When Does A University Stop Being a University?
West Virginia University may be the canary in the coal mine.
Earlier this week, University of Arkansas communication professor Lisa M. Corrigan took to The Nation to decry “The Evisceration of a Public University.”
Last week, West Virginia University (WVU) announced a plan to raze some of its core programs. The public land-grant university intends to eliminate 9 percent of its majors (32 programs total), all of its foreign language programs, and 16 percent of its full-time faculty members (169 in total). The departments targeted for these massive cuts count Truman, Marshall, Fulbright, and Rhodes scholars among their alumni. These cuts were recommended by the consulting firm rpk GROUP, and there’s every reason to believe they’re a trial balloon for doing this elsewhere. Anyone who cares about higher education should be alarmed about what this portends for public universities.
These changes are the functional equivalent of an atomic bomb at WVU, and stand to make it increasingly difficult for the institution to meet its stated mission to create “a diverse and inclusive culture that advances education, healthcare and prosperity for all by providing access and opportunity.” So why is it doing this?
WVU is the largest university in West Virginia. It is labeled an R1 university under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, meaning it is in the top tier of high research activity among US universities; it is the state’s only R1 school. Like other land-grant universities, it was created by the Morrill Act in 1862, which allocated land and financial support from the federal government to help reshape education in response to the Industrial Revolution. Land-grant institutions were charged with educating rural students across the country outside of the elite private universities, which were driven by tuition and legacy admissions.
Today, like many land-grant universities, WVU sits at the convergence of several cultural and economic tectonic shifts that are working in tandem to radically transform education. Foremost among these shifts is the changing economic climate of higher ed. WVU, like many higher-education institutions, has been plagued by gross financial mismanagement by administrators and consultants who have funneled money into massive administrative bloat and capital projects at the expense of faculty hires and support for faculty and graduate students. The university is currently facing a $45 million budget gap, and is seemingly uninterested in shrinking administrator salaries, creating artificial conditions for austerity.
This shift to massive administrative salary costs and, relatedly, software and tech expenditures, came about as federal funding of higher education massively slowed, particularly after George W. Bush’s cuts in 2007–08. Fifty years of cuts to higher education have accounted for losses of between 30 to 50 percent of funding for some land-grant schools. Facing state austerity and a culture war on public goods, especially public education, state funding for higher education continues to decline, forcing public universities to rely more on private donors, who impart new controls on higher education professionals.
The trend long predates Bush and is mostly a function of state governments spending less on higher education as demands to lower taxes and spend more on everything from prisons to schools to healthcare have squeezed budgets. This was already a big problem with Steven Taylor and I started teaching at Troy in 1998 and got much worse after the Great Recession a decade later.
Naturally, all of this resulted in fewer and fewer tenure-track positions and the shifting of teaching responsibilities to cheap adjunct (“contingent”) faculty who aren’t invested in the institution or its students.
While Corrigan’s essay devolves into a rant against Republicans, she’s right that there has been an increasing push from politicians and the public, mostly but not entirely from the right, against the traditional mission of higher education, shifting the focus almost entirely to “What job does that degree prepare graduates to hold?”
NYT higher education correspondent Anemona Hartocollis focuses on this issue (“Slashing Its Budget, West Virginia University Asks, What Is Essential?“) in today’s edition.
In a move that shocked the faculty, students and their families, West Virginia University announced last week that it was proposing laying off 169 faculty members, or 7 percent of the faculty on its main campus in Morgantown.
Thirty-two of the university’s 338 majors would be shut down, and some other programs would be consolidated, like those dealing with the state’s historically important but declining mining industry, which will probably be converted into an “energy” program, officials said. The cuts will affect 147 undergraduates and 287 graduate students, or less than 2 percent of student enrollment.
The administration is calling the plan a “transformation.” Some professors are calling it a “blood bath.”
The budget cuts have ignited debate about some of the biggest issues facing higher education. As students flee the humanities — interest in English and world languages is declining nationally — how much money should universities continue to put into them? Is it time to make tough choices about what students really need in order to be educated?
