Opinion: West Virginia University 'faculty are stretched so thin that no one could offer a class on Shakespeare'

(Photo by Chase Barnes, The Atlantic)

As West Virginia University administrators continue to cut classes and degree programs that carve out the humanities, writer Michael Powell asks in his opinion for The Atlantic, "Do West Virginia kids of modest means deserve the humanities?" Below is a condensed version of his thoughts.

"For too long, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University told anyone who would listen that public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift. He began rolling out his own plan. . . . He spoke of investing in medical, nursing, cybersecurity, and business degrees to serve a working-class state with an aging population plagued by disease and drug abuse. . . . Gee terminated more than two dozen majors and cut professors in other programs in areas as varied as foreign languages, public health, jazz studies, and community planning.

"Some cuts were truly baffling, given his insistence on WVU’s obligation to strengthen the state. The university decided to stop granting graduate degrees in environmental health sciences, education administration, and math. Many of WVU’s 27,000 students protested that this wasn’t what they wanted. The faculty cast an overwhelming no-confidence vote in the president, to zero effect. More than 140 professors will soon be without jobs.

"For most students, their state’s main public university remains their best hope of breaching the walls of class difference. As the ax falls, that idealistic mission fades, and inequalities widen. A student at Cornell University, for example, has a buffet of choices, including more than four dozen languages as varied as Sinhala, Old Norse, Farsi, Khmer, and ancient Greek. By contrast, a student at West Virginia University will soon have just four choices—Chinese, Arabic, French, and Spanish—and there will not be enough instructors for students to major in any of them.

"The budget for the school library was cut by $800,000 in recent months, and administrators laid off employees and have suspended ordering new books. Liberal-arts departments cannot afford to fix photocopiers. English faculty are stretched so thin that no one could offer a class on Shakespeare."