So today was a big day today, as something pretty rare occurred. A university wide faculty assembly was held to discuss a vote of no confidence in Gordon Gee, the President, and to call for the immediate cessation of the “Academic Transformation.” President Gee, to the surprise of many, was in attendance and gave a give minute presentation, and the room was silent as all get out. When he ran out of time he muttered something about free speech and then continued on until various faculty shouted “POINT OF ORDER” and he was gaveled down.
Several faculty spoke, some in direct response to things just stated by Gee. A vote was then held, and the faculty voted 797-100 to signal NO CONFIDENCE in Gee.
The assembly then took up the second resolution to vote to stop the transformation. Provost Maryanne Reed, former professor, former Dean of Journalism, and self-described leaser of the academic transformation initiative, requested to speak for five minutes. This was put to a vote.
Faculty then spent a half hour voting, the vote failed 400 hundred something against and several hundred four, and decided not to listen to her for five minutes. Instead, several faculty used the allotted 90 seconds they were given to say why the resolution should be passed.
Faculty then voted, and the resolution passed 747-79.
To fully appreciate and understand how lopsided these margins are, you need to appreciate how argumentative faculty are- you could put twenty of them in a room for hours to pass a resolution for free ice cream and infinite puppy kisses and not only would they not be able to come up with a conclusion, the resolution wouldn’t be written until someone wrote it themselves and at the next meeting said here I wrote the resolution taking into account everyone’s advice, and it would get unanimously approved because there was something new to argue about this meeting.
Not only that, someone would say something that would be the foundation of a decade long grudge that will at some point over the next 20 years impact a doctoral thesis, and the hatchet would not be buried fully until one faculty member had been dead for ten years and the other a professor emeritus in waning health.
At any rate, immediately after the vote, the Board of Governors released a statement that had been written before the vote even happened expressing full support in President Gee and telling the faculty to go fuck themselves.
Not wanting to be left out, Governor Jim Justice, himself an unwitting display of the health of education in West Virginia, also had what we will charitably call thoughts:
Bless his heart.
Elizabelle
I’m glad to see the faculty voting. What is happening at WVU is chilling.
Lapassionara
Good for the faculty. Gordon Gee is a nightmare administrator.
Spanky
Please tell me there’s a typo somewhere in the Justice quote.
Also, that description of faculty meetings is so dead-on that I want to marry it.
Timurid
Did somebody say ‘wildcat strike?’
John Cole
Also for 21 years I have never talked about my employer or job and that is not changing today so I would appreciate no discussion of that in these here threads.
Martin
One of my reasons for retiring was having to engage in increasingly questionable activities to shore up the health of the institution. To be clear – I don’t think any of the institutional leadership was corrupt, but higher education as we currently operate it is in serious trouble as it is obviously unsustainable.
The issue is fundmentally that higher education needs to be completely restructured – how it’s paid for, how faculty compensation works, how students earn their degrees – all the way down. That’s too heavy a lift for any institution to take on, which is why every effort to address the problem has resulted in new institutions being tipped up – none of which have obviously taken off.
I don’t know Gee, or have any insight on the specific issues with WVU, though I can hazard some guesses from my understanding of how WV education funding worked a few years back and how that might fit into the much broader currents in higher ed. And I think situations like this are going to be increasingly widespread as institutions run on narrower and narrower knife-edges.
Unable to get any commitments to help reform the institution, and unwilling to apply short-term fixes that created very obvious long-term problems, I decided to get out while I still had some sense of pride of the work I had done. But it’s hard watching the institutions continue to fall apart.
Alison Rose
@John Cole: It’s cool, a lot of pole dancers wanna keep that private.
I don’t even know what your job is, so no worries from me.
Omnes Omnibus
@John Cole:
We all figure you live off of the ad revenue from this site, so I think you are pretty safe.
bbleh
Hmf. “Faculty.” How much money did they raise last year?
About damn time the hired help learns its place! If they don’t like it, they can find another job!
It’s really appalling. And for all WV’s backward reputation, education has always been a STRONG community value throughout the state, and both the quality of both public schools generally and WVU in particular show it. And this bowtied huckster — with support from certain elected officials who are ambivalent at best about the value of a well-educated general population — has brought it low.