And what should be done about declining public trust in the value of higher education? “We simply have lost the support of the American public,” said E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University.
Dr. Gee contends that his school is a canary in the coal mine, and is being candid about its financial problems. Other public universities, he said, confront similar challenges. Penn State, for instance, faces a $63 million deficit this year, despite a hiring freeze and other savings. Rutgers University in New Jersey has been slashing budgets and raising tuition to help close a $77 million deficit.
“A lot of higher education institutions in the country have had a deficit in some form or other — ours is sort of in the middle,” Dr. Gee said in an interview.
Some faculty members in Morgantown lament that the state’s flagship university, a respected research institution, is turning its back on the liberal arts by closing programs like creative writing. They say that it is a low blow to a state known for Appalachian poverty and lack of opportunity, one that will accelerate the brain drain that drives many of its most talented young people out of the state.
The cuts, they say, will have ripple effects that will give students fewer course options and larger classes. And, they say, students will lose a precious commodity: the ability to try Russian or fiction writing, even if they are not majoring in the subjects.
The university’s problems, they say, stem from fiscal mismanagement. Over the last decade, the university has invested in projects like new buildings for agriculture, engineering, student health, student housing and recreation, conferences and labs, and it has renovated its athletic facilities. Faculty members say that capital spending was imprudent when West Virginia’s population was declining.
I would note that university faculty, myself included, have very strong opinions about how their institutions are managed despite most of us having no training or experience managing said institutions. Gee, who is a very controversial figure, has been running universities continuously since 1981! (West Virginia 1981-1985; Colorado 1985-1990; Ohio State 1990-1998; Brown 1998-2000; Vanderbilt 2000-2007; Ohio State again 2007-2013; and West Virginia again since 2014.) He may well be an arrogant son of bitch but he knows something about running a major university.
And this is a familiar theme that we’ve addressed here more than once:
The university has answered critics of the capital spending by saying that it was needed to maintain the campus and to attract students and faculty members, and that the university’s bond rating is good. The athletic department must raise money and “is expected to carry its own weight,” according to April Kaull, a university spokeswoman.
Dr. Gee said that pandemic aid had provided a false sense of security. “We were given a lot of relief during the pandemic, and some of that free money sometimes doesn’t bring about the best results,” Dr. Gee said. “But the real issue is the fact that there’s a post-pandemic world that we’re dealing with, which is dramatically different.”
As it did at many universities, the pandemic accelerated enrollment declines at the Morgantown campus, where the number of students has fallen by 2,101 students, or almost 8 percent, since August 2020.
One budget analysis said a long-term decline in state support was to blame for much of the university’s financial trouble. Higher education funding in West Virginia has dropped by about 24 percent, or $146 million, over the past decade, adjusted for inflation, according to the analysis by Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
Nationally, public colleges and universities have doubled their reliance on tuition since 1980, but in West Virginia, the figure has nearly tripled, according to the analysis. More than half — 56 percent — of total revenue for the state’s public colleges and universities now comes from tuition; in 1980, the figure was 19 percent. If West Virginia lawmakers had maintained education funding at the level of a decade ago, most of the current deficit would be erased, the report said.
Again, this is the core issue: public universities are no longer meaningfully funded by the public. This, combined with the arms races for better facilities to attract faculty and students means that the shortfall has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually tuition and fees. Which is more challenging in a poor state like West Virginia.
W.V.U.’s tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates this academic year is $9,648, which is steep for many families. The state’s median household income was a little more than $50,000 in 2021.
Dr. Gee, whose contract was recently renewed for one year, until 2025, is known for his charm, outspokenness and fund-raising skills, qualities that have propelled him to lead five universities: Ohio State (twice), Vanderbilt, Brown, West Virginia (twice) and Colorado.
But he has also made unpopular decisions. He said he had been involved in making budget cuts at all three of the public universities where he has served. At Ohio State, he restricted enrollment, merged departments and cut jobs through attrition, while beginning a fund-raising campaign. He once joked that he wore his trademark bow tie because “it’s much more difficult to be hung by the faculty with a bow tie than with a long tie.”
