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New Student Organization Opposes WVU Program Cuts

Opposition at West Virginia University to proposed program cuts – including a student walkout and demonstrations at university meetings – has been led by the recently formed West Virginia United Student Union.

The West Virginia University Board of Governors will vote Friday on proposed cuts to programs at the university’s Morgantown campus. Campus opposition to the cuts – including a student walkout and demonstrations at university meetings – has been led by the recently formed West Virginia United Student Union.

Reporter Chris Schulz sat down with two of the union’s founding members, Matthew Kolb and Christian Adams, to talk about their efforts.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Schulz: Mathew, I’ll start with you. What exactly is the West Virginia University Student Union?

Kolb: The West Virginia United Students Union, it’s a union of students and student organizations on WVU’s Morgantown campus. We’ve been working to advocate for student voices in a way that let’s say, for example, the student government hasn’t been able to do. We’ve been organizing for only a few months now, we’ve got over 350 members, we’re looking at possibly having over 500 within the next week or two. We’re growing pretty rapidly. We’ve gotten a lot of support from the community. Right now our goal is making sure that we build a strong foundation for organizing students on the campus this year, and next year, and every year following.

Schulz: So Christian, can you add to that a little bit? Can you tell me a little bit more about what it is the organization is capable of doing that more traditional entities like the SGA can’t?

Adams: Yeah, so ultimately, the Student Union provides a much more participatory platform for students to engage with local politics, whether that be on the level of SGA, or the Board of Governors or even within the state politics, because ultimately it serves as a platform and a voice for a large quantity of students to be capable of engaging in.

Schulz: Christian, I’ll continue with you. Can you tell me a little bit about the history?

Adams: We announced it, I believe it was July 20 of this year. We had definitely started thinking about it all the way back at the end of April, and kind of how to create it. Originally, it was just an idea for a simple newsletter. But as time progressed, and as we found out more and more about the cuts, we understood that to organize effectively, we had to move beyond that, and create something that allowed students to engage much more thoroughly than just a newsletter.

Schulz: Matthew, would you say that it’s accurate that the cuts kind of motivated the creation of this organization?

Kolb: Completely accurate. In general, having a student union like ours that can represent students the way it does is important, no matter the time, or place, but the fact that the cuts were so, the proposals were so widespread, affecting so many students, it really motivated them to get in, get involved in a way that they might not have at any other time. We’re hoping that we are going to be able to build solidarity right now that will continue past this issue. A lot of organizing happens based around issues, and it’s hard to get students and really anyone involved in a unionization effort if there’s not an apparent issue directly in front of them.

Schulz: So tell me Christian a little bit more about what organizing actually looks like on the ground right now.

Adams: Around this issue in general, most of what we do is research, essentially combating the current narrative that the administration has been putting forth. A lot of what we’ve been doing has been working towards allowing the faculty and the students to have a voice. But in terms of concretely how we do that a lot of it is fliers, showing up to meetings, it is reading articles, it is poring over the data and trying to establish a concrete and coherent narrative around what is going on.

Schulz: Matthew, anything to add to that?

Kolb: One of the important things about the student union is the way that it brings students from across the university together to advocate for themselves and for their peers. We’re able to bring in a bunch of decentralized information, centralize it and then distribute it to everybody in that organization. That’s one of the more important things that we have been doing was making sure that we’re informing our members and other students of these events going on, that they need to show up to, they need to ask questions, give comments, give their thoughts, tell administration, student government, the Board of Governors, how these recommendations are going to affect them.

Schulz: What do you feel has been the impact of organizing so far Matthew?

Kolb: I’m an undergraduate senior, this is my fourth year I’m going into right now. The three, four years I have been here, I have not seen a campus culture at WVU like I see it today. I fully believe that this student union has altered the way that students relate to each other, the way they relate to faculty and staff and how they understand the power dynamics at this university. We’re hoping that that cultural change is a permanent change at this campus.

Adams: Well, I would definitely agree with Matthew that the culture on the WVU campus has shifted dramatically, but we’ve also seen the faculty be emboldened significantly, and we’ve seen the relationship between the administration and the students and the faculty changed dramatically as the power imbalance has…it’s been pushing towards being more level. The administration is starting to get scared. We are concretely creating long term institutional power that will be able to affect change on campus and across our community.