My relatives who are alumni/ae are NOT pleased. Not that Gee or Justice cares a bit.
trucmat
After reading about it here I elsewhere used the planned axing of the grad level West Virginia Math Dept as exhibit A on why major college sports need to be severed from Universities. Let pro leagues run their farm leagues elsewhere and let schools prioritize being schools. Good to see the faculty are having none of it.
Scout211
The faculty at my husband’s university had a no-confidence vote on the president a few years ago (after Mr. Scout had already retired). After years of faculty and student frustrations, the president finally left after the no-confidence vote (and many viral student protests). The Board of Regents finally let her go after having defended her for many years.
No-confidence votes are very embarrassing for the Board of Regents at universities*, so hopefully this will bring about change for WVU. It did at Mr. Scout’s university.
Added: *and for the big donors to the universities.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Seems to me “transformation” is a matter for the Math department.
Miss Bianca
Whoa. That is a crazy story. So, does the faculty vote carry any weight in terms of consequences? Sounds like he’s not prepared to do the right thing and fall on his sword, and sounds like the Regents are behind him (and the Governor – Jeez, I thought he was supposed to be one of the sharper tools in the GOP shed).
RAVEN
@trucmat: Rotsa Ruck with that.
cintibud
Does the vote stop the changes or is this just “advisory”
ETA – I guess Raven answered this just as I posted
RAVEN
@Miss Bianca:
“West Virginia University faculty approved a symbolic motion on Wednesday expressing no confidence in President E. Gordon Gee as the university addresses a $45 million budget shortfall.”
RAVEN
duplicate
ArchTeryx
@Timurid: That’s about the only thing that might have a slight chance of changing anything. Let’s see how much money all the administrators raise from alumni with WVU shut down.
twbrandt
Gee is an idiot. I remember when he was president of Ohio State when football coach Jim Tressel was under fire for multiple NCAA violations and other shitty behavior, Gee said “I only hope coach doesn’t fire me!”.
bbleh
@RAVEN: concur, alas. When you have political leadership and a general populace who value gladiatorial entertainment over intellectual development and discovery — as is very much the case presently in many if not most Republican states — then it’s more likely that the academic side will suffer rather than the athletic, as the present case demonstrates.
The whole college football /NCAA thing was a Shaitan’s bargain, and these are (some of) the consequences. Alas again.
I think it’s likely that the American system of postsecondary education is going to bifurcate, with the majority of it becoming community-college-type institutions with an emphasis on marketable skills, a much smaller part of it becoming like the liberal-arts schools of a few generations ago — which were available only to the well-off — and the middle ground of liberal-arts-for-the-general-public — in the tradition of the great Cal experiment of Pat Brown — being defunded and dying. And we will be much the worse off as a nation for it.
Ohio Mom
Is “eat up with” some sort of quaint Appalachian expression?
Mathguy
Gordon Gee is one of the biggest scumbags in academia. He reminds me of all of those NFL head coaches that get hired after failing somewhere else.
Princess
It’s past time for faculty everywhere to start using the power they have. But bringing faculty together is like herding kittens. You are right — these margins are unreal!
TF79
Good for the faculty. Good administrators see their jobs as serving the faculty to facilitate the core research and teaching mission of the university. Bad administrators view the faculty as serving their own resume polishing/fiefdom building/legacy burnishing/wallet filling.
wjca
@John Cole: And besides, your nym is obviously a pen name. And common enough that anyone having a similar name is a coincidence.
Martin
@trucmat: Yeah, the problem is that there are no good solutions within the existing framework of how higher education works. And I think faculty run some risks with their often willful ignorance of how the sausage gets made. Yeah, it’s shitty leaning on the basketball team to pay the bills, but at the end of the day you do have to resolve the college debt/costs problem with the faculty workload and pay scales that are necessary to retain talented faculty.
Among my jobs I used to do retention analysis for faculty – basically, if they come with a competing offer, should we try and retain. It’s a fucking unpleasant task, and in most STEM fields I had to make it clear to leadership that we had reached a point that no retention offers made financial sense. Most tech companies that are recruiting those individuals are making $2M-$5M per year per employee – that included the janitors. A PhD is worth several million a year almost everywhere (not that the PhD holder usually sees more than a fraction of that) but it meant that trying to retain was either pointless, or would require the institution pay more than it could afford.