At West Virginia University, professors complain that the proposed changes will be more destructive than Dr. Gee makes them out to be.
“Other universities have closed particular languages,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a professor of Russian, Slavic and East European Studies. “But nobody has closed an entire department of world languages that we know of. The word that we’re hearing over and over again is ‘unprecedented.’”
But the university says the student body has changed, as it has elsewhere. The number of bachelor’s degrees in world languages, literature and linguistics awarded annually fell by 25 percent nationally and by 30 percent in the states where W.V.U. focuses on recruiting students between 2010 and 2021, the university said.
Language requirements for graduation, it says, have been eliminated at Amherst College, the University of Alabama, Johns Hopkins, George Washington University and Duquesne University, among others, as students have shifted to fields like computer science.
For West Virginia students who are still interested in learning French or Mandarin, the university has a possible solution: taking language courses online.
I honestly don’t know how a state flagship university, let alone a “doctoral university with very high research activity,” can exist without a world languages department. In most disciplines, proficiency in a second language is a minimal requirement for a doctorate. But, again, Gee has been running such institutions since I was a freshman in high school, so it’s possible that he has a keener insight on these matters than I do.
UPDATE: WaPo’s Nick Anderson (“WVU’s plan to cut foreign languages, other programs draws disbelief“) weighs in:
Modern flagship universities occupy a special place in the market, serving many regional and national needs. They are simultaneously a rallying point for pride in academics and athletics; a source of comprehensive degree offerings in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering and professional fields; and a center of high-level research that advances knowledge and applies it to pressing global problems. They must do all that while offering heavily discounted rates to in-state students, responding to volatile political environments, and recruiting aggressively elsewhere in the country and internationally.
The upheaval at WVU, as it is known in the Mountain State, raises questions about what the minimum academic offerings should be at a prominent public research university and how to deal with ebbing financial support from the state government while the head count of students — and the tuition revenue they represent — is also decreasing.
Budget troubles have also flared recently at public Rutgers University in New Jersey, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Kansas, among other places. Options in such cases typically boil down to more state funding, tuition increases, program cuts, or some mix of those. But the solutions that Gee’s top lieutenants have advanced at WVU strike some observers as radical.
“I can tell you that no other state flagship university has forsaken language education for its students or made the kinds of cuts to the humanities that WVU is undertaking,” Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, wrote in an Aug. 11 letter to Gee. Krebs said study of language, literature and culture is essential to the mission of a major university. “Access to these courses is especially important in public higher education, which is often the only route to a degree for many state residents,” she wrote. “The humanities should not be reserved for students who can afford private higher education.”
Indeed. But, as has been the case at other state flagships competing for prestige (including my graduate alma mater), the original goal of serving the students of the state has become secondary:
For several years before the coronavirus pandemic struck in 2020, the university was thinking big. When Gee arrived in 2014, WVU had 29,175 students in Morgantown and nearly 3,000 more at two sister campuses. Gee predicted system enrollment would reach 40,000 by 2020 — a massive increase for a state where the annual flow of high school graduates has stagnated in recent years and is projected to decline significantly. The university, which is northwest of Washington and south of Pittsburgh, counted on drawing students from other states and overseas. It expanded student housing and built and renovated other facilities.
But enrollment has slid nearly every year for the past decade, with the pandemic exacerbating the problem. In fall 2022, the system head count was little more than 27,000, with 24,741 on the flagship campus. About 42 percent of undergraduates in Morgantown are from West Virginia. The in-state charge this year for tuition and fees is about $9,600. Those from out of state pay about $27,000. Those figures don’t count housing and food.
Gee’s bet didn’t pan out. But he surely can’t be expected to have forecast the COVID pandemic.
Perhaps I’m not understanding you, but this seems off to me. I suspect very few world languages departments contribute to the achievement/maintenance of R1 status of a university.
And it seems to me that relatively few disciplines require proficiency in a second language for a doctorate degree.
Note, none of the above speaks to whether such departments are essential to the modern university.
2016, and January 6, 2021, make it clear that we are not suffering from a lack of STEM graduates, we are instead suffering from a lack of basic liberal arts education. We dominate tech and at the same time join a cult of personality and believe imbecilic conspiracy theories.
