly, a body composed of full-time WVU faculty members, approved the no-confidence vote — which is symbolic — 797 to 100.
The resolution outlines several complaints against Gee, who became WVU’s president for the second time in 2014 after leading several other prominent research universities.
This year, WVU leaders announced a $45-million budget deficit, which they feared could grow larger in coming years. In a March speech, Gee said that the university must “make the difficult decision to stop investing in those things that no longer meet our expectations.”
Yet Gee has refused to “accept responsibility” for the institution’s current fiscal state, the faculty resolution says, which was caused, in part, by “poor planning” and “faulty decision making.” During his tenure, for example, Gee pledged that the university system would enroll 40,000 students by 2020, but that figure stands at only around 27,370 now. Meanwhile, Gee increased the institution’s debt load considerably, the resolution says.
Among other criticisms, the resolution also questions the logic undergirding the proposed program cuts and says Gee has failed to “fully and honestly disclose the impacts” of those cuts on students and faculty members. Several professors spoke in favor of the resolution at Wednesday’s meeting, including Tina Faber, a faculty member in the School of Social Work. She told her colleagues that Gee’s tenure “has been marred by a series of questionable decisions that have eroded trust and confidence.”
John F. Brick, a professor of neurology, defended Gee. He is “totally dedicated to the land-grant mission of this place and to improving the lives of West Virginians.” As for the university’s financial difficulties, Brick said: “He didn’t cause this stuff. He has had to deal with it.”
Gee’s tenure “has been marred by a series of questionable decisions that have eroded trust and confidence.”
Gee was given five minutes to address professors before the vote. Sporting his usual bow tie, he walked up to the podium after the resolution was read aloud and started with a joke: “If I had done all of those things, I’d probably vote no confidence myself.” He spent most of his time running down a list of what he believes the university has accomplished while he’s been at the helm. He focused on the university’s contributions to health care in West Virginia, such as WVU Medicine’s hospital system and its growth in revenue from $2 billion to $6 billion. “We now can say to every person in this state that they no longer need to leave the state to get great health care,” Gee said.
He also noted that the university regularly receives “clean” financial audits. As for that enrollment growth that never came, Gee said, “We did not plan to grow the university on the basis of our budget. We planned with the hope that we would grow that, and then our budget would follow.”
Finally, Gee said that he has “great faith” in the university and in the faculty gathered before him. “We will proceed forward with what we are doing right now, and I think it will strengthen our institution,” he said.
After the University Assembly passed the no-confidence vote in Gee, it considered and ultimately passed a resolution calling for an “immediate freeze” in what the university has called Academic Transformation, which the measure says has been an “opaque process” that “severely deviates” from professional norms.
In a statement issued after the meeting, Taunja Willis-Miller, chair of the Board of Governors, said that while the board acknowledges the passage of both resolutions, it “unequivocally supports” Gee, as well as the “strategic repositioning of WVU.” It also “rejects the multiple examples of misinformation that informed these resolutions.” The university “must continue to act boldly,” Willis-Miller said.
And Gee “has shown time and again he is not afraid to do the difficult work required.”
The Backdrop
The no-confidence vote in Gee has been months in the making, as his vision for West Virginia University has collided with that of many faculty members.
This summer, university leaders, with the assistance of RPK Group, a consulting company, began analyzing data — such as enrollment and tuition revenue compared with expenses — about academic programs on the Morgantown campus. The university flagged for further review more than 100 programs that underperformed on various metrics. In August, WVU initially recommended that 12 undergraduate majors and 20 graduate-level programs be discontinued, eliminating 169 faculty positions. Affected disciplines included English, mathematics, and public health.
Units could appeal, and some of the proposed cuts have since been mitigated or altered. For example, the institution initially said it wanted to eliminate its entire department of world languages, literatures, and linguistics and drop the unit’s faculty to zero. In its final recommendation, the university said five faculty positions should be kept and moved into another unit, to provide face-to-face instruction in just two languages. The university system’s Board of Governors will vote on all final recommendations on September 15.
We have majors that have low enrollment, and they’re not cost effective to operate.
Students and professors at West Virginia, along with defenders of the liberal arts and some higher-ed observers, have sharply criticized the university’s proposed cuts as ill-thought-out and fundamentally damaging to the public land-grant institution. At an August student-led protest, hundreds of people rallied in support of programs that were on the chopping block. Much of the anger at the rally was directed toward Gee.
Gee has defended his and the university’s decision-making as essential for its future health. At an August Faculty Senate meeting, Gee told professors that while change is difficult, it is “absolutely necessary.”
“I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it,” Gee said. “And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption. I have seen numerous stories and posts about how we are ‘gutting’ or ‘eviscerating’ our university. That is simply not true.
“What is factual is that we have majors that have low enrollment, and they’re not cost effective to operate.”
The Stakes
West Virginia University is far from the only institution grappling with a dicey financial and enrollment outlook. Other colleges are already facing — or will soon face — similar decisions over which academic programs to keep and which to relinquish, and how to go about adequately assessing a major or a unit’s value to the institution. Whether one agrees with the proposed cuts or not, Gee and WVU are redefining what sort of education a public R1 institution must offer.
From Gee’s perspective, this is ultimately a hopeful quest. In a July message to campus, Gee referenced the Morrill Act, which created the land-grant university. Universities established under the act, including West Virginia, “were to concentrate on teaching agriculture, engineering, science, and military science,” he wrote. “This focus was in direct response to the industrial revolution and a changing society. Education shifted to meet the needs of the people.”
Gee argued that right now, education again must change to meet the needs of the people. “We must adapt to be relevant to the students of today and the industry of tomorrow,” he wrote. He pictures a future West Virginia University as one with “more industry partnerships,” as an “elite R1” that emerges “as a global leader in the areas of astrophysics, neuroscience, energy and sustainability, cancer prevention and treatment, and artificial intelligence and robotics.”
Professors who disagree with Gee’s vision contend that, rather than meeting the needs of the people, it forecloses certain learning opportunities for West Virginia’s students and hollows out the education the university can provide. During Wednesday’s meeting, David Hoinski, a teaching associate professor of philosophy, also cited the Morrill Act, saying the university’s proposed cuts go against the law’s spirit.
“It’s undemocratic and elitist, what WVU is proposing to do,” Hoinski said. Instead of “transforming the university by shrinking it, we should be looking to grow it and build more programs. Let’s make a university where students can learn how to read the motto of the university,” Hoinski said, who noted that it’s written in Greek.