Schulz: More broadly, what other issues is the union concerned with, beyond the immediacy of the cuts, Matthew?

Kolb: There have been discussions about accessibility on campus to speaking about tuition, making sure that tuition is affordable. The cost of housing on campus, making sure you know that everybody in West Virginia has the opportunity to go to WVU. Making sure that college athletes are adequately compensated for their work. Discussions about holding administration accountable, holding the Board of Governors accountable, things of that nature. Especially right now, when the administration holds such power, building a sort of democratic power at the university that does not exist right now. But people have been trying to make it exist. We don’t want to try to make it exist, we want it to exist, and we’re going to make it exist.

Schulz: Do you feel like what your organization, what your union has done so far will have a meaningful impact come Friday?
Kolb: Friday will come and Friday will go. We may succeed, we may not. But what is maybe even more important is how our union succeeds at cementing itself as a legitimate and credible fighting force on this campus, for students and by students. So whenever the time comes that they might think about doing what they have done and are trying to do now, maybe they will think otherwise. Because they know that there will be a reaction from the students. They know that they can’t hide it like they used to, they know that they can’t peddle a narrative to the press like they used to, because the faculty, staff and students have been working to try to meet them where they’re at power wise with manufacturing a narrative, to make sure that our stories get out there, that our research gets out there so that everything people read is not just what the administration wants them to read.

WVU Community Speaks Against Program Cuts Ahead Of Board Vote Friday

Dozens of West Virginia University community members spoke out against proposed cuts to university programming ahead of a vote Friday.

Dozens of West Virginia University (WVU) community members spoke out against proposed cuts to university programming ahead of a vote Friday.

For more than three hours Thursday, faculty, students, alumni and community members pleaded with the WVU Board of Governors to reject or freeze proposed cuts to university programs. Speakers were each limited to two minutes.

First to speak was Student Body President Madison Santmyer, who read a student assembly opinion and an assembly resolution, both in opposition to the cuts.

“The new budget model used to make these decisions was not adequately explained by administrators,” she read. “Communication by the university on academic transformation, especially regarding final decisions on the future of academic programs, has failed to meet students where they are, and has been muddled in administrative jargon.”

Brian Woerner, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, urged the board to carefully consider the implications of the cuts before their vote.

“Graduates from these majors have driven the growth of the software industry in Morgantown, Fairmont and Clarksburg over the last few decades,” he said. “I fear that significant cuts will limit economic development opportunities for the state and surrounding region for years to come.”

Masters student Zachary Gilpin warned of the unintended consequences of cuts beyond their intended programs. He said multiple programs will be impacted that are not listed for termination, or for loss and faculty.

“These programs depend on education and programs for World Languages in order to advance research that you are offering as an example of success in one area,” Gilpin said. “You have to consider that there are downstream impacts. Isolating any given program as one individual particle or one atom to analyze doesn’t make any sense in the complex ecosystem of a university.”

Gilpin also questioned the qualifications of administrators to suggest such cuts.

“I implore you to consider that while your administrators may have expertise when it comes to gutting worker’s comp in West Virginia, perhaps they’re not the best whenever it comes to recommending how to reform education at the level of WVU,” he said.

Gilpin was not alone in criticizing the administrators who have proposed the cuts.

“We’re also very well aware that the administration’s salaries have increased by $50 million since 2013,” said undergraduate Miles Case. “You’ve already done significant damage to our university. And so now it’s your duty and your obligation to fix it.”

He then turned his attention on President Gordon Gee, who received a lopsided vote of no confidence from the faculty last week.

“You were correct when you said that higher education is under attack, but I think you forgot to mention that you were the one who was attacking it,” Case said.

Many took the time to discuss the impact the university had on their lives, and how the proposed cuts would have limited their opportunities.

First generation college student Olivia Dowler said a college education wasn’t expected of her.

“Please don’t make me have to say that I’m embarrassed to go here,” she said. “Please don’t make me feel guilty whenever I tell students that they should come here. I love this state and the school. And so to all these people, that’s why we’re here today.”

Not one person spoke in favor of the proposed cuts.

The board will meet again Friday at 9 a.m. to vote.