STEM shortages can be addressed by immigration, but a population that cannot identify the two nations on our land borders, or correctly identify the causes of our Civil War, or understand the concept of the rule of law, is not something we can fix by opening our borders. The American people are astoundingly ignorant, and it’s that ignorance that has us talking about a second civil war. Teaching ignoramuses to code does not address the problem. A broader liberal arts education does.
West Virginia is going in the wrong direction. Huge surprise.
West Virginia does have an elite Division I football team in the Big 12. So there’s that! What else really matters in American higher education?
There’s also knock on effects like ABET requires four semesters of a foreign language for accreditation, so are they going to drop accreditation for all their engineering degrees? How is that going to work in fields like civil engineering where EIT/PE certifications are important and their graduates won’t be eligible?
@Mimai: I gather it’s not necessarily a thing in STEM programs but most social science and humanities PhDs require at least reading/research proficiency in two languages. Mine substituted a sequence of statistics courses for one of the foreign languages and I was able to test out of German, fulfilling the requirement.
@Scott: the basketball and football coaches’ combined salary is about 8 million. Not factoring assistants and other resources, there is 10% of the shortfall right there.
@Thomm: Sigh. Only a tiny portion of the salary of those coaches come from the school budget. The vast majority comes from the separate athletics budget, which is fueled by multi-billion dollar television rights deals, ticket sales, boosters, and the like.
It’s been a century, perhaps what we call universities are ripe for reform. It was an issue in 1923, and it is again in 2023. BTW, the 1923 annual compendium of Scribner’s linked below has several good discussion of higher ed in that time. Interesting the topic is again risen to be dominant 100 years later.
—Are Our Universities Overpopulated? HENRY S. PRITCHETT, Scribner’s Magazine Vol. 73, 1923
And we might lament the adoption of the medieval university model vice the Scottish university that brought forth the Scottish Enlightenment. Professors today are rewarded on their research activities not on their teaching.
–‘Scottish university’ John Grier Hibben, Scribner’s magazine, 1901
And a bit of trivia:
” He may well be an arrogant son of bitch but he knows something about running a major university.”
He knows something about pleasing the right-wing politicians who appoint trustees and regents, we can agree on that. But I wonder — can any of the universities he ran be said to be better off when he left than when he arrived?
@JKB: Cutting edge as always.
This is sad. WVU is where I got my law degree (1985-1988). Morgantown is a wonderful and beautiful college town. Those were good years.
What he delivers may please Boards of Trustees yet bad for the academic mission of a university.
Perhaps enshitification applies beyond internet platforms.
Perhaps so (and probably so), but I would note that he has been, as the post notes, at WVU since 2014 (and was president before) so maybe, just maybe, he is part of the problem.
@wr:
Haha! It’s like JKB was reared by their great-great-great grandparents.
@Kurtz:
100%
Also, the core problem is here:
Trying to predicate everything on unrealistic growth will absolutely bite you in the ass.
@wr: @Kurtz: I doubt right-wingers hired him at Vanderbilt or Brown, but who knows? I gather he’s annoyed the faculty at each stop, though.
I am very puzzled by the issue of how a university can get by without teaching any foreign languages. I feel that maybe there is some misunderstanding or misreporting here, where certain advanced or “exotic” foreign language programs have been trashed.
It’s grim though even given that.
@Kurtz: I must say, it is always amusing for him to try and act like analyses of higher education from a century ago are relevant. It is like trying to glean wisdom about professional football from newspaper articles about the Canton Bulldogs and the Chicago Cardinals. While I am sure that there are some long-term nuggets of wisdom to be mined, it is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison.
@James Joyner: You may have a point about Brown, but I am willing to bet that the Vandy board, and certainly its donors, lean right.
@Steven L. Taylor: Yes, fair enough.
