Do kids of modest means deserve the humanities?
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.
The destruction of dozens of majors and careers at WVU, which serves many working- and middle-class students, raises a fundamental question in public higher education: If you’re a bright kid of modest means, which opportunities do you deserve? For most students, their state’s main public university remains their best hope of breaching the walls of class difference. As the ax falls, that idealistic mission fades, and inequalities widen. A student at Cornell University, for example, has a buffet of choices, including more than four dozen languages as varied as Sinhala, Old Norse, Farsi, Khmer, and ancient Greek. By contrast, a student at West Virginia University will soon have just four choices—Chinese, Arabic, French, and Spanish—and there will not be enough instructors for students to major in any of them. “No other state flagship university has forsaken language education for its students or made the kinds of cuts to the humanities that WVU is undertaking,” the executive director of the Modern Language Association, a national organization of language and literature scholars, wrote in an August letter to Gee.
WVU administrators talk of using technology to putty over cuts. At one meeting, according to two faculty members who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, a dean suggested to professors that the school might seek a contract with Rosetta Stone, the language-software company, to replace lost classes. “Perhaps,” a faculty member countered drily on the way out of the meeting, “we should just hire talking parrots.”
When I asked Gee about the risk of irreparable damage to his university, he did not sound regretful. This moment, he suggested, called for daring, and he relished that. “I’m audacious,” he told me jauntily. He portrayed WVU as his laboratory and its current troubles as a test of his power. “When the legislature wouldn’t give me the money I sought years ago, I said, ‘Okay, give me the freedom to make the changes I want.’ And they believe in freedom, and they did.”
At West Virginia University, in-state tuition, room, and board costs less than $23,000—not even half the average cost of attending a typical private college. About a quarter of WVU’s attendees are first-generation college students. One such student, Taylor DeLong, met me at the Blue Moose Café in downtown Morgantown, a pleasantly ramshackle college city that sprawls across hills and edges the Monongahela River. She was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt. A 22-year-old senior, she has blond hair and the honeyed accent of her native Wyoming County, in the southern part of the Mountain State. Her county suffers the plagues of opioid and meth addiction, and has lost population steadily since the 1980s. It is, in other words, a microcosm of West Virginia, where drug overdoses are spiraling and life expectancy is 72.8 years, the second lowest in the nation.
DeLong excelled in high school. Her parents preached the virtues of education. But her father was a coal miner, and to take on a private-college tuition seemed an impossibility. She enrolled at WVU, took classes in philosophy, language, and international studies, and could feel her brain coming afire. “When you’re from where I’m from, there are not options unless you become a blue-collar worker,” she told me. “I knew there was a larger world out there. I knew it.” She speaks several languages and plans to take the foreign-service exam in a few months. Perhaps, someday, she’ll become a diplomat.
But the university that made such a future conceivable is ailing. The budget for the school library was cut by $800,000 in recent months, and administrators laid off employees and have suspended ordering new books. Liberal-arts departments cannot afford to fix photocopiers. English faculty are stretched so thin that no one could offer a class on Shakespeare. “We organize, did benefit concerts and petitions and speak-outs, and the administration refers to us as ‘the kids,’ as if we know nothing,” DeLong said. “Their equation is ‘revenue from a major equals value.’”
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The students protesting Gee’s plans have leaned into their state’s history, donning red bandannas in an homage to great-grandparents who wore the cloths during the bloody coal strikes of the 1920s and 1930s. “People hear ‘West Virginia’ and think ‘dumb rednecks,’” she said. “No, no. It doesn’t have to be that way. Harvard and Yale will always have philosophy. We should be proud that courses like that are still available to ‘common folk.’”
“I love my state,” DeLong continued, “but it feels like we’re systematically having the shit beaten out of us.”
The next day at the Blue Moose, I met Hunter Neel, another first-generation student, a shy young man who grew up near Morgantown. His parents were absent from his life, he told me. His grandparents—a carpenter and a homemaker—raised him. Languages entranced him. In late August, he enrolled in classes for his master’s degree in linguistics; in mid-September, the WVU Board of Governors voted to dismantle the program. One of his favorite professors, Nicole Tracy-Ventura, who teaches applied linguistics, received her layoff notice in mid-October.