Gee Responds To Questions At Faculty Senate Meeting

West Virginia University faculty and students had a lot of questions for the university president about looming cuts to programs during Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting.

West Virginia University faculty and students had a lot of questions about looming cuts to programs during Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting.

WVU President Gordon Gee delivered a statement addressing what he called misrepresentations of the academic transformation process at the start of the meeting.

“I will not accept the narrative being promulgated that we have mismanaged this university, where we are making it a lesser university,” he said. “That is absolutely far from the truth.”

He dismissed claims that the university’s budgets were designed around the aspiration of growing enrollment, or that the university’s debt load increased by 55 percent. Gee also emphasized that the university has been addressing areas of concern since 2016.

“Almost every program that was put on watch was told three years ago that they were going to be recommended for discontinuance because they were not operating at an optimum level including declining enrollments,” he said. “They had multiple opportunities to bring forth viable options for change.”

After his statement, Gee spent more than a half hour answering questions from faculty members and students, many of whom questioned his assertions.

Asked by one student if he would take a pay cut to help mitigate the budget shortfall, Gee responded that he had not had a pay raise in the 10 years since his return to the university.

“I don’t advertise that I also am a major donor to the university, I have given a substantial amount of money,” Gee said. “During the pandemic, there was a decision made that we would not cut any salaries for the teaching faculty. But we did ask our senior administration and our athletic department – for all of them to cut their salaries. And they did.”

Douglas Terry, an English professor in Beckley, asked how eliminating World Languages would lead to WVU providing a robust liberal arts education.

“We’re in a modern country, we have many modern ways now to teach foreign languages and to teach and to engage in culture,” Gee said. “There is not just one way to salvation, there’s a number of ways of salvation and that’s exactly what we are doing and what we’re going to explore.”

Gee also used the opportunity to discuss the World Language Department’s performance issues.

“They had a student faculty ratio better than the department of surgery and on top of it, they said, ‘Well, we’re making $800,000.’” he said. “That is false, from the very start, because what they’re doing is they’re counting student hours. That is someone else’s money.”

Mathematics professor Ela Celikbas asked about the impact of the proposal to cut the university’s math PhD, particularly on math education.

“Mathematics is critical to our sciences, but it doesn’t mean that we need to do it the way that everyone else does it,” Gee said. “The fundamental issue is, math is critical. But not every aspect of mathematics in this state at this university is critical.”

The remainder of the meeting was focused on the details of the reduction in force and non renewal process if the Board of Governors votes Friday to approve cuts to programs.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Board of Governors released an open letter jointly with Gee reiterating many of the points he made during the Faculty Senate meeting.

WVU Alumni Rally Against Cuts, Pledge To Stop Giving

Following in the footsteps of current students, West Virginia University alumni came together in front of the university’s student union in Morgantown Saturday to rally against the proposed cuts to programs.

Logan Shamberg is a software engineer who graduated with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. He helped organize the rally and said he and alumni are done giving to the university.

“We want to educate alumni about where their money’s been going,” Shamberg said. “If WVU doesn’t have its house in order, why should alumni support it?”

Shamberg said financial pressure is a tactic to try and stop future cuts. The university Board of Governors will vote on the currently proposed cuts Friday. Shamberg believes that the board and administration will ultimately do what they want.

“But now they’re having to do it in full view,” he said. “These are people who are not used to scrutiny. We’ve got some very passionate alumni who are looking at this process. If they want to do this, they’re going to do this with the world watching, and we will be sure to announce to the world what they do. So maybe they will think twice next time they decide to try cutting whatever programs are on the chopping block next year.”

Cuts to Academic Support Units are expected to be announced next week, with program reviews set to take place at WVU’s Beckley and Keyser campuses early next year.

During the rally, third generation WVU alumnus Walt Auvil questioned why the West Virginia University Foundation he donated to wasn’t being used to bridge the university’s $45 million budget gap.

“We’re saving it for a rainy day,” he said. “The students and the professors that are affected feel like it’s raining. So if we’re not going to use it for this, what is it for?”

At the presentation of the university’s budget during the June meeting of the Board of Governors, it was outlined that the Foundation will contribute $33 million in “one-time-use resources.”

