Maybe, though if it wasnt expensive to operate, it wouldn’t have been helpful to cut it to generate savings, which presumably was the primary goal in finding $45 million in savings. I assume the faculty and administration recognized that.
The language study linked above is really interesting. Who knew that NC offered the most high school courses in Arabic or Texas in Hindi?
(I’m intrigued that NC had the most number of high schools that teach Russian. Although UNC has an extremely respected Russian language program so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.)
My earlier posts in this thread were before I knew that engineering was going to get cuts. But as @ucbalumnus indicated, those departments are continuing and though there will be some mergers between departments (such as mining with petroleum engineering), the cuts are not nearly so drastic and the departments and coursework will continue to exist. Foreign languages will not.
The fact that engineering is receiving cuts is to me a cautionary warning (or alarm) to students and families that nothing is safe.
I agree that WVU’s administration caused most of their mess. West Virginia (the state), however, still needs a fully functioning flagship. Unless they decide to make a different university its flagship (and have all the associated costs of bringing that university up to the level of services/funding etc, that WVU currently has), then WVU still needs to get fixed.
I would start with reducing/eliminating much of the administrative bloat that was detailed in @MWolf’s link in post 29. And President Gee might not get to retire Jan. 1, 2025. He might be let go sometime soon and have an interim president brought in. Better supervision and accountability from the Board of Governors seems needed as well.
But there still appear to be structural issues involved with how the state’s higher education system exists as even that link indicates that the “demographic cliff” will start really effecting schools in 2025, two short years away. Rather than continuing to wait to face their issues, the state should start taking action to prepare (and not just go into significant debt, as Pres. Gee proposed and enacted).
For instance, Fairmont State is a 30m drive from WVU and is currently serving about 3200 undergrads and 300 grad students. Why have a state college 30m from the flagship? Consolidate the two and capture the savings. It doesn’t have to do with the fact that WVU’s admin screwed up (royally). It’s that such a situation shouldn’t really exist, particularly in a poor state with a declining population and a declining undergraduate population.
Bluefield State is a 31m drive from Concord University which itself is 41m from WVU Institute of Technology. Again, why? Having so much redundancy in a small area that is not that heavily populated doesn’t make sense. West Virginia State is 43m from Marshall. It doesn’t make sense for ANY state to have so many public universities in close proximity to one another.
So it wouldn’t be that these universities that are close to other public ones are being reduced to pay for WVU’s mistakes. They’d be reduced because they shouldn’t exist. The timing may be because of WVU’s and the Board of Governors’ screw-ups, but the issue would need to be fixed anyway, particularly in light of the 2025 demographic cliff. Higher ed in West Virginia should be thinking, “United we stand. Divided we fail.”
Some of these state universities are left over from the segregation era. West Virginia State, for instance, is a HBCU.
The private consulting group that chose the cuts didn’t consult with Academic Depts but only with Deans and when Deans disagreed they were overruled.
The group decided to look at the number of majors rather than at the number of undergrads taking the classes, and they also disregarded any double majors. (Since almost all FL majors are double majoring in sth else, usually business or social science, sometimes Humanities, the profile must have looked odd.)
They also went for “easy” fixes: most students take a FL at WVU because it’s part of a requirement- end the requirement and bam no need for foreign languages - remember all the double majors had been erased from the data. (If you can’t see the flaw in the logic…)
They didn’t look closely at consequences - closing grad programs in math means fewer TAs for freshman math, and WV isn’t brimming with qualified math majors willing to be adjuncts.
Same thing with English - some of the positions they want to eliminate teach Rhetoric&composition while they recommended switching the grad program to that field, and a whole English Dept simply can’t exist if it cuts…literature.
Some misapprehensions may have been in play, too: Beside the official explanation linking student learning languages in class to switching to an app ( * ) an example provided by the University is the Puppetry program. Useless, weird, let’s cut it and fold it into sth else. Can you hear the guffaws? Well… Turns out it’s highly selective - there are only two in the country so it IS one of these programs that attract students from OOS. And it places well - Sesame street, all sorts of children programs, films, animation, etc. The proposal is to fold it into a General theater major, cutting the number of specialized courses (and their associated pro experiences), which would result in fewer applicants and way less employability.
*(in case you don’t know: beyond the elementary level FL learning is about so much more than what Duolingo can do, which is why selective colleges want to see level 4. It’s akin to saying you don’t need a math dept bc everyone has calculators.)