Looming cuts threaten a world-languages department that, by most measures, is quite successful. The world-language department turns a profit—it generates about $800,000 a year more in tuition revenue, the university estimates, than it costs to run the department. Its students win highly competitive national scholarships. This past summer, WVU announced with fanfare that two linguistics professors, Jonah Katz and Sergio Puente-Robles, had been awarded a $250,000 National Science Foundation grant to study pronunciation with an eye toward divining the origins of language. The university recently told Katz that he will be laid off at the end of the spring semester. If he leaves, WVU will lose the grant.
Administrators have promised that upperclassmen and graduate students can still complete their majors and graduate, but by that point any professor who can find a new job will have left. Graduate students will find themselves in progressively bigger classes with fewer electives. Neel teaches undergraduate classes to defer his tuition. He said he has loans and no savings. If he transfers to an out-of-state graduate program, he risks losing many of his credits. He tries to sidestep panic. “I love academia more than I ever would have imagined.” He paused. “We’ve had this reputation as a state of uneducated hillbillies. University leaders are playing into it.” I asked him whether his family knows of his troubles. He tossed up his hands; his academic world is terra incognita to them. “They just know it’s bad.”
Critics of American higher education, particularly those who pride themselves on being hardheaded sorts, tend to dismiss certain degrees as arcane and impractical. Majoring in linguistics, for example, might seem frivolous to some, although it is rather relevant to natural language processing and psychoacoustics—the fields that produced Siri and Alexa. One need only look back at the 1980s, when the telemarketer reigned, and jobs in computer and data processing had increased by 182 percent over a decade, and physicians and dentists nearly doubled their employment of aides and administrators. Artificial intelligence and the internet have wreaked havoc on all of those sectors, whereas a major in philosophy or art history can lend itself to a lucrative career in law, in government, or at a tech start-up.
For the moment, West Virginia University is one of two universities in the nation that let students major in puppetry. The joke writes itself: C’mon—puppetry?! Typically, fewer than a dozen students a year major in the program, although many more students take classes. Faculty and students reported that at a meeting in September, as students walked to the microphone to denounce budget cuts, several members of the board of governors rolled their eyes at mentions of puppetry.
Yet the program has precious little overhead, its physical plant a 12-by-20-foot room filled with puppets and marionettes—a Jim Henson fever dream. Mary McClung, who teaches costume design, is the lone professor. A native West Virginian with a wry wit, she was a ceramic artist and sculptor until she decided she wanted her creations to open eyes and mouths and come to life. She set up shop at WVU and, like a pied piper, drew students. “You are designing environments, new skin and eyeballs and characters. This is rich for students and promises a career outside of cubicles.” Her former students have found jobs in early-childhood classrooms, CGI labs, and Hollywood studios.
McClung has spun inspiring tales for years. It worked until it did not. This year, administrators told her that the undergraduate puppetry major could possibly survive in shrunken form, but only if McClung filled out lots of paperwork and lobbied the faculty senate and the administration. And she has her own design and fine-arts classes to attend to.
She sighed. No thanks. “There’s this sense now at WVU that education should be purely utilitarian. Like a vocational school. Who would not want to go to a school with a puppetry program?”
For decades, John Goldwasser has taught graduate math, which could soon disappear. He told me he is near retirement, and nearer still to despair over Gee’s cuts. But when I asked him about Gee himself, he chuckled with a grudging appreciation. Small in stature with an ebullient manner, the president is a master salesman and fundraiser, a bon vivant with a strong sense of his personal brand. That, for many university boards in the 21st century, is the platonic ideal of a leader. “I’ve heard him talk to high-school parents and kids and he makes me want to be a student,” Goldwasser said. “His biggest knack is getting wealthy people to trip over themselves to open their checkbooks.”
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Gee was raised as a Mormon in Vernal, Utah, then a dusty city of 3,000, and attended the University of Utah before obtaining a law degree and education doctorate at Columbia University in New York City—which he described, in a 1998 interview with high-school students, as “Baghdad on the Hudson.” His taste in fashion ran to bow ties—of which he now owns 2,000—and in music to Dave Brubeck and Simon and Garfunkel. Then as now, he cultivated an image as a wide-eyed, endearing square.
