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West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee Given Contract Extension

The West Virginia University Board of Governors gave President E. Gordon Gee a one-year contract extension Monday amid a budget shortfall, falling enrollment and plans to cut some academic offerings.

Gee, 79, was given an extension through June 2025 during the board’s special meeting in Morgantown. His contract was set to expire next year.

Gee thanked the board after the vote was announced, acknowledged the ongoing challenges and said the intent is to have “a process that is clear, that is visible to everyone” about improving the university.

The move comes as the university is evaluating nearly half of its academic programs and addressing an estimated $45 million budget deficit.

In June, the Board of Governors approved an estimated $1.2 billion budget for fiscal year 2024 that includes $7 million in staff cuts, or around 132 positions, including 38 faculty members. The board moved forward with slashing 12 graduate and doctorate programs and approved a tuition increase of just under 3%.

Gee and other top university officials have said the budget shortfall is largely a result of enrollment declines. The student population has decreased 10% since 2015. Gee also has cited the factors of inflation stress and increases to premiums the school is required to pay for the state’s government employees’ health insurance program.

In 2019, Gee was given a three-year contract extension through 2024 at a salary of $800,000 per year. At the time, board Chairman William Wilmoth said Gee was “one of, if not the top, university leader in the country.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic started a year later, the university issued $40 million in debt to deal with it. The university also took on an additional $10 million in debt to pay for the increased employee insurance costs.

Gee is in his second stint at West Virginia that began in 2014. He also was the school’s president from 1981 to 1985. Gee also served two stints as president at Ohio State and had similar roles at Vanderbilt University, Brown University and the University of Colorado.

Governor Considers Special Session Request

Gov. Jim Justice has addressed a request from the House of Delegates Democratic Caucus to call a special session of the legislature next month.

Last week, the House of Delegates Democratic Caucus delivered a letter to Gov. Jim Justice urging him to call a Special Legislative Session during the upcoming interim meetings Aug. 6 – Aug. 8.

In the letter the caucus suggests the session focus on the state’s corrections and foster care employment shortfalls as well as what they call a higher education funding crisis.

During an administrative briefing Wednesday afternoon, Justice gave his position on the three issues, saying he supports doing any and everything to improve foster care. He also said the state needs to help out its universities, but the economics of the situation need to be better understood.

“The shortfall in regard to corrections, I’ve sent it up twice,” Justice said. “Really, and truly, this should have been done a long, long, long time ago. So don’t anybody now ask me from the legislature side, as to ‘We really want you to send us and send this off” and everything. For God’s sakes, alive! It should have already been done.”

The governor did not rule out the possibility of calling a special session and says he will evaluate it more seriously when his chief of staff is back in Charleston.

In response to a question, Justice said that the August interim session would be the right time to call a special session.

“The August interim is the time that we should do this. We ought to do it right now,” he said. “That’s just all there is to it.”

W.Va. House Democrats Call For Special Session To Remedy Multiple Crises

The caucus suggests the session focus on the state’s corrections and foster care employment shortfalls and what they call a higher education funding crisis.

In a letter delivered Tuesday to Gov. Jim Justice, the House Democratic Caucus urged the chief executive to call a Special Legislative Session during the August interim meetings.

The caucus suggests the session focus on the state’s corrections and foster care employment shortfalls and what they call a higher education funding crisis.

The letter reads:

“With the surplus that you (Justice) announced this month, we should address these challenges that for far too long have gone unaddressed. A $1.8 billion surplus doesn’t do much good for the 8,000 children in foster care if we don’t act to help them. The surplus won’t help our colleges and universities offset their shortfalls if we don’t act to help them. And the surplus won’t help our struggling corrections workers if we don’t act to help them by finally adjusting their outdated pay scale.”

House Minority Leader Doug Skaff, D-Kanawha, said these are all non-partisan issues.

“Regardless, if you’re a D or an R, it’s about helping West Virginians,” Skaff said. “Whether it’s higher education and our students, or those trying to find people to fill all the vacancies in our correctional facilities. We’ve got to quit kicking the can down the road. It’s going to continue to get worse. I know for a fact there’s, there’s institutions of higher learning right now deciding if they’re even going to be open this fall or not.”

Justice has said he wants a consensus before talks on corrections and has talked of progress in foster care hiring.

The interim meetings are slated for August 6 to 8 in Charleston.

WVSU Holds Archaeological Field School In Malden

The historic Hale House in Malden is the site of WVSU’s archaeological field school.

West Virginia State University (WVSU) is having its archaeological field school at the historic Hale House in Malden in eastern Kanawha County. For four weeks, students have been digging up West Virginia history for their History 399 class.

“We do a field school which is a learning experience for the students,” said Michael Workman, class instructor. “They learn some of the basic techniques of archaeology. This is, however, historical archaeology and that we use not only what we can dig, but also historical records.”

Student Keyira Curtis (left) and field coordinator Carl Demuth look at plans for the day.

*Credit: Jack Bailey/West Virginia State University*

WVSU students and faculty sit down for a meeting about the dig site.

*Credit: Jack Bailey/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

The Hale House is believed to have once been the house of Kanawha Valley politician, Dr. John Hale. Hale was the owner of the largest salt works in North America, supplying salt to the thriving meat packing center of Cincinnati. After the collapse of the salt business in the 1870s, he ventured into brick making machinery, the Bank of the West in Charleston, which he helped organize, as well as the city’s first gas company.

