Gee whiz, what a bloodbath

Longtime readers of this blog are unlikely to be surprised that the culmination of Gordon Gee’s career will be a suite of consultant-driven mass layoffs of tenured faculty:

Financially beleaguered West Virginia University is proposing eliminating 9 percent of the majors and 7 percent of the full-time faculty members at the flagship Morgantown campus, including the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics, the university announced Friday.

“The university is reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors [and] is exploring alternative methods of delivery such as a partnership with an online language app or online partnership with a fellow Big 12 university,” WVU said in its news release. It said student interest in the department’s programs “is very low and declining.”

“It’s hard to imagine any university, anywhere in the world, not teaching world languages, let alone the state flagship, land-grant, R1 university in a state like West Virginia,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian studies at West Virginia, noting that the state has faced a brain drain for generations and has low “intercultural competencies.”

There are real issues with demographics reducing the prospective pool of undergraduate students and (for state flagships) declines in state funding. But wherever you see crises that allegedly require the shock treatment of mass faculty firings and department closures, you almost always see administrators knowing a demographic crunch was coming taking extremely foolish debt-funded risks:

But the roots of West Virginia’s current predicament run much deeper. They include external forces like the pandemic, declines in state appropriations, demographic trends, and budget battles at the federal level. But they are also the result of internal choices and miscalculations like debt-fueled spending on buildings and, most crucially, the big bet by university leaders on enrollment growth that didn’t pay off.

[…]

Despite early marginal successes, out-of-state recruitment never delivered the salvation that West Virginia University had expected. From 2010 to 2021, the number of U.S.-based, out-of-state students who enrolled at WVU’s main campus basically held steady at around 12,000 a year.

Patrick Lane, vice president for policy analysis and research at the Western Interstate Commission, suspects institutions like WVU that anticipated expanding their enrollments by recruiting out of state had underestimated just how competitive that market would become.

[…]

Whatever successes WVU had in enrolling international students started to evaporate in 2018, as fewer Saudi Arabian and Chinese students elected to enroll at colleges and universities in the United States, including West Virginia, according to annual estimates by the Institute of International Education and the U.S. Department of State. The pandemic would ultimately undo more than a decade of international-student growth for the university. From 2017 to 2021, international enrollments fell by more than 40 percent.

[…]

After being named president of West Virginia University, in 2014, Gee wasted little time in ratcheting up enthusiasm for the next chapter he planned to write in Morgantown. Instead of the 32,000-student target that had preceded him — which represented 10-percent growth over 10 years — Gee promised in a 2014 address that WVU’s main campus and its sister campuses would now work to enroll 40,000 students by 2020.

Some local voices, though, would eventually express skepticism about Gee’s plans. In 2016 a group of apartment landlords placed an ad in a Morgantown newspaper predicting that WVU would not “increase campus enrollment to 40,000 students as President Gee has suggested.” Gee fired back, doubling down on his prediction both in black-and-white commentary and in a full-page color ad.

By then WVU had proposed an even more improbably ambitious target to the state’s Higher Education Policy Commission. Rather than affording itself a six-year runway to increase its systemwide headcount from 30,000 to 40,000 students by 2020, as it had originally done, WVU proposed a much more challenging target — to enroll 39,450 students by 2018. In other words, it set a target of 20-percent growth in just three years.

These enrollment goals were transparently insane, leading to choices that were the precise opposite of what administration should have been doing. But reason to pull such numbers out of your bow tie is that they justify building lots of stuff, which is always the goal-in-itself of a certain kind of university president:

• During the 2014 fiscal year, the university paid $2.3 million to acquire nine acres of land for the future construction of a recreational complex, baseball park, and stadium. The following year, the university bought an adjacent 5.6 acres for parking.
• Following Mountain State University’s closure, WVU in the 2015 fiscal year acquired, for $8 million, nearly 30 acres of the institution’s former campus, in Beckley, including two residence halls, a library, a gym, and a student union and bookstore. West Virginia University would come to rely on two loans, for $36.1 million and $42 million, to pay start-up costs and fund various projects associated with the Beckley campus.
• From the 2012 to the 2016 fiscal years, WVU completed the acquisition and development of three separate student residence projects.

WVU’s building spree didn’t stop with student housing. From 2010 to 2023, the university completed construction on a biomedical-science research center, a basketball practice facility, a greenhouse, an art museum, and buildings for the College of Physical Activities and Sport Sciences, student health, the College of Business and Economics, agricultural sciences, and advanced engineering research, as well as student recreation fields and an animal-facility annex.

The university also undertook dozens of renovation and maintenance projects, among them adding advertising video boards to its 14,000-seat sports arena and removing asbestos at its law center.

As WVU’s ambitions grew, so did its debt load. In June 2010 the university clocked its long-term debt liabilities at around $380 million (unadjusted for inflation). Come June 2020, those collective liabilities had ballooned to $810 million, and they would continue growing in the years to come. And with that increase in liabilities came an increase in interest payments and debt service. From the 2006 to the 2011 fiscal years, the annual inflation-adjusted costs associated with the issuance and servicing of WVU’s debt ranged from $21 million to $26 million. After 2011, however, those debt-related costs spiked, with the university paying, on average, around $35 million annually to bankers, bondholders, and creditors.

But don’t worry, if Gee’s trip to the casino means that lots of tenured faculty lose their jobs with little prospect of finding another one, he owes you a Cole! (Guarantee will not be honored.)

Oh, and if you expected to be able to study foreign languages when attending a flagship R-1, don’t worry, there will be DISRUPTIVE new synergies available:

My prediction for what happens next: (1) WVU pays an app millions of dollars to develop courses, (2) WVU loses tons of money b/c students don't waste credit hours on it, (3) Admin who orchestrated the deal goes to work at said app for 3x their salary, (4) more faculty cuts https://t.co/g3qAxsCD5y— Corey Moss-Pech (@CoreyPech) August 12, 2023

Either way, sure is convenient for Gee that a spot at the law school has opened up for when if contract runs out in 2025. [UPDATE: according to Paul, he already got the courtesy appointment, which I should have guessed.]