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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

The bloodbath at West Virginia University [sic]

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SOME VERY INTERESTING COMMENTS (SEE ESP. #1 AND #2); MORE WELCOME

We noted earlier this summer the mismanagement that precipitated this crisis, but now the details are coming into focus, with dozens of programs, including philosophy, affected.  As CHE reports:

In the face of a $45-million deficit, the university’s leadership has decided to cut the entire department of world languages, literatures, and linguistics, among much else. Twelve undergraduate majors and 20 graduate programs will disappear. You will no longer be able to get a bachelor’s degree in German, Spanish, French, Russian, or Chinese, or a graduate degree in mathematics. There will still be some art-history classes, but no art-history major. The recommendations would result in 169 potential reductions in faculty lines. The master’s and doctoral programs in higher-ed administration will also be discontinued.

On top of that, the WVU President Gordon Gee is also proposing contractual conditions for new faculty that are both unconstitutional and violate academic freedom.  What a disgrace!  Comments are open for links and more information about what's going on.  (You must use a valid email address, which will not appear.)

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9 responses to “The bloodbath at West Virginia University [sic]”

  1. butt in seat

    Philosophy is actually the sole department reviewed that has been spared any "recommended" changes to any of its programs, and one of the very few reviewed departments in which tenure-track or tenured faculty will not lose their jobs. (Philosophy recommendation here: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/3671f2e1-7147-4159-a602-d247044136d6/preliminary-recommendation-philosophy.pdf ; full details regarding all reviewed departments here: https://provost.wvu.edu/academic-transformation/academic-program-portfolio-review ).

    You may also be amused/depressed to learn that "mission-based" plan is to replace expert language instruction "with an online language app or online partnership with a fellow Big 12 university": https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/08/11/wvu-announces-preliminary-recommendations-academic-transformation-next-steps

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  2. David Pesetsky

    The West Virginia University news office featured the really interesting NSF-funded linguistics research by Jonah Katz (tenured associate professor, PhD from my department at MIT) in a big news item. excellently written, posted on August 10 here:

    https://wvutoday.wvu.edu/stories/2023/08/10/wvu-linguists-sound-out-how-intensity-and-duration-of-speech-shape-pronunciation-rethinking-language-learning

    The very same day that article appeared trumpeting Katz's research (which engaged WVU students as well), his department was informed by the Provost of the proposal to shut it down, eliminate all its degree programs, and fire all its faculty, including Katz. The very same day, a few hours later.

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  3. Laurence Bernard McCullough

    Enrollment at WVU has decreased by 10% (more than 2000 students, resulting in 10000 fewer occupied seats in courses per semester assuming 15-hour load per student) over the past decade and this relentless trend will continue. Demographic trends that cause such drops in enrollment are not plausibly the result of mismanagement by the WVU administration, especially in states like West Virginia that struggle to keep their young people from leaving, much less attract people with families to move to from elsewhere in the US of A.

    COVID taught us that much teaching can be done effectively online. (I began online teaching two decades before COVID and found that I had individualized contact with learners that did not occur in in-person courses. Also, asynchronous courses are very convenient for learners.) It therefore makes sense for WVU to contract out with other universities for courses with high didactic content such as languages. Smart universities will see an opportunity here and market their online courses to other colleges and universities as a way to preserve learning opportunities for students at institutions having to make budget cuts. One result may be that students will have the opportunity to take courses from other universities with greater prestige than their own, which may help them to become more competitive for jobs and graduate/professional study. Another result, of course, will be lost revenues for WVU and other institutions that contract out some of their teaching. A third result will be more opportunity for part-time faculty to earn some money (or just continue to be exploited).

    It is also long past time that non-prestigious graduate programs, especially those with no or very poor placement rates to tenure-track positions, be closed down, including scores in Philosophy. Such closures will have no adverse effects on the quality of the professoriate. Such closures will also create the opportunity for faculty to focus exclusively on undergraduate teaching and its improvement, a survival-positive move that will also increase the competitive advantage of their universities.