At most public universities, your breakeven point in STEM is around 75 students per class with traditional faculty workloads. You can subsidize a smaller grad program with larger undergrad somewhat (those TA costs mean undergrad needs to be larger yet), you can subsidize that a bit through your research funding (but not as much as you might think, given the staff costs to support pre- and post- award). Small programs can subsidize through general education – this is what keeps humanities grad alive. But the equation gets more and more out of balance each year because high education productivity lags the broader economy. You need just as many faculty to teach a group of students today as you did in 1950, but that faculty member has MUCH more value to the economy than they used it. So, the real way you balance the equation is by shifting more and more teaching to adjuncts and treating them worse and worse. But you can’t run graduate programs like that, so they are increasingly at risk.
Make no mistake – I value these programs. I built these programs, and I was in these programs. But the economics of these programs gets worse every year, faculty refuse to acknowledge why they get worse every year, demand that we stay the course, and then some asshole like me has to come in and have the come to Jesus talk saying that your program is running in deficit. You can’t cut faculty because the program becomes impossible to complete. You can’t charge more because of state laws around tuition. You can shorten the degree, which diminishes the quality of it, and so on. You can create a ‘professional masters’ program which is designed to create a 2nd track MS program targeting foreign students with deep pockets who will pay $80K a year to attend a bare bones program because what they’re *really* buying is access to an H1B, and you know you shaking them down with a shitty degree for 3x the money with no PhD opportunity, but the state laws permit it, you live with it because it keeps the proper MS/PhD program alive, and you try and live with yourself. But that trick only works for a while. Eventually the imbalance returns and you need a new trick and a new one after that and a new one after that. And you sell out a bit more for each one.
Martin
@twbrandt: My employer provided Gees replacement at Ohio State. There was so much shit to clean up when he got there – we heard some stories.
Alison Rose
@Miss Bianca:
I mean…it’s a low bar.
ArchTeryx
@Martin: Couldn’t have been medical research. I tried for 20 years to break into that field, with a PhD and 2 postdocs, and I couldn’t even scratch the surface of an actual PhD level job. I could tell quite a few stories about how badly I was abused AFTER getting the degree. I eventually abandoned it entirely and am now a financial analyst for New York State. And being paid a low-end PhD salary for the first time in my life.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
The solution 50 years ago was that the states subsidized most of the cost of a degree at their public universities. But over the years since, states decided that the students who would ultimately earn and benefit from those degrees should pay more of the load. And more. And still more. But you can only do so much of that.
The way out would ideally be to go back to the states subsidizing their students the way they did back then. But that’s a heavier lift than ever, particularly in red states that seem to be more and more against the whole idea of learning and knowledge. But still not an easy sell in the blue states.
Villago Delenda Est
It is said that academic politics are the most vicious, because the stakes are so insignificant. I don’t think that’s the case at WVU this time, though. The fact that reactionary shitstains are fully committed to supporting Gee means that something sinister is up.
David Chop
Yes.
Should be “ate up with” [past simple of eat], but spell check missed the fat thumbs. It’s akin (hah!) to saying “is consumed by the disease of …”
Source: I worked with Virginia hillbillies for about twenty years.
Bill Arnold
@Ohio Mom:
Was curious, poked google:
Eat up = consumed. “I’m eat up with love.”
bbleh
@Martin: @lowtechcyclist: can’t speak at nearly Martin’s level of expertise. But speaking as an economist, as a general principle, I think if institutions of higher learning — especially state universities — are expected to be cash-neutral or better, then unless they turn themselves into fee-for-service vocational-training centers, they are no longer viable. And if the political leadership — and by extension the polity — of the state is comfortable with that, then that will be the inevitable result, and the only question is when.
The downside for such states, of course, is that those who recognize such institutions as a public investment — say, like highways 🙄 (“yeah, the minds of our young adults are valuable assets, like asphalt!”) — will lose the students, and the parents of those who are or would be students, and the companies who would hire those parents or those students, and and and.
To apply concepts like “break-even” to education — especially but not exclusively STEM education — is so evidently cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face that there’s almost no point talking about it.