The assumption that there is administrated “bloat” in these schools strikes me as just that–an assumption. The expansion of university administrations is in part due to the changing and more complex nature of running a university. Over the last 50 years or so we’ve seen the addition or expansion of: in-house legal departments (including human resources), financial aid departments, on-campus security, mental health facilities and services, disability programs, semester abroad programs, student life departments and others. Most of this is necessary to provide a safe and healthy environment for students and faculty. Sure, there’s undoubtedly some bloat, but universities these days take on a much more active and proactive role in the lives of their student population.
I believe in higher education and as an undergraduate took a bunch of classes in subjects not strictly relevant to my focus like a literature class on Faulkner and a poly-sci class on the Soviet Union. However, the reality is that universities have overshot the sweet spot on the price/demand curve in large part by assuming that the customers (students) would be willing to assume more and more debt to get a degree. Simultaneously, the demographic of young people has been declining. Universities have fewer potential customers, and their product has gone through the ceiling that the customers are willing to pay. It is easy to manage an enterprise that is in demand and making money. When Gee predicted that there would be 120-125% more customers than actually showed up, this meant cuts were inevitable. No ideological biases needed. Retreats are hard to manage.
Hey, that Soviet Union course was relevant. Krushchev’s “Virgin Lands” program comes to mind.
@James Joyner:
This is a fair point, at least in the case of Brown. I’m skeptical Vanderbilt fits that bill, though.
It may mean nothing, but I noted that his tenure at Brown seems short. Of course, there could be a ton of reasons for that.
@Slugger: While the university administrators deserve some of the blame, the entire enterprise simply changed from one that was a public service to one that was expected to function as a business. My undergraduate institution charged $400 a semester when I started in 1986, so $800 a year for a full-time student. That’s $2231 in 2030 dollars. Tuition is now $11,120. That’s literally five times as much!
@James Joyner: Thanks for clarifying. Of relevance, there were about 5500 humanities PhD graduates in 2020. This represents about 7.5% of all PhDs awarded. It’s been a significant decline over the past few decades.
@Steven L. Taylor: Yes, this is a key factor. We’ve all been bracing for the enrollment cliff, and that was before covid. How anyone could have responsibly predicted a massive INCREASE in enrollment is beyond me.
A lot of flagship universities are struggling with the fixed costs of buildings etc now that they are a 25,ooo student body institution rather than a 35,000 one. From my vantage point, this seems to hit the liberal arts departments especially hard — for historical reasons, their campus footprint has been rather large, but now their student (and faculty) body is relatively small.
These departments tend to lose a lot of money and, thus, require support from the rest of campus. Depending on the campus budget model, this support can come at a significant cost to other departments. That might be a cost worth paying (“there’s no such thing as a university without an English department”), however, it can engender quite a bit of ill will, among other things. Trade offs.
@Mimai:
It’s part and parcel of both “What are you going to do with that degree?” and the steady erosion of tenure-track positions for those PhDs to go into. The NSF site is down for maintenance today but Statista seems reliable enough. The breakdown is a bit weird, in that the vast majority of the “doctorates” were in health sciences and law; the overwhelming number of those are surely practitioner degrees (MD, DO, DDS, DVM, JD, etc.) rather than research doctorates. And the next category is Education, which is its own cottage industry. The PhD fields, then, are what remain. And, without going Kevin Drum and building my own spreadsheet, it looks like humanities and social science fields account for roughly 40 percent of those. So not nothing.
James: “He may well be an arrogant son of bitch but he knows something about running a major university. ”
Run them, or run them into the ground?
@James Joyner: Thanks for the data source. I used American Academy of Arts and Sciences. As usual, it’s all in the definitions and categorizations of “humanities” and “social sciences.”
Regardless, the relevant departments do seem to be in a death spiral of sorts. STEM has sucked all the oxygen out of the room (for good and/or bad), students (and especially parents) are less willing to pursue these degrees, fewer and fewer “traditional” academic positions, changes in funding, etc.
One question I ponder is: Is it better to have a flagship university without XYZ departments or to have no flagship university at all?
I realize this might be a false dichotomy, but it does help me think through what I consider to be the necessary and sufficient components of a university in 2023 and beyond. It also forces me to grapple with the tradeoffs.