There is at the same time a restlessness to him. After a stint as a judicial fellow to Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, Gee turned to academia and in 1981, at the age of 36, became president of WVU. He spent four years engaged in vigorous fundraising and building before packing off to become president of the University of Colorado and then Ohio State. In 1998, he left for Brown University. He roiled professors and students at this most liberal of schools by inveighing, during a speech in his native Utah, against moral relativism and internet culture. To no one’s amusement, he cut funding for the university’s beloved Charleston String Quartet.
He quit Brown abruptly in 2000 to become chancellor at Vanderbilt. (Former Brown president Vartan Gregorian told The New York Times, “I am stunned, utterly disappointed and dismayed.”) Seven years later, he returned to Ohio State to serve again as its president. Along the way, he epitomized a movement to treat peripatetic university presidents like corporate CEOs. By 2004, Vanderbilt was paying Gee $1.3 million, making him the second-highest-paid university leader in the nation. At Ohio State, his salary and compensation approached $2 million a year. In a nod to his trademark neckwear, the school spent thousands of dollars on promotional bow ties and bow-tie cookies.
Ohio State officials eventually tired of Gee and his version of wit. He told an audience in Columbus that coordinating Ohio State’s many divisions was “like the Polish army or something.” A year later, while talking to Ohio State’s athletic council, he framed his opposition to Notre Dame joining the Big Ten Conference in religious terms. “I negotiated with them during my first term,” he said, “and the fathers are holy on Sunday, and they’re holy hell on the rest of the week. You just can’t trust those damn Catholics on Thursday or Friday.” Profuse apologies followed, along with a university recommendation that he undergo cultural-sensitivity training. Instead, he abruptly announced his retirement. He now jokes that he was about to be run out of town. “I’m the inadvertent president at WVU,” Gee told me. “I retired at Ohio State just ahead of the sheriff.”
When Gee reappeared as the interim president of West Virginia University in 2013, the board of governors assured everyone that he was not a candidate for the full-time position. Three months later the board offered the job to him.
Gee’s admirers point to his stalwart defense of free speech and of a diversity of views in classrooms and lecture halls. Seven years ago, the breadth of WVU’s research and graduate offerings led to its classification as an R1 research university, a sought-after laurel that the school seems likely to retain, at least for now. In the past few years, WVU’s graduation and retention rates have risen, although these rates trail the university’s counterparts in neighboring states. Gee’s salary, $800,000 a year, is relatively modest.
Still, hints of champagne tastes remain. The drive from Morgantown to Charleston, the state capital, takes about two hours. Gee and his top aides have made use of a 35-minute flight on a charter jet. In the past nine years, the university has spent a total of $11.7 million on charter jets to various destinations, most of which of which are in West Virginia. “The use of charter flights is part of efficiently conducting the business of an R1, land grant flagship university,” a university spokesperson told me by email.
Gee has thought deeply about the land-grant university, having co-authored, in 2018, a book, Land-Grant Universities for the Future, and written essays on the subject. President Abraham Lincoln initiated the land-grant university system, of which WVU is one, in 1862, offering federal lands to states to establish schools that, without excluding classical studies, focused on more pragmatic disciplines such as agriculture, science, and engineering.
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Gee proposes to return to that ideal. He has argued for a land-grant university fiercely committed to programs that tailor academic content to needs in the local marketplace. But that begs a larger question: What does it mean for a university to serve its state? Should it help West Virginia employers find workers and recruit new companies? Or should it focus more on helping the state’s young people realize their aspirations, even if their dreams happen not to involve health care or business school?
For better or worse, WVU’s board has empowered its CEO president to press ahead as he pleases. Four years ago, he chose a provost—the university’s chief academic officer, a highly coveted position—without a job search and without consulting faculty. She was previously a WVU dean, lacks a doctorate, and made $435,561 in 2022. (She recently took a voluntary 10 percent pay cut.) The faculty senate protested. Gee offered a disarming rejoinder. “Look, I’m 75, and I don’t have the time to do a lot of searches,” he said. “I did not consult you, I know.”
