Some college presidents and chancellors are media stars. They lead big schools, appear on television, are quotable and raise prodigious amounts of money. They have prominent football and basketball teams. President Elwood Gordon Gee of West Virginia University is a star. I’m not.
Gee, who is 79, is a serial president. He led WVU from 1981 to 1985, followed by tenures as president at the University of Colorado, Brown University and Vanderbilt University and two at Ohio State University, and returned to WVU in 2014. Gee has asserted in one of his books that land-grant universities like WVU are meant to “prioritize their activities based on the needs of the communities they were designed to serve.”
On the other hand, there are college presidents who are nobodies like me. I lead a small, private graduate-level college. Nobody wants to see me on television. The only times I get quoted are via footnotes by other people who work in my areas of scholarship. I’m lucky if I can raise enough money for an endowed lectureship. As far as big-time sports, my school has intramural corn hole.
“We must focus on market-driven majors, create areas of excellence, and be highly relevant to our students and their families,” Gee said. In August 2023, WVU announced that it would cut or restructure 32 programs and lay off 169 faculty members. On the chopping block were undergraduate majors in music, art and multiple foreign languages; master's programs in acting, landscape architecture and creative writing; and doctoral programs in mathematics,........