What Happens When a Poor State Guts Its Public University
Photographs by Chase Barnes
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Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.
For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift—a “black swan moment,” as he put it, that forced educational leaders to ask questions “rather than pretend to have answers.” And that December, he began rolling out his own plan to return WVU to an older agrarian ideal with majors that lead to partnerships with state industries and classes that allow students to graduate into jobs.
This year, as WVU faced a budget deficit that administrators estimated at $45 million, Gee’s efforts to reshape his institution intensified. He spoke of investing in medical, nursing, cybersecurity, and business degrees to serve a working-class state with an aging population plagued by disease and drug abuse. He would slash money-draining majors and cut required courses that run up costs for students. These kids, he insisted, are our customers. At the beginning of the fall semester, Gee terminated more than two dozen majors and cut professors in other programs, in areas as varied as foreign languages, public health, jazz studies, and community planning.
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Some cuts were truly baffling, given his insistence on WVU’s obligation to strengthen the state. The university decided to stop granting graduate degrees in environmental-health sciences, education administration, and math. Many of WVU’s 27,000 students—Gee’s customers—protested that this wasn’t what they wanted. The faculty cast an overwhelming no-confidence vote in the president, to zero effect. More than 140 professors will soon be without jobs.
A wealthy man just shy of 80 years old, Gee fashions himself a truth teller. “People have lost faith in higher ed,” he told me. “It’s an existential moment.” Most state legislatures are spending less per student than a decade ago. Throughout higher education, total student enrollment is declining. Too many universities resemble dinosaurs lumbering toward extinction, Gee argues. Enough with strategic plans, he told the faculty: “We need strategic action.”
West Virginia’s Democrat turned Republican governor and GOP legislators have played their role in WVU’s sad drama, pointedly declining to share a penny of the state’s $1.8 billion surplus with their flagship campus. Yet this isn’t just a MAGA morality tale. Gee has waved off talk of lobbying for more state cash as a salvation for the university.