The archaeological dig project came about after a chance meeting with Bob Maslowski, a consultant, and Lewis Payne at Dickinson Salt-Works.

“We came up with the idea of getting a field school started at Dickinson Salt Works and maybe, have it turn into a long-term project,” said Maslowski “As it turned out, this particular site came up and we decided to start the excavations here, at the Hale House. We thought originally that it was occupied by John Hale who was a famous historian and salt maker and we haven’t been able to substantiate that, but it is one of the early houses in Malden and in the Kanawha Valley.”

Hale helped initiate the move of the state capitol to Charleston in 1870 and headed a group of investors who built the capitol building in 1871. Hale also became the mayor of Charleston that same year.

Students search for lost items from Kanawha Valley history.

*Credit: Jack Bailey/West Virginia State University*

Carl Demuth is the field coordinator for the project and an adjunct professor at Marshall University. He said it is important for students to learn about the lives of people in history.

“There’s not many other opportunities you have to be the first person to hold something that no one else has touched in fifty, a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years, and that’s what a lot of these students are doing,” Demuth said. “Working with these students lets them have the chance to embrace their own heritage and history in a way that’s a little bit different and, you know, that’s really why I’m out here.”

West Liberty University Names New President

Timothy Borchers was selected unanimously as West Liberty University’s new president by the Board of Governors Friday morning.

Borchers, who was chosen out of a group of four finalists, previously served as the vice president for Academic Affairs at Peru State College in Nebraska.

There were 59 applications for president in total, according to the university.

Borchers has 18 years of higher education administrative experience. He holds a doctoral degree in communication from Wayne State University, a master’s degree in communication from Wayne State and a bachelor’s degree in Speech Communication from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

He said he was honored for the opportunity to address the school’s challenges and find creative solutions.

“Together, we will increase enrollment,” Borchers said. “We will increase retention rates working together. I’ll be transparent. I will be a steady and consistent leader. I’ll be present on campus.”

Borchers and his wife, Suzanne Williams, plan to be on campus by the first week of June and are excited to engage in the university’s activities and culture. He will assume the presidency on July 1.

“We’re already looking forward to the first athletic and arts events of the fall semester,” he said. “We’ll be happy to have people to the house to deepen those connections, to re-engage everyone after this semester gets started.”

Borchers succeeds Interim President Dr. Cathy Monteroso who has served as president since January 1, 2023.
West Liberty chose to let the contract of previous president W. Franklin Evans expire in December after accusations that he failed to give proper attribution in several speeches.

WVU Student Aims To Connect Those Aging Out Of State Care To Higher Education

Less than three percent of people raised in state care nationwide obtain a college degree. One West Virginia University (WVU) Newman Civic Fellow aims to change that statistic.

Heidi Crum grew up in wardships, or as some know it, foster care. As an infant, she was removed from her biological parents, placed in state care and transferred across many states.

“When you’re raised in wardship, the people of influence are social workers, caseworkers, people in law enforcement,” Crum said. “As a little girl, that’s who I aspired to become. I was deeply ashamed when I wasn’t able to finish high school because of the way that I was discharged from the system. So I always knew that I aspired towards something serving other people or giving back.”

She describes her education as a journey, not a destination. She aged out of wardship at 15 years old and sought her GED as a personal goal.

“By the time I learned that less than three percent of people like me earn a college degree, I was frustrated enough, determined enough and convinced enough from personal experience that was accurate, that I wanted to get my degree,” Crum said.

Crum is attending WVU remotely from Missouri and will graduate in May of this year with her master’s degree in Higher Education Administration. She will begin doctoral work this fall in the same program.

When discussing state care, Crum said language is important. For her, terms like “foster care” paint an incorrectly comfortable portrait of the reality of day-to-day life as a ward of any state.

“As someone raised since infancy in wardship, my story has continually been written for me by other people,” Crum said. “There’s something very valuable about claiming ownership back of my voice, my story. And so the terminology, foster care, from my perspective, erases entire subpopulations because I was not only in foster care and foster care as a placement outcome after I had been removed from traumatic circumstances, the removal itself is traumatic, and the replacement is traumatic.”

According to the Pew Research Center, young adults without a permanent family fare far worse than other youth.

More than one in five end up homeless after age 18, while one in four become involved in the justice system within two years of leaving foster care. Fifty-eight percent of foster youth will graduate high school by age 19, compared to 87 percent of all 19-year-olds.

For her Newman Civic Project, Crum plans to expand her work with group homes, transitional living facilities and similar placement spaces.

“It’s just quite like WVU to continue to show up, to meet me where I am, and to validate and recognize that I am only one face and one voice, of people like me,” Crum said. “So it’s a tremendous honor. And I feel a little bit like an ambassador to sort of introduce two different worlds together. And that’s what I hope that I do very well.”

Crum completed her Regents Bachelor of Arts degree through the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences in 2021 with an emphasis on human services.

While she is a non-traditional student, attending virtually, Crum said WVU’s culture of support has helped inspire her to help others find safe spaces through education.

“But the crux of the issue at the heart of the matter was WVU simply allowing me to introduce myself, and to stand in the space that I was in, and for them to meet me where I was, in every single context, that has been the thesis,” Crum said.

Crum is one of 154 civic leaders from 38 states, Washington, D.C. and Mexico that Campus Compact has named to the 2023-2024 Newman Civic Fellows. She aims to close the gap between congregant facilities and colleges and universities, especially at regional and local levels.