I expect the consultants offered more than one possible solution, all with pros and cons.
I’m not sure where WVU is in the process, but assume any change of this magnitude has to be approved by the Board of Trustees. I wouldn’t be surprised if some trustees were on the committee that the consultants presented their recommendations to.
I get it, but that’s a different issue than the consultants not understanding how colleges function.
When a major ballet company or cultural institution is having financial woes and they bring in consultants to evaluate their options, the dancers and artists aren’t the ones hiring. This isn’t how it works.
The entire WVU story is a sad one-- ultimately, one hopes that the citizens of WV end up with a system that works for most of their students. But agree with Roycroft- this is a “least worst option” situation. There is no tooth fairy that can bail out a university with only goodies and no painful decision-making.
Just bcos a FL department is on the chopping block, doesn’t mean that that FL will no longer be taught. Eliminating a department is the only practical way to force retire tenured faculty in departments with few major student amid declining interest and student enrollment. For example, when USC reviewed its German offering, it found it had as many tenured faculty as grad students due to declining interest, which was clearly uneconomic. But the only way to retire the faculty was to eliminate the Department, which they did. USC still offers German 1-3 & Conversational (thru Adjuncts?). OTOH, USC has beefed up its Arabic and Asian languages.
If you read the plan, it actually does mean it will no longer be taught. This isn’t one foreign language - it’s all of them. The recommendations are to outsource it to other online programs or to use apps.
https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/5f12601b-6686-4aa6-b2c5-8ffbd32224ef/preliminary-recommendation-world-languages-literatures-and-linguistics.pdf proposes that the number of world languages faculty be reduced to 0. Presumably, this means that any instruction in such subjects, if made available, will be outsourced (to adjuncts or remote / distance education).
I say this in complete sincerity: This assertion makes it abundantly clear that you do not know how higher education works at an administrative level.
(I have both observed from the outside and experienced from the inside enough of these that it can’t just be a sampling issue. Faculty recommendations would get no consideration, though they would certainly receive meaningless thanks for putting in that much pointless work toward a futile endeavor.)
If I’m not mistaken, the president indicated that faculty were not consulted at all -that, in fact, only Deans were consulted and when they disagreed they were overruled.
Why not ask the people who made the egregious decisions to be first contributors? They should be held accountable and liable.
Then, all administrative salaries are on the faculty scale. (Some admin salaries go as high as 800k.)
Cuts ahould be felt first by those who made the decisions.
Someone asked why the State can’t contribute, since it’s its public flagship and it’s in much better shape than in 2008-2010. Could take over the new buildings in exchange for a bail out and a serious review of the higher ed system.
While politics is probably always lurking in decisions like this, in the case of WVU, it doesn’t seem as cut and dried: for example, the Women’s and Gender Studies BA - never a favorite of the political party referenced above - seems to have made it through unscathed (and possibly enhanced if the reference to them adding a BS program that i read elsewhere is fact-based).
That is in part on the faculty. One can’t just offer criticism and no alternatives. Faculty are adult members of the community-they could and should have ties to political leaders, business leaders, powerful alumni. If they can not lobby for their own interests with a workable alternative solution, now is a good time to acquire that skill.
No, it does not work like that. @dfbdfb is absolutely right on this point. At some universities, shared governance is a real thing, but at most universities (more and more these days), it’s pretty superficial and meaningless. There might be a faculty senate and other signs of shared leadership, and some faculty might make the jump to the dark side (umm, administration), but when it comes down to it, the administration is free to ignore faculty leadership and usually does. And most faculty do not have “ties to political leaders, business leaders, and powerful alumni” – we’re not lobbyists, and there’s no part of our jobs that would allow for that kind of role. (Sure, some individual professors’ work might put them in contact with important outside interests, but the structure of leadership in a university really doesn’t make those relationships consequential for purposes like these.) When an outside consulting firm is hired to make these decisions, this is a pretty clear sign that the faculty are not part of the decision-making team.
Outside consultants are hired for their expertise in the industry and ability to assess and propose various solutions. Maybe it is time for some to rethink their respective roles.
In my experience, their solutions often work for administrators’ priorities, but not for the faculty and students. Outside consultants don’t often pay a whole lot of attention to the heart of an institution – just to its bank account. They answer to the people who hired them, not to the people who have to live with the consequences of their decisions. Meanwhile (not to castigate all admins, but it does often work like this), admins are more focused on big, splashy agendas to position themselves for their next (bigger) jobs – Gordon Gee is a perfect example of this type of admin. So they pay more attention to their CVs than to their institutions when consulting outside agencies and throwing down policy changes. I’ve seen this at a lot of universities, and it’s pretty clear that it’s happening at WVU, too.
Candidly, I too would ignore faculty complaints that were not accompanied by workable solutions-if not FL being cut, what department should be? If the faculty can’t largely agree on that, its input isn’t truly helpful.
This is too broad a brush. I would expect that many higher ed consultants have a more in-depth understanding of a college’s situation (from many perspectives) than do some faculty members, especially throughout the conducting and completing of the project. The consultants likely left no stone unturned in identifying ways to close a $45M gap.
Colleges are complicated businesses with complicated funding sources (and all the restrictions that go along with that). If there were no faculty members consulted or interviewed during the course of that project, that would be less than great for sure…and not typical consulting project protocol.
Another important consideration is that many don’t realize that colleges are in the customer procurement and customer service business (customers are the students, and to some degree the parents).
The faster everyone realizes that, the better for the institution. The shift to a customer service business happened to physicians too, and those who got on board with that relatively sooner were able to better adapt.
correct
I kind of doubt this. When counting impacted students, they counted single majors, but not double majors. They counted majors and not non-majors who took (and needed) classes in other departments, or to fulfill gen ed requirements. That’s a huge red flag to me that the outside consultants either don’t know or don’t care about the consequences of their proposals. And it’s not just in this case – I’ve seen this sort of thing before.
Bingo! If environmental sciences and comp sci are booming majors and FL declining, the only way to boost faculty in the former two is to reduce faculty in the latter. And other than eliminating the department, Admin would have to just wait for years for no longer needed tenured faculty to retire. (But that is a difficult pill to swallow when one is facing a huge deficit due to dealing enrollment overall.)
How many double majors do they actually have? Anyone got numbers? By department?
We have no idea what the consultants proposed. They wouldn’t be in business if they routinely did poor work, or made poor recommendations. It is true that these consultants won’t be responsible for rolling out the changes that the admin and Board agree to adopt.
Cutting $45M from the flagship of a poor state with a relatively low proportion of college going students is tough for everyone involved. They aren’t the first flagship that has had to make substantial cuts/changes (UVM did in the recent past), and they won’t be the last.
Frankly, it doesn’t really matter how many double majors there are-those students can just focus on their other major and are unlikely to transfer if being unable to double major in French disappears. That famous puppetry department referenced above had 1 major in 2019-I don’t care how many students enroll in puppet courses, if they do not care enough to major in it, it is a good choice to be cut. Most things are subject to the laws of supply and demand, as the economics faculty, at least, should realize.