West Virginia University

I've been hearing about the gutting of programs and departments at the West Virginia University for a while, but it took the convergence of two things today to get me to post about it. 

One was an article by Myya Helm, a recent WVU alum, Black labor historian, and Marshall scholar. The title is Everyone at West Virginia University Knew Something Was Up. I Hate That We Were Right.
The summary Slate put on it was "The student population got smaller and smaller while fancy new buildings appeared."

Helm outlines the way the university's president has been paid lavishly, in addition to the building campaigns that have taken place to accommodate enrollment increases that were the inverse of reality, even as state support of the university declined and enrollment figures were miscalculated or inflated.

The gutting of college liberal arts programs has become old news, but the fact that the WVU cuts are proposed at this scale and at a state's flagship university makes them noteworthy. As Helm points out, departments like World Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics are operating at a profit, but still they are targeted. And as I heard elsewhere, the university's puppetry BFA, which is proposed to become an emphasis within the theater BA, is one of just two puppetry programs in the U.S., with alums working for the Muppets, Sesame Street, and museums across the country. For those who care about such things, it has a 100% job placement record.

More is at work than cost-cutting, as Helm demonstrates. She points out that her own research demonstrates the way West Virginia either ignores and destroys or purposely suppresses what it does not value:

West Virginian students and faculty do not choose their programs and specialties in a vacuum. Today, I am a labor historian and am studying the exploitation of Black people by the West Virginia coal industry. My research led me to the discovery of the Mining Extension Service of West Virginia State College, which provided mobile classroom education to rural Black West Virginian communities. This program was established in 1937 and discontinued in 1957 by an act of the state Legislature in the name of integration, abandoning Black West Virginians who had the greatest potential to benefit from education. Almost all records chronicling its existence were transferred to WVU’s library, until they were ordered to be destroyed in 1971 with officials alleging that the documents constituted a fire hazard.

The second piece I saw that finally made me post was a series of panels by Joe Lupo, a WVU printmaking professor, which I saw shared by a friend on Facebook:

One of the most disgusting things in Helm's article is the fact that student leaders on the WVU appear to be afraid to be quoted by name when criticizing the administration's planned cuts. When have students ever been afraid to criticize their university's administrators? This explains it, according to Helm:

A former member of the WVU Student Government Association also anonymously expressed: “I’m a student leader, and I don’t know what I can and can’t say. [The WVU administration] affects my future in West Virginia, and that’s all I’ve ever had.” It is hard for students to read the administration’s recent announcement that “the next item for review in the academic transformation will be the more than 450 organizations that support student life” as anything other than a thinly veiled threat.

Faculty are also being asked to sign a bizarre loyalty pledge, which is the antithesis of academic freedom.