Del. Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, leads attendants in renditions of “Solidarity Forever” and “Country Roads” at the alumni rally in Morgantown Sept. 9, 2023.

Auvil also questioned the role of debt and bonds issued for building projects in creating the budgetary deficit.

“What is the percentage of this debt that is debt service on the bonds that were very ill advisedly floated to build buildings that we didn’t need?” he said. “And what about the bondholders? Why is there never a discussion about the people that hold the bonds, the banks, the other financial institutions that hold the bonds that we’re being held over a chopping block for? Why are they not part of the conversation about who can take a cut, can stand to take a cut?”

Many of those present at the rally said that the cuts felt personal.

“First off, many of us have spent a lot of money already here in West Virginia University, on our degree programs, as well as donors, but we also have kids,” said Carisa Collins. She holds two WVU degrees and also helped organize the rally. Collins is concerned her child won’t have access to the same opportunities she had when she attended WVU.

“This is a watershed moment in higher education, where the sorts of cuts that are occurring will take away opportunities that made going to university so important,” she said. “Getting an education at a university like West Virginia University is an extraordinary gift, you have a chance to take courses that you never even dreamed of taking.”

Collins reiterated the unique position alumni have to put financial weight behind their opposition to the proposed cuts.

“We have the opportunity to stop giving and tell the foundation, tell the board of governors in a very unique way that we are done,” she said. “We are done donating to a university whose administration is so fiscally irresponsible, that it feels like our children don’t deserve the intensity of instruction in foreign languages, in mathematics, in creative arts, design, you name it. We deserve all of it and that’s the future we were donating towards. If the university isn’t willing to support that sort of a future we are done giving.”

WVU Releases Final Adjustments To Cuts

With the last hearings held this past Friday Sept. 1, West Virginia University has finalized its recommendations for cuts to academic programs.

With the last hearings held this past Friday, Sept. 1, West Virginia University has finalized its recommendations for cuts to academic programs. Tuesday’s announcement was the final of four covering the 19 units that chose to appeal the recommendations.

A proposal to cut the bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture was reconsidered.

In a press release, Provost Maryanne Reed said the School of Design and Community Development “made a strong case for retaining the major by demonstrating it could achieve efficiencies while addressing the needs of landscape architecture students who do not have a similar degree program to pursue here at the University.”

Efficiencies include reducing the number of faculty in the unit.

The Office of the Provost declined a proposal to develop the Master of Public Administration as an online degree and will maintain its original recommendation to discontinue the degree program and eliminate all faculty positions in the unit.

The first of the announcements Aug. 29 included an amendment to the recommendations for the World Languages Department, including retaining in-person Spanish and Chinese instruction while still closing the department.

On Friday Sept. 1 it was announced that the Department of English had successfully appealed the preliminary recommendation to discontinue the MFA in Creative Writing. The unit presented a plan to merge the MA in English with the MA in Professional Writing.

A recommendation to discontinue the Masters in Special Education was also overturned. All final recommendations can be viewed on the provost’s website.

The University Assembly meets Wednesday to vote on resolutions of no confidence in President Gordon Gee, as well as one calling for a halt of the academic transformation process.

The WVU Board of Governors will vote on the recommended cuts Sept. 15.

WVU Adjusts Cuts To World Languages

Following an appeals process, West Virginia University has amended its proposal to close its World Languages department.

The WVU Office of the Provost announced Tuesday that after a hearing Friday, it is recommending the university continue to provide face-to-face instruction in Spanish and Chinese.

The proposal still includes the elimination of all foreign language majors and master’s degree programs, as well as the closure of the World Languages Department. Additionally, the five remaining faculty positions would be moved to another yet to be determined unit.

In a press release, Provost Maryanne Reed said the change will allow students to take language courses as electives and potentially as minors. The release also stated the Provost’s Office will continue to pursue the elimination of the language requirements for other majors.

The preliminary recommendations for two other departments, the Division of Forestry and Natural Resources and the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering were not changed from the preliminary recommendation.

A proposal to cut faculty in the School of Public Health by 14 positions was adjusted to cut 11 positions.

More updates to cuts are expected this week as appeals continue through Friday. The WVU Board of Governors will vote to finalize all proposed cuts on Sept. 15.