Gee shows a fondness for big promises and grand gestures. “I have an edifice complex,” he declared in his state-of-the-university address at WVU in 2014. Throughout his career he has thrown up shiny state-of-the-art buildings. The university’s debt increased precipitously on his watch at WVU, just as Ohio State’s and Vanderbilt’s did. In 2014, he promised that enrollment at WVU would soar from 29,000 to 40,000 by 2020. It fell instead. As Gee was hired partly for his management acumen, this might have registered as a disappointment. When I raised the issue, Gee offered a winsome laugh. His vision accommodates grand failure no less than success. “I plead guilty that I had an aspirational 40,000 goal,” he told me. “That aspirational goal did not occur.” The WVU Board of Governors was nevertheless reassuring; in July, it extended Gee’s contract through June 2025, which includes bonuses totaling at least $1 million upon retirement.
Gee’s story has another twist, one that further reveals the distance between him and many of his students. Gee gets along splendidly with corporate chieftains and some years has earned half a million dollars or more in extra income and stock options from corporate boards. In 2000, while at Vanderbilt, he joined the board of directors of Massey Energy, a now-infamous coal-extraction company. Then one of the largest mining operations in the nation, it offered Gee handsome compensation: He eventually was paid between $192,000 and $235,000 a year, plus stock options. But the board’s oversight was spectacularly ineffective. Twenty-three workers died in Massey’s mines during Gee’s years on the board. The federal government levied large fines on Massey for environmental degradations. Gee, who served for a while as the board’s safety and environmental chair, insisted to a student newspaper at Ohio State that Massey “has one of the best environmental records in the country.” Later came a cataclysm: In 2010, less than a year after Gee resigned from the board, an explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia killed 29 miners. Federal and state investigations found “reckless” and “blatant” disregard for safety. There were lies, acts of intimidation, and two sets of books, these reports found, these reports found.
Four years after the accident, WVU’s board of governors, several of whom had connections to the fossil-fuel industry, voted unanimously to appoint Gee as the president. An official WVU magazine ran a list offering five reasons that “we’re gaga for Gee.”
While reporting in Morgantown, I kept coming across people whose lives had been transformed by WVU. One was David Mersing, who grew up in Terra Alta, a working-class town of maybe 1,400 people in the blue-green hills to the southeast of Morgantown. An indifferent high-school student, he joined the military and later worked as a truck driver before becoming another of WVU’s many first-generation students. He obtained a bachelor’s degree and doctorate in chemistry there. This soft-spoken 50-year-old has a wife and three children and teaches at the university, mentoring students who in his story hear their own.
He holds office hours nearly every day, and former students routinely email to ask if they can lean on him for tutoring help. “These kids are what I’m here for,” he told me. Then he paused and stared at the wall. “I’m not sure what the future holds if they let me go.” As it happens, he will survive another year, as older colleagues in his department chose to retire to save the jobs of younger faculty.
Gee told me he is not oblivious to such worries. But he insisted that money problems or no, WVU must change. He pointed to a bleak national landscape. Indeed, the president of Dickinson State University in North Dakota recently proposed to cut majors in math, political science, information analytics, and music. The State University of New York at Potsdam recently announced that a steep drop in enrollment had forced deep budget reductions and cuts—deeper, certainly, than the ones Gee is contemplating. When announcing cuts in chemistry, physics, public health, and theater, Potsdam’s president broke into tears.
Regardless of the toll on students, faculty, and even some college presidents, the travails of public universities have become a rich source of business for the consultants who advise beleaguered presidents on their options. Several years ago, Gee and WVU paid $1 million to EAB, formerly known as the Educational Advisory Board, a Washington, D.C., firm, to gather data on university programs, examining how to recruit and retain more students and looking at their performance in various college majors. This past April, the university gave a still-active contract worth as much as $875,000 to the RPK Group to analyze that data. The Maryland-based consultancy—which has had contracts with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the Kansas Board of Regents, the City University of New York, and the universities of Virginia and Missouri, among many others—offers higher-education clients its “Mission Market and Margin®” strategy to “optimize” their business model and “align academic offerings to student and labor demand.” (WVU declined to release any recommendations or other work product from RPK.)