That Gee? E. Gordon Gee? Oh my……
I lived in Boulder Colorado during some of Gee’s tenure at C.U. I can say that many of us were happy to see him find other employment.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Does he? I’ve never seen a major private university that wasn’t run by the fundraisers and finance types, all solidly conservative. It’s a primary source of friction between administration and faculty — the faculty tends toward liberal values, which the administration thinks of purely as marketing points.
@Jay L Gischer:
If they follow the current trend, they will still teach foreign languages — they will simply stop offering degree programs in them. So you will still have untenured instructors and TAs teaching intro French / German / Russian / Spanish, and maybe others, and maybe even a few elective lit courses. But you won’t be able to get a degree in German Literature.
Are they keeping the Linguistics program? If so, that’s where they’ll staff the language instruction courses from. Which shows a deep ignorance of what Linguistics is these days, but it doesn’t really matter when everyone has Google Translate at their fingertips, right?
@Steven L. Taylor: The thing that I find myself wondering about is the whole “what’s wrong with this picture” aspect of a state half the population of Metropolitan Seattle sustaining a university with over 30,000 students spread across 3 campuses. That doesn’t make sense to me.
@Kurtz: “It’s like JKB was reared by their great-great-great grandparents.”
It’s why he never replies around here. He’s too busy yelling at himself to get off his own lawn.
@JKB:
Holy crap, JKB has said something I firmly agree with. Bravo, JKB. Keep it up. And three cheers for Adam Smith, David Hume, and Joseph Black!
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
This is why drawing students from out of state is so important — not only does it let you grow beyond what your state can organically sustain, it does it with students you can charge higher tuition for (and who all need room and board).
Of course, competition for out-of-state students really is a zero sum game. One state’s gain is everyone else’s loss. Which is where all of the marketing expenditures (both explicit and implicit) come from, wasting everyone’s money in a red queen race. Sort of like campaign finance, in that regard.
Cornell, which is the land grand university for New York, handles this by splitting the university into two firewalled parts. The Ivy League university is extremely competitive, research-oriented, and very expensive. The land grant college is accessible and much less expensive for state residents, and offers excellent education in agricultural and technical fields — but you’d have better luck trying to transfer from East Podunk community college into the Ivy side of Cornell than from the land grant side to the Ivy side.
@Mimai:
I vote for the latter, if by “flagship” you mean something beyond being the best public university in the state.
I have always felt that the purpose of a state university system is to offer quality education in every field to state residents at affordable cost. Everything else should be either complementary to or supportive of that goal. (Including the athletics, but that’s a topic for a different day…)
Where is all of this going? I don’t know. But half the country is dumbing down really fast.
Recently in Florida, at the behest of Governor DeSantis and a special Education Commission, public school curriculums concerning Slavery now include information and materials sourced from ‘Prager University’ which, you might know, is not really a university. Kind of like ‘Trump University.’
Also, a public university gave us Senator Tommy Tuberville. Just saying.
@Mimai:
Because there is a school of “leadership” that thinks it entails making bold predictions to demonstrate that one is a visionary!
@DrDaveT:
I won’t argue.
@Michael Reynolds:
Why can’t it be both?
The systematic Republican assault on public education has not employed precision weapons.
@DrDaveT:
A key part of this is how one considers the “system.” To take one example, there are over 50 SUNY campuses that offer an undergraduate degree program.
Must all of these campuses offer quality education in every field? I’m concerned that’s not feasible (was it ever?).
An alternative is to require the SUNY system, as a whole, to meet this goal (quality education in every field).
Of course, states vary a lot in their public university systems — SUNY is amongst the largest, Alaska and West Virginia amongst the smallest. This matters.
@Steven L. Taylor: Haha! I’m familiar with that school. Unfortunately, my own dean graduated from the arch rival of that school. meh
@DrDaveT: I “get” the issue from the business angle. My disconnect has to do with the possibility that the model you suggest may not be sustainable across 50 or so “flagship” universities competing in a market with privates. Beyond the basic issue is also the question of whether we need have one (or more) “flagships” in every state of the union.