Cameron
How did Ron DeSantis miss this guy? He’s perfect for Florida DOE.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Martin:
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the man.
You’ll notice a couple of things: He’s expensive to keep and he often opens his mouth and utters thing he shouldn’t.
He’s nearly 80* and one would think he’d be ready to retire, but I guess grifters gotta grift.
*I’m not saying he’s too old for college presidentin’, just that there are probably younger, less expensive candidates out there, people who hadn’t made a career of turning a highly-paid job (he does not come cheap!) into a hot seat by doing (and saying) dumb shit over and over and over again.
Andrew Abshier
Faculty, that is, what’s left of them at New College in Sarasota, feels their pain.
sdhays
@bbleh:
Counterpoint – my former colleague who lives in WV and raised his two children there told me flat out the schools in WV totally suck. And I believed him considering the teachers just a few years ago had to strike so that they could make enough to only teach and not have to take a second job to make ends meet.
I’m glad your experience has been better than his.
Ken
They always have, but it’s in income taxes over the next forty years.
Lyrebird
@ArchTeryx:
Hey I don’t know how far away you and germy & spouse live, but someday we should do an ALB meetup.
Says a commenter who doesn’t go out in the evenings… (rambunctious kids), but I still think the idea is nice.
eclare
I am so glad I got my public university degree in 1990. Things have changed.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: +1
As Pelosi said, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your values.”
I’m reminded that my alma mater, the University of Chicago, used to be the Monsters of the Midway and were dominant in college football for many, many years. First Heisman Trophy winner. Founding member of the Big 10. Etc. They ended the football program in 1939. (They’re in Division III now.)
Big time sports is too big at too many universities.
But beyond that, states and the federal government does not support universities enough. Schools have decided they have to chase big-time sports and the hope of big TV contracts to survive. Or they have to chase federal research grant dollars, with all of the overhead (expensive facilities, contract monitoring, etc.) that that entails. Or recruit foreign students who will pay full-freight. Or …
A lot of these problems go away when there’s enough baseline support at universities to pay for enough instructors, enough TAs, enough post-docs, enough support for graduate students, and low enough tuition that students aren’t burdened for decades. And a dynamic public and private R&D sector that is willing to hire all the PhDs in areas other than the latest “tech” bubble that has Wall Street’s attention. Of course, many, many areas beyond university education need more support as well…
Raising taxes on those who have grabbed most of the gains in the last 40 years makes a lot of good (and necessary) things possible.
Cheers,
Scott.
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: That’s not ultimately the problem. The ultimate problem is that when we think of ‘inflation’ that’s really the inflation that’s left after the economy takes its productivity gains. Everything gets a little bit cheaper/easier/faster/better to do because of electricity or telephones or computers or the internet or robots or whatever. But none of that applies to higher education. Class size is the same now as it was 70 years ago. There’s zero productivity gain in higher education – and jobs that don’t see productivity gains usually get killed off pretty hard because their costs go up much faster than inflation. In fact, there’s negative productivity gain because the expectations have gone up – classrooms are more expensive to build because you need tech in them, and so on. And faculty* salaries have risen faster than inflation. *tenure track faculty. And they have done so by creating this underclass of adjunct faculty. And the qualitative difference between the two is negligible (oftentimes adjuncts are clearly better instructors than the tenure track), but the pay and job security difference is massive.
So how does this increasing level of inflation get paid for? The state, sure, but there are limits to how much the state can afford to continue to subsidize an industry that shows no productivity gain. They are subject to inflation like everyone else, so have to pay for that by raising taxes. Not popular. Or by raising tuition. Also not popular. And when you shift that cost to students, you eventually run into value considerations. *Society* may value having David Andersons among us, but if the cost of earning that PhD is high enough, David Anderson may not value the length of time it takes to pay off that education. Debt loading and cost shifting are real economic problems that need to be solved, and our existing higher education frameworks are not prepared to solve them. You could break even at 30 students per classroom in the 80s. That was 75 by the 2010s, and the trendline was *extremely* stable. 30 student programs were sustainable at the start of a lot of people’s careers that were unsustainable by the end of their career.
