Is WVU the canary in the coal mine?

There are some dirty doings going on in West Virginia that are going to impact the entire country. It all has to do with an old white man. And this time, it isn't Joe Manchin.

Meet E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University (WVU), and the very definition of failing upward.

He has been the president of a number of universities and almost everywhere he goes, questions pop up about consequential behavior, including financial improprieties. At Ohio State, for example, the university spent $64,000 on bow ties, bow tie cookies, and anything else they could do to brand him with that damn bow tie. He had to abruptly retire from that university when he was heard calling Notre Dame players, “those damn Catholics” and saying the BIg 10 had more money than God.

He was also the president of Brown University, but he left after two years. To say that is uncommon would be an enormous understatement. University presidents don't leave up and leave an Ivy League institution, and certainly not after only two years. There, as at other institutions, he raised lots of money and catered to students by having them to dinner and sleeping in the dorms. The people he doesn’t ever seem to have a good relationship with are the professors. According to The New York Times, “[H]e ruffled faculty feathers with an abrupt shake-up of top administrative posts last summer and a surprise announcement of a new brain-sciences program and $80 million life sciences building.” In higher education, those kinds of decisions are made in conjunction with faculty, not by presidential fiat.

He left Brown to go be the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, which included a package that reportedly totaled close to $1 million a year, and included a faculty position for his then-wife. In addition, he got the university to renovate his presidential home ($6 million), pay for he and his wife to entertain in that home ($700,000, and to cover the expenses of hiring a private jet to take students to an away athletic game (cost unknown). This was so flagrant, the Wall Street Journal did a story about his out-of-control spending.

Wall Street Journal headline, September 26, 2006

Virtually every time Gee leaves an institution, there’s another headline about a scandal or a controversy he has left in his wake. But that doesn’t stop institutions from hiring him or paying him handsomely for the work he does.

Most recently, he landed at West Virginia University, an institution where he had been president before.

The Marketing of E Gordon Gee and what it hid

I learned about E Gordon Gee while researching the marketing of higher education over the last decade. In conversations and at conferences, Gee's name always came up as the guy to see because he does marketing so well. In particular, what he (or the marketing department) calls Gee Mail. Take a look.

After years of bowties and GeeMails and friendly reporter-on-the-scene interactions, he seems to have everyone bamboozled. He’s just the jovial old guy with the bowtie who’s hanging out with the students. Not so much.

This fall, he did something that can only be called shocking. An action that affects not just people in West Virginia, but likely all of higher education: Gee and the Board of Governors slashed 143 faculty jobs and 28 academic programs.

Higher Ed overall is in trouble, we all know that. Colleges are dealing with significantly reduced enrollments and not just because of Covid. For more than a decade, colleges have known that there was going to be a steep drop in enrollments—what insiders called “the cliff.” This sudden loss of students was due to Millennials aging out of their college years.

Stupidly, Gee seems to have banked on the idea that the college’s numbers were still going to remain the same. They didn’t. According to Inside Higher Ed (IHE), West Virginia's enrollments are down 10%—much higher than the national average.

With numbers that bad, the Board of Governors had to take a machete to the budget. In August, most news outlets were saying that the cuts would be $45 million. More recent reporting from IHE puts that figure at $75 million.

The fallout affects faculty, students, and higher ed

Making broad cuts like this will have serious consequences for students. Imagine you are a student going into your junior year, and suddenly your major disappears. Students who have less than 60 credits, meaning that they have not hit the halfway point in their studies, will likely have to transfer to another college. And this isn’t happening in “useless humanities” programs. Hard sciences are being cut, too.

Tenured and non-tenured faculty in departments from foreign languages (all of those majors were cut) to graduate mathetics and education have been cut. At the same time, no cuts were made to administration positions, and Gee retains his $800,000 salary through next year when he says he is retiring (again).

This has implications far beyond West Virginia: if a university president and his Board of Governors can decide willy-nilly what programs they want to eliminate, there's no reason why other public institutions around the United States won't look at this and say, “Well, They did it in West Virginia. We can do it here.”

We all know higher ed is at a crossroads. Enrollment figures are down. Numerous faculty left or are thinking of leaving the academy.

Gee is the Energizer Bunny of university presidents. How could no one over decades figure out that this guy with a bow tie doesn't know how to run an institution?

Obviously, he was able to raise money or nobody would have kept him around. But there was a lot of stank around this guy, and someone should have cleaned it up.

For more, see my TikTok on this topic and you can get my free download on higher education on my website.