Don’t get me wrong. That model is great for creating a well-educated surplus labor force to staff all the Starbuckses and MickeyDees that we need employees for. 🙁
@Steven L. Taylor: The “doctorate” programs in educational “leadership” are a whole nutha scam altogether. The last 2-year I taught at worked with a private university with aspirations of becoming a major player is graduate educational research to create several customized programs for department office managers for the purpose of allowing the jobs those people held as executive administrative positions. The capstone achievement was moving the office supervisor (she originally answered to the Dean of Administrative Services) for the personnel department to Vice President of Human Resources. We got 2 or 4 additional deans out of this move, too.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’m not sure how you are using the word “flagship” here, with or without scare quotes. We need to have affordable quality university education in every state of the union. Does that require “flagships”? Not necessarily, if by that term you mean schools that can compete in quality with the best private universities, or that conduct world-class research. Again, my take on the purpose of state universities is education, not research (or status, or bringing in money).
@DrDaveT: Partially, I use quotes for “flagship” because I take the concept to be bogus in the first place, so my use is as in “so called.” Beyond that, the ship of state universities (flagship or otherwise) being to provide educational opportunities probably set sail while I was in university 50-some years ago. We’ve been providing more educational opportunities than states need to meet economic demands for almost as long as I’ve been alive and it seems to me that we’re at the point now where higher education is being frequently/mostly used as a screening system/justification to gut working wages.
But that’s just my inner Marxist talking.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
We probably don’t disagree very much, then. When I say ‘education’ I mean just that, not a code word for professional certification or status or employability. I believe that the purpose of state universities is to provide undergraduate and graduate curricula to produce people competent in their fields, at a price (at least for in-state students) that anyone can afford. Everything else is gravy, though sometimes it can be pretty nice gravy. I am very much opposed to the idea of making a bachelor’s degree essentially mandatory for jobs that do not require any specific expertise in an academic discipline.
Once upon a time, when I was an Assistant Professor of Industrial Engineering, I was told that the reason local businesses hired our graduates was not because they wanted them to know anything about Industrial Engineering, but because having the degree proved that they weren’t idiots and were trainable. I wasn’t happy about that then, and still amn’t.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Let’s just say I will provide a politic “no comment”(for a number of reasons) and move on.
I read “Gordon Gee” and thought – no, it can’t be the same guy, but it is. I attended CU Boulder (87-92) when Gee was there. I’m surprised he’s still kicking because I’m no spring chicken. That was a long time ago, but I remember his bow-tie and that he was controversial. I think he raised student fees and a chunk of that was to go to the football program – those interested in the racket known as college sports probably remember this was when CU was the national champs. But I don’t recall paying too much attention to Gee – I was busy with other things.
More generally, one frustration is there seems to be a lack of good collated information on the changes in income and spending by universities over time. This allows many difficult-to-adjudicate claims to be frequently repeated, like “cuts” in state funding are the primary explanation.
Looking at the number in the cited pieces for West Virginia, it turns out that the higher-education spending didn’t change over the past decade, and the “cuts” described are entirely inflation. But let’s assume that funding kept up with inflation – the University would still have a deficit- albeit a much smaller one, still have 3x the tuition, etc. That organization’s problem’s can’t entirely be explained by the failure to make inflation adjustments to state funding.
It seems to me there are a bunch of different things going on, not just at this University but generally:
– State funding levels
– More administration and the change in the balance of power in Universities from professors to administrators.
– Federal government throwing money at higher education
– Competition between schools for a small pool of high-tier students
– Probably others I can’t think of right now.
All these tend to increase costs and therefore, tuition. I don’t really like Paul Campos, but I think he’s right here. One thing that needs to happen is to give professors more authority in universities.
WRT resource allocations to more campuses than a state’s population can support. Here in South Carolina, there are three “research universities”: University of South Carolina, Clemson, Medical University of South Carolina. However, for largely political reasons, the USC system has at least two or three branch campuses that get left out in the resource wars. Probably, it’s because they are located in poorer communities. It would be a smarter use of funds to close those campuses and provide daily bus transportation to the Columbia campus for students who want to attend USC.