And higher education has other contradictions built into it. It has productivity opportunities, but the people who attend increasingly hate them. Everyone complains about costs, but also about class size, about non-PhDs teaching introductory classes, about hybrid or online classes and so on. So the public wants Hogwarts but also doesn’t want to pay for it – either through taxes or directly. So the faulty usually deny the problem, as do the public, and the customers. And the problem won’t solve itself. But it will continue to get worse until institutions begin to collapse. And I would argue to a fair degree they already are. My public university got 7% of its funding from the state. One real fallout from the 2008 financial crisis was the institution giving up on the state for ongoing funding. It was clear – everywhere – that we’d need to find other revenue streams to try and stay ahead of what is effectively a hyper-inflationary economy – mildly hyper, but still hyper. You can grow into it, you can cut services into it, you can build new revenue streams. So student athletes gets leaned on with the schools pocketing the value of their name and likeness, and parents sending their kids to summer camps, and joint institutes with China who give the impression they have unlimited money, or immigrants, and so on. And they patch the hole for a few years, and then you come up with the next scheme. But the underlying productivity situation relative to the broader economy is the fundamental problem. Faculty are paid by how many courses they teach, not how many students they teach. So they are incentivized to do the opposite. Tenure isn’t granted in a way that is congruent with how the institutional needs to remain sustainable. Millions of dollars are thrown down holes to boost rankings, because that’s a grift that the public has bought into, and so on.
Understand that this problem is just as acute in states like CA that are not red states. UC Berkeley got twice as much state funding per student as the ‘lesser’ campuses like mine, because preserving the #1 public university rank was important. But eventually that too fell. They hit a $100M budget shortfall (double what WVU is facing, and that was just *one* campus, not a whole system).
CA has 3 million public college students. That’s the population of Iowa. That’s 1 student per 6 taxpayers. If the state is covering $24K per year of the students’s education, that’s an average tax bill of $4K per taxpayer per year. Say what you will about the value of those educations, that’s a HARD sell. It was 1/3 that amount in the 80s, because the cost of the education inflation adjusted was a lot cheaper, but also because there were fewer college-bound students.
I think the best model proposed is a post-education income tax that has 50% directly returned to the institution. You get the degree for free, but you pay 5% (to pick a number) income tax on all income (including unearned) for the first 20 years after you earn the degree. If the institution doesn’t confer degrees, they lose out on income. They also now have incentives to build out expensive programs. A lot of our degree shortages are in programs that are much more expensive than average to teach. An engineering degree costs 4x as much to provide as a humanities degree – so institutions shape their educational opportunities based on what they can afford. Because the state pays the same subsidy for both of those students, and students pay the same. But earnings aren’t the same, so take a share of what the student earns. The engineers will pay more off of higher salaries. That’ll help. You go off and found Google and you pay a huge amount back to the state and institution, as taxes rather than philanthropy, so the institution can steer that money where it needs to go rather than where the donor wants it to go. Your sports franchises work the same way – you throw off a lot of NFL players, you’ll get back a share of their NFL earnings, etc.
The problem is it doesn’t work at the state level. If California did this, we couldn’t claw back that money if you move to New York because you no longer pay CA taxes. It would have to be done federally.
dmsilev
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): I imagine there’s a probably-sordid story behind how he became a University President at age 37; normal academics are more or less just coming up for tenure review at that age.
unctuous
There wasn’t even time to say
Goodbye to pres’dent Gee
Martin
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): Yeah, I’m rendering no opinion of him apart from the state of Ohio State when the person I know took over as president. But I don’t know anyone who has spoken favorably of him. I also have not great opinions of how WVU is funded by the state.
But my point is that there’s set of realities that need to be dealt with. A lot of terrible decisions will need to be made, some by good people and some by bad people, some good leaders and some bad leaders. I think too often we get caught up on the personalities involved so that we can avoid looking at whether there’s a real problem this person is doing a good or bad job managing. What I’m trying to say is that there are SERIOUS problems in higher education that are in line with what’s happening in WVU that we can’t just wish away. Guy could be a complete asshole. I don’t really care.
Steeplejack
@David Chop:
Would also accept “et up with,” depending on local dialect.
Dangerman
One of my favorite REM songs; there was a Youtube of an early version, stripped way down, that was lovely. Can’t find it.
