The Review

West Virginia University is bleeding out. In the face of a $45-million deficit, the university’s leadership has decided to cut the entire department of world languages, literatures, and linguistics, among much else. Twelve undergraduate majors and 20 graduate programs will disappear. You will no longer be able to get a bachelor’s degree in German, Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese, or a graduate degree in mathematics. There will still be some art-history classes, but no art-history major. The recommendations would result in 169 potential reductions in faculty lines. The master’s and doctoral programs in higher-ed administration will also be discontinued.

Moreover, WVU’s faculty members may no longer enjoy much in the way of academic-freedom protections. Last month the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression took E. Gordon Gee, the university’s president, to task for having added language to a code of conduct included in faculty-appointment letters requiring faculty members to “accept and encourage change that is for the greater good” and “avoid conduct that reflects adversely on the image of the University.” Both requirements are obviously violations of academic freedom. Since WVU is public, they’re also incompatible with the university’s First Amendment commitments. And they’re bizarre — especially the first one. What can it possibly mean to “accept and encourage change that is for the greater good”? What at first looks like anodyne vagueness, sloppy and nearly automatic administrative word salad, on inspection might seem like a sinisterly intrusive, quasi-spiritual demand for moral reform.

But in the context of WVU’s sweeping cuts, the language is probably more tactical. At the bottom of the annual Notice of Appointment sent to the faculty on June 29 — which must be signed “within ten (10) business days of its receipt,” or else “we will assume you have elected to discontinue your employment” — faculty members were told that “ALL employees are expected to comply with the WVU values and code of conduct,” followed by a link to a PDF containing the code. As FIRE notes, the code of conduct contains the following requirement: “Respect the decisions that have been made in the best interest of the University.” This sounds like a formal prohibition on criticizing the administration and the president for their handling of the budget crisis, which it was already clear in June would result in major program cuts.

Gee has, in the past, presented himself as a champion of academic freedom. “Any attempt to deny free-speech protections to others is a threat to our own freedom,” as he put it in a 2017 State of the University address. “It is a threat to education. And it is a threat to democracy itself.” Gee reaffirmed his commitment to those ideals in a 2021 interview with WVU’s student paper, The Daily Athenaeum. “I’m just a believer in ideas, and I’m not afraid of ideas, and I’m not afraid to have the marketplace of ideas.” He appears to have changed his mind, at least when it comes to criticism of his own decisions.

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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin