Gordon Gee’s reckless spending spree will ruin many careers

Whenever a university or college announces that it will eliminate a large number of tenure-track/tenured faculty positions, administrators will invariably cite demographic changes. If they’re at a public university they will cite declines in state funding. The claims will not even be wrong, per se. But if you look carefully, you will generally see administrators who engaged in all kinds of reckless debt-funded vanity spending projects based on the assumption that their particular institution would continue to have increasing enrollment, despite knowing that the population of typical college-age people was going to shrink. Needless to say, Gordon Gee’s conduct in a state with especially unfavorable demographics and an especially unfavorable political context was particularly egregious:

West Virginia University’s student population has been shrinking for years. Its proclivity to spend money has not.  

Now facing a $45 million budget deficit, administrators have proposed eliminating dozens of programs, including the mathematics Ph.D. and the entire world languages department. Students staged a spirited protest on campus last week, and faculty are pleading with the school’s governing board to reject the recommended cuts. 

West Virginia reflects a broader pattern of flagship schools increasing expenditures far faster than they did enrollment, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation. The proposed cuts have caused concern over the direction of education in the state, among the nation’s poorest, and the school’s role as a steppingstone for local students into the global economy. 

University President E. Gordon Gee and current and former members of the board blame the institution’s financial challenges on the pandemic and state funding cuts, as well as competition and demographic changes. 

A review of university financial records, however, shows that its spending habits and expansion plans set it on a path to instability. 

Gee said in 2014 that the university, which at the time enrolled about 33,000 full- and part-time students across its three campuses and online, should grow to 40,000. That would require new investments.

The students didn’t come—enrollment fell to about 27,500 last fall—but the spending continued.

After adjusting for inflation, spending at West Virginia University rose by 38% between 2002 and 2022, compared with a 7% increase in enrollment, the Journal found. On a per-student basis, spending increased by 29% over the past two decades. The enrollment numbers in the Journal’s analysis give less weight to part-time students than to full-time students.

As state funding fell by more than half in the past 20 years, administrators turned to students to cover the bills. The inflation-adjusted average cost for in-state students, after scholarships, rose by 20% between 2007 and 2022, federal Education Department data show. Overall, the Journal’s analysis found, tuition revenue has more than doubled since 2002. 

“Public universities have always lived at the margins where there is never enough funding to do all the things we would like to do,” Gee said in a speech this spring. He has been president at four other universities, and led West Virginia in the 1980s as well. 

West Virginia University’s Morgantown campus got $800 million in upgrades between 2012 and 2018.

“I love seeing cranes sprout up on our campus like spring daffodils, heralding rebirth and renewal,” Gee said in 2014. “Because a university that is not renewing itself is a university that is wilting and withering.”

“I love seeing cranes.” A phrase that is the difference between a university that deals with modestly declining enrollment through attrition and some early retirement buyouts, and one that just fires a large number of faculty, most of whom have little chance of finding another comparable position in a job market mostly open only to new or recent Ph.Ds. But Gordon Gee got paid, so there ain’t nothin’ else to think about.