I’m curious about the specifics of what or how Gee mismanaged funds? If he embezzled money then he should be held accountable.
However, if he spent it on new facilities, buildings, dorms and faculty how is that different than pretty much every school in the US? Every school we visited had construction or renovations happening. They have to to keep up with the Jones. Cheap money allows for malinvestment to happen.
WVU just happens to be the first to be caught. The PASSHE schools behaved similarly. I’m sure there will be more.
I didn’t say their analysis was irrational, I said that the arguments some on this thread (yes, including you) are making are based in false presuppositions.
I think that the consultants’ conclusions were entirely rational. I would argue that they’re not well-grounded, but rationality isn’t the question at hand here. Lots of things are rational.
My husband was the CFO of an educational institution (private). The school NEVER embarked on a building project without it already being funded, usually through large donations (or even, one donor) AND with an endowment for the building’s maintenance already funded.
Ok, let’s go with the above suggestion that we get rid of all administrators responsible at least partly for the current crisis. Per the above link, that saves $3 million in salaries, but presumably at least someone would have to be hired at some salary to replace some of those fired, so the savings won’t be the full 3 million dollars. That leaves a 42 million dollar deficit. Next steps?
The Board will surely approve this Plan unless an alternative plan is presented showing a similar savings by alternative methods.
225 posts later, I expected more options than statements simply that we do not like these cuts or believe they are well founded
If you’re actually asking me specifically, see my posts #32 & #43. I suspect if those changes are made, the legislature would be willing to float the $43 million needed to cover WVU’s costs this year to have the significantly bigger savings in future years by enacting my plan. (I left $1 million to cover the salaries for needed administrators…a 67% savings over the current administrators.)
Still waiting for the address to send my invoice so I can get $500k.
And I might have expected more than simple assertions that rpk GROUP employs smart people, and therefore we should accept their processes and ideas at face value. But here we are.
The basic problem is that the process was (effectively, even if possibly unconsciously) rigged from the start. The process, including the data that was required to be used, predetermined a set of conclusions. That is a ridiculous way to try to fix a budgetary problem, and is likely to create more problems than it cures.
And are the proposed cuts likely to be implemented by the Board of Governors? Well, yes—I don’t think anyone is contesting that. The real question is whether they’re the right cuts. I and others say no—and we have presented rationales for that. But to suggest that people with that point of view should be required to present a comprehensive (or even nearly so) alternative plan to be taken seriously, that’s just weird, you know?
No, I don’t know. Even if I take everything you say at face value and agree with it, that does not change the bottom line that WVU needs to come up, right now, with a budget that works by whatever means necessary. If the only plan presented to the Board is this one, so be it. @AustenNut can try to sell his alternative; maybe someone will bite. There is no evidence a better plan is possible, so the criticism of this one isn’t very helpful. Maybe this is the best of all bad choices.
your plan is beyond the authority of President Gee and the WV trustees. It will require legislative action.
btw: PA also suffers from a many small state colleges that should be consolidated. But that is receiving a bunch of pushback from the localities, as the colleges have morphed into a Jobs program.
You’re correct. But as President Gee has mentioned his work with the legislators and lobbying the legislature comes under the office of a university president, so though Gee and WVU can’t do this unilaterally, they could certainly make efforts to get others on board with the plan.
The WVU Board of Governors approved most of the previously proposed cuts today (5 free articles per month upon free account registration).
Some selected excerpts:
Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted today to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.
The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).
WVU will also eliminate all its foreign language minors, with the possible exceptions of Spanish and Chinese, the two languages in which it will still offer courses. There was one relevant change Friday: the board preserved two faculty positions in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.
The current minors allow students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.
The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.
The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.
University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degrees at WVU.
Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.
The students of West Virginia deserve so much more. And it makes my stomach ache to think of how many faculty careers will be destroyed for no valid reason.
So is the solution that all 50 plus flagships offer Old Norse ( like Cornell) and Puppetry (like WVU) for the handful of students who might take those courses? At what point does it not make sense for taxpayers to pay for a program of interest to just a few, if any, citizens? Is that really an ethical use of public funds on one or two students when the funds could be diverted to oversubscribed programs?
My reading of the article was that its mention of puppetry was not a claim that all state schools should offer it - they described it as an idiosyncratic program based upon the work/dreams/genius? of a single faculty member, not easily replicable in other places - but rather that state universities should be open to unique explorations of the human experience. And it certainly sounds like there were more than 1 or 2 students in her classes - not just majors, but also elective students.
I think Gee, and his propensity to run up debt, is the real story here. As the article points out, Kentucky and Arkansas (and so many other public flagships in poor states)) are managing to keep a range of non-vocational and non-“practical” offerings, and still balance their books, and keep their enrollment steady. The whole debate about the relative value of obscure majors or esoteric fields (though world languages and linguistics are neither) is a red herring distracting us from a classic case of administrative mismanagement. It plays into cultural debates about the humanities that are “hot” right now, but doesn’t help us understand what happened in WV.
Yes, administrative mismanagement happened and is awful and hopefully the parties responsible will be held accountable.
Nevertheless, the money deficit is what it is, and needs to be addressed this fiscal year. Apparently the current plan is the best the trustees can come up with to address that deficit, and it has the support of the elected representatives of the taxpayers. No fairy godmothers in the form of philanthropists have stepped in to save the situation, so it will be implemented.
Other schools from SUNY Potsdam to Miami of Ohio are facing similar challenges regarding course cuts and offerings; is widespread mismanagement the problem everywhere?
An analogy- you are the CEO of a toy company. It is NOT enough to have your teams analyze your OWN data (what is selling, what isn’t) or competitive data (your market share vs. competitors). You need to have sophisticated analyses of MACRO data- demographic trends- birthrate up or down, seasonally skewed? You need to understand shifts in parenting practices (less gendered toy preferences in some parts of the country; traditional preferences in others). You need to understand trends in family formation… step siblings under the same roof so potentially a much wider spread in children’s ages; more adults giving gifts to the same number of children overall (i.e. several sets of grandparents). Etc.
One bad year- you can likely talk your way through it. Two bad years, you are probably out the door.
So seeing that other U’s are similarly struggling is the obvious. Good leadership is going to take into account the macro trends facing higher ed.
Agreed. And those macro trends are partially responsible for what is happening at WVU ( in addition to mismanagement there). But most universities will have to confront those very same macrotrends within the next decade, and are likely to engage in the same reevaluation of programs that just occurred at WVU. Perhaps some will opt for different results, but I doubt it.
