The liberal case for WVU's restructuring.

Whats happening in WVU might not spread to every corner of US higher education, but it should give us all pause to think about what we really want, and how we should go about getting it.

As all US higher education observers know, West Virginia University is undergoing a dramatic restructuring. The university faces deep budget cuts and will eliminate numerous degree programs and faculty jobs. I won’t link to any particular source. Just google “WVU cuts” and see for yourself. 

The reactions to the plan, excited by outgoing WVU President E. Gordon Gee, that I’ve seen are almost uniformly negative. They range from laments about what is happening to the university to ominous predictions that Gee’s brand of managerialism and awful, anti-intellectual austerity will sweep across the country, destroying US public higher education as we know it. I share these concerns to varying degrees. 

But I also think we need to take the liberal case for Gee’s plan seriously. This case is made tacitly by lucid liberal higher education thinkers who want to advance reforms that benefit students and communities. The pro-Gee case from liberal reformers is not, so far as I know, made explicit because it is politically distasteful. Further, the means, speed, and extent of Gee’s plans may give even the most student reformers a bit of pause. So, I will make the case because I think we should take it seriously. The liberal case for Gee’s approach is what I’ll call the implicit center-left think tank consensus. 

The problem with public higher education

To understand the liberal case for Gee’s WVU cuts, let’s start with a standard prescription of what ails public universities in the US -- they don’t serve their undergraduate students well. We can outline a simplified version of the account.

• The primary purpose of public universities is to provide undergraduate students with a good education that helps them acquire the skills they need to secure an in-demand job at a price low enough that they don’t acquire unmanageable debt. Or, the shorter version: college should be a positive net investment over a reasonable time horizon. 

• However, universities often fail to provide this value proposition to students because:

  • They don’t admit students who can most benefit from a college education;

  • They charge unaffordably high prices;

  • They don’t support students to graduation;

  • They don’t offer the right mix of job-relevant programs. 

• The reason public universities often fail students is that (1) state governments do not sufficiently support public colleges, (2) the Federal government underwrites the operation with student aid but has lax accountability regulations, and (3) faculty and administrators are self-interested and focused on things (expensive) things other than undergraduate student outcomes.

Most reformers are skeptical that states will (or can) increase their investment in public higher education, and even if the states gave more, they assume that universities would fritter away the investment without more accountability to ensure student outcomes. We are talking about basic consumer protection stuff, and from a point of view, it’s pretty compelling. Public universities should do better for students and especially focus on lower-income students and students from historically excluded groups. Only someone like Ron DeSantis can disagree with that. 

The Gee solution

Perhaps without meaning, Oliver Whang’s recent article in the New Yorker on WVU’s math department makes the liberal case for Gee’s plan. Yes, cutting faculty and programs will help to close the university’s budget deficit, but more than that, it will align the university’s mission with its purpose of effectively serving undergraduate students. The passage below gives us a good sense of how this could happen.

Last year, there were sixty-five enrolled math majors at the school and twenty-three math Ph.D. students. Meanwhile, five thousand students were enrolled in service courses. For several years, a handful of math service courses had very high “D-F-W rates,” meaning that students earned D’s or F’s or withdrew from these courses more than they did in most other classes. Higher grades “drive first-year student retention and are a primary factor in students’ ability to complete their degrees in a timely fashion,” Reed [WVU Provost] explained, adding, “The key point here is that we need to focus on what our students and their future employers want and need.”

If we accept that offering low-demand graduate programs in mathematics bolts the department, which needs more tenure-line faculty to do the labor-intensive work of research and graduate student supervision that goes along with master’s and Ph.D. programs in pure math, and distracts it from offering better quality applied courses for undergraduates, then right-sizing the department and re-aligning it makes a lot of sense. My left-wing higher education graduate students don’t like Gee’s cuts, yet they are also convinced that the university (generically speaking) needs to do better for undergraduate students. Furthermore, if we prioritize undergraduate students’ access to lower-cost, student-centered, relevant instruction, then it is at least plausible that Gee is doing what needs to be done. 

In essence, here is the liberal case for Gee’s reforms: absent a deluge of money from the state legislature in WV, which any realist would agree is very unlikely to materialize, the university has two choices. First, charge students more to run an elaborate university. Second, make the university less elaborate and more student-focused. The second choice is preferred. 

A couple of challenges

I am not so naive that I think Gee’s plan is as simple and common-sense as I make it seem here. I didn’t get into the possibility (probably?) that the financial hole Gee is plugging was created by his failed grand plan to grow WVU, for example. Nor am I addressing the consequences to students or the state that will flow from these cuts. Even so, I have a challenge for two groups.

The first challenge is for the liberal center-left reformers. Be honest about and publicize what you like (and don’t like) about Gee’s plan. If we have a more student-focused, less elaborate, and self-indulgent university, would it look like what’s happening at WVU? What are the costs, and why is it worth it? And don’t get into facile thinking like MOOCS! or ROI! Be serious, and avoid one-quick-trick-style thinking.

The second challenge is to me and my fellow academics. We are horrified by what we see in WVU. What is our alternative vision of a university that is rich intellectually, civically vibrant, and does better for undergraduate students? How can we get there? What realist role does that faculty have to play, and what, if any, changes to our work and way of doing things do we need to make? Avoid banalities like, ‘well, if we just cut the President’s salary,’ or ‘if the legislature just gave us 50% more.’ The first is insufficient to do anything, and the second is a medium-term fantasy. So what do we do?

Ok, enough.