West Virginia’s Gee: university leaders ‘are driven by fear’

Under heavy criticism for approving deep budget cuts at his cash-strapped institution, the president of West Virginia University, Gordon Gee, is chiding his colleagues in leadership around the US for not doing something similar.

“Fear is a driving factor among leadership right now,” Dr Gee said in an interview after several contentious weeks in which he pushed past an overwhelming faculty vote of no-confidence to eliminate 143 faculty positions on a pathway towards closing an estimated $45 million (£37 million) budget shortfall.

“It’s hand-to-hand combat in my world right now,” said Dr Gee, a 79-year-old veteran of more campus presidencies than any other American, including tenures leading Ohio State University, Brown University and Vanderbilt University. “Being a university president is not for the faint of heart, there's no doubt about it.”

US higher education has been described for years as facing a period of fundamental transformation owing to factors that include declining government funding, shrinking populations, heavy partisan interference, profound shifts in technological delivery and rapid workplace transformations.

West Virginia’s flagship public university might be feeling the effects ahead of most, located in a rural and politically conservative mountainous area long marked by chronic poverty and below-average educational investment and performance.

That vanguard position on the front line of change has helped to expose Dr Gee to especially harsh scrutiny. His course cutbacks that have drawn criticism from national academic groups include the university’s entire department of world languages, literatures and linguistics, and the master’s and doctoral programmes in its School of Mathematical and Data Sciences.

Some West Virginia faculty said they were particularly troubled by such seemingly needless acts as cutting the few thousand dollars the university spends on MathSciNet, a library database used by academics in numerous scientific fields. Among her colleagues across the country, said Ela Celikbas, an assistant professor of mathematics, “I don’t know anyone at an R1 school who doesn’t have access to MathSciNet.”

The president insisted the cuts were both strategic – the university has estimated that the eliminated majors would affect less than 2 per cent of student enrolment – and unavoidable. Many other US institutions probably needed to do something similar, Dr Gee said.

Yet the average tenure of a US university president keeps shrinking – now shorter than six years, from eight-and-a-half in 2006 – reflecting what Dr Gee saw as a preference among campus leaders to quit rather than make painful decisions. “Universities are averse to change,” Dr Gee said. Presidential search committees, he said, were “appointing people who have offended the fewest number of people the longest period of time”.

Dr Gee said that even his presidential colleagues admitted that dynamic to him – privately. “My friends call me up and say ‘Hey, listen, we’re so glad you’re doing this’, and I say ‘Well then, when are you going to do it?’, and they say ‘Well, you know, I’m not going to do it, but I believe in what you’re doing’.”

Dr Gee left no doubt that the necessary changes, at least in his case, meant putting much greater priority on the needs of local employers. “If I’m in Manhattan, I would have a different set of issues,” he said. “But I am in rural West Virginia, and we need to make West Virginia a place that is very liveable so that people are anxious to move here.”

And leaving the tough calls to a longer-term successor after 2025 was out of the question. “Remember, I’ve been university president a long time – I hated it when people left me a mess,” he said. “I want to make all the hard choices.”

Even then, Dr Gee appears to be showing some flexibility. Dr Celikbas said the president had agreed to meet with her to discuss MathSciNet and her arguments for keeping the subscription, among other things.

Dr Gee acknowledged he was not a theoretical mathematician, and understood that mathematics “is a building block of a great university”.

“But not everyone needs to be in every part and every aspect of that,” he said. “We’re trying to narrow ourselves so that we can be excellent in what we do, and not mediocre in everything.”

As for foreign languages, Dr Gee said he was confident that a remote partnership with Brigham Young University would fill WVU’s needs. “They teach people to speak language proficiently in six weeks, and they’re part of our team, and they're perfectly willing to work with us,” he said.

“Change is very difficult, and changing the direction of a university has become nearly impossible because of the gathered forces of those who don’t want to change,” Dr Gee added.

“They want to have the university the way that it always was, but it isn’t – we’re not Bologna in the year 1200; we are in an age in which knowledge is doubling every 12 hours, so we’ve got to be in front of that.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com