Yet dark claims of doom are worth interrogating. Kentucky sits on West Virginia’s western border and has only modestly better median family incomes and poverty rates. Yet its flagship public university enjoys record enrollments, not to mention vibrant foreign-language departments and math doctoral programs.
Arkansas has social indicators similar to West Virginia’s. But the University of Arkansas has expanded offerings and aggressively recruited students from other states. Lisa Corrigan, a communications professor there, has examined the doings at West Virginia University. “The demographic cliff is a product of the consultant-industrial complex,” she told me. “This is a manufactured crisis. At Arkansas, we’re drowning in students.” Despite all the talk of streamlining, demand appears strong for a wide diversity of classes at many flagship public universities.
Meanwhile, at WVU, administrators are making cuts that look puzzling even through a purely utilitarian lens. The administration has cut recreation majors and a resource-management doctorate even as West Virginia officials talk of economies built on outdoor sports and the repair of waterways and forests. The state suffers a severe shortage of public-school math teachers, yet the university has cut the only math doctoral program in the state.
Gee is undeterred. He said WVU still has hundreds of majors and graduate programs. “If the nation has 30 excellent math Ph.D. programs, why does West Virginia need one too?” he asked me. Addressing the mounting attacks on his stewardship of WVU, he added, “I will not accept a narrative that I have mismanaged the university. I’m leaving in 2025. That makes me very brave.”
Looking at the gap between Gee’s rhetoric and the agenda he’s pursued, one struggles to tell whether his words have meaning. Many of the programs that Gee has targeted offer students paths to lucrative careers or strengthen the state in ways it desperately needs. Some are even tracks that he’s praised in the past as essential. I reminded Gee that only seven years ago, he gave a speech arguing that world languages and linguistics were ever more vital in a modern world. Yet he insists now that if language were not required for many majors, most students would not take the courses. “We’re doing away with world languages because our students wanted to do away with it,” he said. “Our students are tired of our telling them what courses to take.” He recounted a conversation he had with a WVU student who told him, “I took four semesters of Spanish, and I landed in Madrid and couldn’t even get a taxi.” With the air of a man tossing a trump card on the table, Gee asked me, “What does that tell you?”
What came to my mind was my conversation with Taylor DeLong, that senior from the mountain hollows. She spoke of how her classes offered undreamed-of consolations. She studied abroad in France. One evening she met a couple from Argentina. She told me, “I spoke with them for two hours in Spanish.” She glowed. “To be a well-rounded person, to have a sense of this world, that’s what this education gave me.”
The aspirations of a Taylor DeLong might not cajole conservative state legislators into opening the purse for WVU. And perhaps this rural state cannot hope to persuade a young woman like her, bent on serving in an embassy one day, to spend her career here. Although one might imagine a different vision, in which a Wyoming County woman of wordly accomplishment returns to WVU to teach a class or give a lecture and so enriches her alma mater.
An existential question—to borrow one of Gee’s favorite adjectives—hangs over this deconstruction and reconstruction of a 27,000-student state university. Once you tug at a thread here, a seam there, and programs unwind and careers end and professors and graduate students are sent packing, can you easily stitch up what’s left? Gee could try to reorient WVU around its medical school, neuroscience center, and business school, but the appeal of those schools might depend on being woven into the fabric of a grander university.
Will a whip-smart aspiring neuroscientist choose Morgantown, after cuts to the arts and to a math doctoral program that might attract like-minded students? Will young people in West Virginia feel “socialized to leave,” in the words of the renowned Appalachian novelist and essayist Ann Pancake, due to shrinking opportunities? (Pancake told the Mountain State Spotlight that she has herself decided to leave WVU this year because of the cuts.)
I had to wonder: What might have transpired had Gee emphasized the moral urgency of creating grand options for working- and middle-class students? What if he had taken the case for building a top university directly to West Virginians? Instead, the inescapable impression he leaves is of a college president—a man with experience, energy, and willpower—who settled for a utilitarian vision and straitened choices.
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