How West Virginia became ground zero in the war for the future of college in America

For a time, college was the American Dream, and it nearly felt that way this summer for Aryn Vanoy when the 22-year-old psychology major transferred to West Virginia University, the state’s flagship school. Vanoy grew up in tiny Dunbar, W.Va. — population 7,330 — with a goal of becoming the first in her family to earn a bachelor’s degree, and with a keen awareness of what a diploma means in one of America’s poorest states.

“I think if you know West Virginia right now, we’re facing incredible problems, but the biggest problem is our opioid crisis, and what I want to do is get my degree and go to medical school and focus on treating addiction and help my state,” Vanoy told me by phone this week from the Morgantown campus. “My state is hurting right now.”

That’s why it felt like something of a gut punch when, just days before making the two-and-a-half-hour move to WVU, Vanoy learned university administrators — citing a $45 million shortfall at a school that’s been chronically underfunded by GOP lawmakers ― had aggressive plans to lay off 7% of the faculty and kill entire programs, from foreign languages to jazz to the graduate degree in math. When she’s not going to class, Vanoy has been protesting the cuts.

“Everybody in the country is familiar with the stereotypes and hardships that are associated with West Virginia,” she said, adding: “West Virginia University was something we could be proud of, but now it doesn’t feel like that anymore. It feels like we are just continuing to move 100 steps backward. And you almost feel a little hopeless.”

American higher education is in a state of crisis right now, and West Virginia has unexpectedly become the front line. The problems here — indifference, if not hostility, from the state’s political leaders and shortsighted decisions by college administrators — are hardly unique to the Mountain State’s flagship university. The solutions — cuts in academic programs tilted heavily toward the liberal arts, especially the humanities — are similar to those on other campuses across America, after a slide in enrollment and a loss in confidence in higher education.

And the questions being asked in Morgantown — is the purpose of a college education to prepare you more narrowly for a job, or to be an learned and well-rounded citizen? — strikes the delicate nerve of how to educate our young people in a moment of national stress.

Lisa Di Bartolomeo — an award-winning professor teaching Russian in WVU’s gutted world languages department and one of 69 faculty recently informed she’ll be laid off at the end of the academic year — told me the university’s retrenchment is a blow to middle-class West Virginia kids, who can attend on discounted Promise Scholarships, but may soon learn their desired program has been eliminated, or there are fewer elective courses to broaden their horizons.

“They’re losing that ability to train and educate themselves for the future and open up all the possibilities that we owe them,” Di Bartolomeo said.

The downsized ambitions at WVU, with just under 30,000 students including 21,000 undergraduates, mark a reversal of fortune for a Lincoln-era land-grant university that — upon its 1867 opening on the banks of the Monongahela River — prompted a local newspaper to write that “a place more eligible for the quiet and successful pursuit of science and literature is nowhere to be found.”

For the first century and a half, WVU largely lived up to that promise — its once futuristic 1970s elevated people mover shuttling students around Morgantown as a kind of metaphor for the modernity it promised kids leaving struggling coal towns to become first-generation college grads in a state synonymous with Appalachian poverty.

» READ MORE: Inside the fight to save American college from runaway careerism | Will Bunch

But things started to change — as they did for many U.S. public universities — during the 2010s, when state governments suffered through a recession and conservative lawmakers placed a low priority on higher ed. In 2012, West Virginia’s taxpayer contributions to WVU — long the bulk of its budget — started to decline. Students and their families were expected to make up the gap; tuition went from just 19% of school revenue in 1980 to 63% by 2019.

Higher costs and changing demographics have sparked a 10% drop in enrollment since 2015, worse than comparable universities. When an arguably shortsighted scheme to lure more higher-tuition out-of-state kids fell flat, WVU’s $800,000-a-year president E. Gordon Gee stunned the WVU campus over summer break with the proposed cuts.

Gee’s new plan called for eliminating some 28 academic programs, including ending degrees in foreign languages and killing off a highly regarded graduate degree in math, a source of pride in the economically struggling state. Coming out of the COVID-19 crisis, WVU axed four master’s degree programs in public health. Many were particularly irked at the suggestion that foreign language classes could be replaced with apps, with one protest placard calling the school “DuoLingo U.”

Critics note that Gee and his administration — facing campus turmoil when students returned in late August — pingponged between the explanation that WVU faced a financial crisis or that the changes were instead part of an ”academic transformation” for the future of the university, more heavily focused on today’s career needs. It’s a debate hardly unique to Morgantown.

Overall, the double-edge sword of ever-rising tuition and mounting student debt, coupled with bitter ideological debates over what’s taught on campus, has caused public confidence in U.S. higher education to plummet from 57% in 2015 to just 36% last July. That, along with the lower birth rate that produced Gen Z and pandemic woes, drove the loss of some 1.4 million students nationwide from 2019 through last spring. College administrators have been forced to make hard choices — and the carnage has been heavily concentrated in the liberal arts programs such as English, history, philosophy, and sociology.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — often awash in controversy with its GOP-dominated, politically minded trustees — captured the zeitgeist recently when officials said “distinguished professorships” would no longer be awarded in the humanities, but only for academics in the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering, and math.

The damage has been more severe at small liberal arts colleges that have been ground zero for falling enrollment. English, philosophy, and history are on the chopping block at Virginia’s Marymount University. Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University is bagging religious studies, marriage and family therapy, and theater, among other smaller degree programs. The academic world is still buzzing over the New Yorker’s “End of the English Major” piece, which chronicled a one-third drop in the collegiate study of English and history over the past decade.

“WVU is just the guinea pig,” Matthew Kolb, a senior who is president of West Virginia University Students United, a group that formed to protest the cutbacks, told me. He noted that the program cuts and layoffs were crafted after WVU hired a cost-cutting consulting group, the rpk GROUP ― described by its critics as “murky” — which is also reportedly working with other top schools like Rutgers and the University of Kansas.

The fight over careerism is not new. In 1969, a whopping 82% of nationwide college freshmen told a UCLA survey that the purpose of higher education was about forming a meaningful philosophy of life, not job prep. Those numbers had flipped by the mid-1980s, but now it’s time to ask if employers — in whose name careerism is taking place — even want students who haven’t studied the humanities or honed their critical thinking skills. Just this week, some 1,010 executives and hiring managers told the American Association of Colleges and Universities they want students who are “well-rounded.”

Di Bartolomeo, the laid-off Russian professor who also teaches classes on Holocaust literature and film and Russian fairy tales, among other things, sees the logic behind the cuts as extremely shortsighted. She noted that fraught U.S.-Russian relations have taken center stage on the foreign policy front, creating a new need for national security specialists who speak the language.

The fight for the future of the meaning of a college diploma — amplified in a time of crisis — matters well beyond the mountain hollers of West Virginia. Kolb, the student activist, told me that while his classmates and faculty members continue to push Gee and trustees to listen to alternatives to the draconian measures, his group is also forging alliances with other colleges around the country so that they will be better prepared to deal with consultant-driven cuts or fresh attacks on the liberal arts.

“It’s going to happen in other places,” said Kolb, so the time to save the humanities is now rather than later. “This will stick with us for a generation at WVU. Once they’re gone, building [these programs] back up is going to be impossible.”

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