    For context: West Virginia GDP puts it at 42nd and its state budget at 48th among the states. If it were not for the infusion of federal dollars (the appropriation of which for his home state now deceased WV Senator Byrd had no peers), West Virginia would probably be in receivership.

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  4. Brian Leiter

    Readers interested in the history of mismanagement that brought WVU to the brink should consult the website linked in the earlier post: https://wvufacts.wordpress.com/

    There is more to the story than demographics.

    I agree with Professor McCullough that there are too many graduate programs that serve no purpose, except university ambitions.

    Reply
  5. butt in seat

    "COVID taught us that much teaching can be done effectively online… It therefore makes sense for WVU to contract out with other universities for courses with high didactic content such as languages."

    I'd quibble with the premise you do state here, but leave that aside. Your conclusion only follows if you're suppressing another serious substantive premise. Note that the World Languages department has been a consistent moneymaker for WVU (to the tune of at least $800k net revenue every year), per the administration's own data (which they are paying consultants roughly the same amount of money to cultivate): https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/bf3ef02f-e90a-4e43-a316-d295fa489067/academic-transformation-public-data-table_july-17-2023-100.pdf

    As for the claim that "demographic trends that cause such drops in enrollment are not plausibly the result of mismanagement by the WVU administration", that is of course true. However, failing to anticipate those (widely anticipated) demographic trends, and instead heavily investing in real estate and staff with the goal of increasing enrollment to 40,000 students (as Gee claimed would happen for years, even as enrollment was steadily declining), and then suddenly declaring a crisis and letting over 300 employees go (counting the spring/summer cuts that already happened as well as the anticipated cuts), while retaining all of the real estate albatrosses because you signed leases (etc) with bad terms, is the very stuff of mismanagement by the WVU administration.

    We agree about grad programs. But note that the admin is simultaneously reducing the number of faculty in the relevant departments and increasing undergrad class sizes. I would love to see WVU focus on improving the quality of undergrad teaching, but this ain't that (as the shuttering of the World Languages department amply demonstrates)!

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  6. Laurence Bernard McCullough

    To Butt in the Seat: Your comment about World Languages department being a profit center to WVU calls immediately to mind what a wise physician leader taught me many years ago: Never underestimate the capacity of organizations to fail to calculate their self-interests reliably. Or: against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain (the inspiration, if I recall correctly, for Asimov's The Gods Themeselves.)

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  7. butt in seat

    I'm with you there!

    Reply
  8. Jonah

    I am the Jonah Katz in question here, professor of linguistics at WVU for at least a couple more months until I can find a way to flee this dumpster fire. Everything 'butt in seat' says about our department and the university is true. The university spreadsheet they link to, however, notably fails to include external grants our department has received, which totaled nearly $1m this year. We also don't have a PhD program, and neither does the philosophy department. I very much agree that there are too many mediocre PhD programs and I am proud not to be part of one. Finally, your presupposition that the enrollment decline here over the past decade is caused by demographic factors has no basis in evidence. The birthrate here, just as in the US more generally, didn't begin declining precipitously until after the great recession, around 2009-10. Those children are 13-14 years old now. That will be a huge problem for all American universities in a few years. But the *current* enrollment problems at WVU are caused by some combination of declining college-going rates and the failure of WVU to compete with richer and more prestigious schools for out-of-state students. Those problems are also not really the core of the crisis; we could easily have survived a 10-15% enrollment decline with more gradual and thoughtful reductions if the university leadership hadn't bet the farm on 30% growth, as detailed in both pieces linked to by Professor Leiter.

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  9. Bennett Gilbert

    People like Gordon Gee are not fools. They are put there to suppress the humanities for the ideological and financial purposes of other forces and people. The fact that this is happening in many public universities shows that it is not fundamentally a matter of conditions at UWV. As to the matter of "demographic" declines enrollment, there is in fact great demand for higher ed in the US. We need about twice as many K-12 and university instructors as we have. In a sane country, if enrollment decreases, they'd keep the same faculty and have smaller classes with more personal instruction. This also would preserve the faculty for research and the increase of knowledge. Finally, though this is not the place to go into it, online education is miserable.

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