How about… the State kicks out the current president&Board who made such egregious decisions, fills the $ shortfall, and starts a SERIOUS overview of the Higher Ed situation in the State mapping out how to handle the U v. StateU issue, the role smaller institutions play to the economic development of the state including rural areas, the ways the flagship can work with Marshall and Shepherd, how to work across the regions esp. throughout Appalachia, etc.? There’s a definite need for restructuring but it should make sense in terms of academic standing and collaboration, economic impact, etc.
Happy to have the current WVU leadership kicked out but that won’t save $45 million and the State won’t come up with the money.
I’m reading a lot about the RPK group – they’re working with a lot of universities right now, and I thing the results are going to be disastrous for higher ed.
https://twitter.com/DrLisaCorrigan/status/1690362667305664512
Did they make any cuts to the DEI office? If not, then perhaps politics is not the main driver?
There is nothing per se wrong with higher ed consultants like RPK group. Lots of competitors in that field, which is a good thing. Many colleges hire outside consultants, same as any other industry.
RPK’s mission is not to ‘shred the liberal arts’. The decreasing financial support of state schools by the states, declining enrollment in college, and declining enrollment in some majors is a perfect storm. Hard choices have to be made because money. Always the money, because there is no free lunch.
But as you have already described, their approach does not reflect understanding about how colleges function and the students they serve.
I expect they have a deep understanding of how colleges function. These are smart people. There is no money tree coming from West Virginia to support the college. I’m not saying that the admin and trustees didn’t make decisions that made this situation worse, but they are where they are right now…it’s only bad choices at this point.
Consultants can study a university and issue a report with recommendations. It is up to the university administration to accept or reject those recommendations. In 1990, Northeastern University hired a consultant to “reimagine” the university after a significant drop in freshman enrolment. Their first recommendation was that the university’s cornerstone coop program be eliminated or at most made a small and optional part of the Northeastern experience. Northeastern instead eliminated the consultants. They proceeded to transform internally. They have been fortunate to have two visionary presidents since then. Today, coop is still the hallmark of a Northeastern education, and the acceptance rate is 6%.
A consultant’s report is not law.
No doubt that WVU can ignore the consultants’ report and instead come up with its own list of departments to be cut to save 45 million dollars. How would that improve things? We wouldnt be happier if it eliminated all STEM programs? Financial aid? $45 million is a big number requiring a lot of cuts.
Some of these redundancies are legacies of racial segregation in education, where what are now called HBCUs and their corresponding HWCUs were built to provide racially segregated college education.
In some other cases (not in WV), the population in a given area is large and dense enough to have multiple public universities in the area. Examples may be NYC metro, Los Angeles metro, etc…
The current round of review covered only a subset of academic departments.
Future (as in really, really near future) rounds of review with cover the rest of the university, but since administrative divisions weren’t covered in this round, bring the DEI office into the discussion isn’t really a substantive counter to politics being in play with these cuts.
Discussing RPK and their role:
I would amend that to:
I expect that they have a deep understanding of how they think colleges should function.
That’s rather a different thing, though.
Maybe. But they wouldn’t be in business if clients didn’t think they were doing a good job on the projects they were hired to do. That industry is highly competitive, with many players.
Well, yeah—but who are their clients?
Quite significantly, it isn’t ever the academic side of the house that hires them.
If the faculty, or anyone else, wishes to propose an alternative set of cuts to reach the target, I think it likely that would be considered.
I do not think the consultants were making a value judgment about the worth of any of the programs to be cut. They had to reach a target, and tried to do so affecting the fewest number of majors. There may be alternative methods, but the one chosen is certainly rational.
Regardless of which department is cut, there will be objections. Closing any other colleges to merge into WVU will create a storm of objections as well. It is really a matter of picking the least worst option.
There are many countries where the tertiary schools one attends for foreign language are not the same universities where one majors in engineering. Not all schools need be everything for everyone.
any idea if this is happening THIS SEMESTER ? will students in the discontinued programs start their programs this fall? *** i work for a small public U that offers one of those discontinued programs online. Our U too is facing major budget cuts 
So – just thinking about this all. . . .
I doubt it. Some programs are scheduled to “teach out,” or graduate their existing students. contracts have likely been signed already for this year. It hasn’t even been finalized by the Board of Trustees (I think). So it’ll take a few years. And it’s possible that it could be reversed (look up what happened at UWisconsin-Stevens Point a few years back). Changes like this don’t happen on a dime.