REM is a favorite since Michael Stipe is (or at least was) painfully shy. Hard to be a lead singer and be that shy.
In completely unrelated news …
… when did LA become like driving in a Mad Max movie? Holy hell, it’s terrible, get me out of here. LA was never for the faint of heart, but people at least tied to ALMOST follow traffic laws, now it’s just making it up as you go along. And it’s always some dick in a big truck or two cars racing on the freeway.
I’ve never carried a gun in a car but I’m thinking about it next time. Because these stupid fuckers are probably carrying, too.
Steeplejack
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio):
Anybody who habitually wears bow ties is automatically suspect.
Jay
@Steeplejack:
hand tied, no.
Clip ons. fuck yeah.
dmsilev
@Steeplejack: Ftom the Wiki article linked upthread,
That’s ..a lot of bow ties.
moops
The finest and most independent minds in West Virginia have almost unanimously voted to reject Gee. the Board of Governors does not care what they think.
This university is doomed.
mvr
@Martin: You obviously have some experience with this, so I don’t want to suggest you are all the way off base.
But when I do the math for how many undergrads my humanities department teaches, the cost of grad students, and the cost of in-state tuition (cheap by comparison to other state schools), we pay for ourselves before taking into account state funds or endowment income to the university. I know there is overhead for offices and the like, but again the University gets money from the state for that. At most universities, I believe that the athletic department actually costs the university money. At my university, where football seems to make money, the athletic department is very proud to claim they don’t get subsidized by the rest of the U and they even used to kick in a million or so in odd years. But I haven’t seen the books (private foundation and all that) and I don’t know who pays for the athletic scholarships, and I know we pay for the parking lots we use to go to work that the AD then rents out at exorbitant rates on game days for tailgating. This past week they closed campus lots to faculty in order to set a record for an evening volleyball game.
So I guess I’m skeptical both of the implication that humanities is a drain on the budget (yes I caught the gen ed qualifier, but requirements are there for reasons if not always well thought out) and that basketball or some other sport subsidizes the academic side.
This is alongside of administrators no longer getting faculty salaries but rather getting far higher salaries, coaches getting multimillion dollar contracts only to get fired when they lose but continue to get paid for years after firing under those contracts, and more and more staff that don’t seem to serve departments. (And yes, some of the staff that we have now actually does some good – university health centers are better as is psychological help. OTOH, all of the paperwork has been pushed down onto faculty even with additional staff to create paperwork.)
There are also good reasons states should subsidize universities — namely the value of a generally educated citizenry.
ArchTeryx
@Lyrebird: I’d take part in that. Working for the NYS Department of Health downtown has been absolute night and day compared with EVERY abusive employer that I had prior to them. (Which was pretty much all of them). I never thought being a Medicaid Analyst would be the sort of job I could sink my fangs into, but it is. And it does the hospitals of the state some good.
Ken
Maybe they were bow ties (wink wink nudge nudge, say no more say no more).
Walker
Having served on a faculty senate, those bodies never have any power that the trustees do not consider harmless enough to give them. Any votes that would institute major changes requiring investments of money get ignored.
Alison Rose
@dmsilev: The bow tie cookies had pot in them.
dmsilev
@Ken: You still need to account for the bow-tie cookies.
Andrya
@bbleh: In retirement, I teach math at a California community college. Although my subject is a job-magnet, my college teaches loads of stuff that are not- history, sociology, social justice, English literature, art and music for example. Please do not dis community colleges! (Of course, people have careers in all of these subjects, but they are not career-magnets the way that STEM or Business Administration are.)
Benno
John, as someone now serving their third year as department chair of the most amicable bunch of faculty I’ve ever worked with, I’ve never read a better description of faculty politics.
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@Martin: No question that there are serious problems with the current model. When my father was a department head in the 1960s/1970s, there were those in his department who just taught—they weren’t expected to do research at all. Nowadays, those positions are all adjuncts—he had one adjunct who was also the pathologist at the local hospital (yes, this was the Ozarks); he taught a section of biochemistry, something they hadn’t been able to get a full-time position for, despite a lot of interest from students & prospective students. I think they were able to get a full-time position after my father retired.
And faculty issues are just the start of it. The current administrative bloat is unreal, and the lack of sufficient student housing just complicates the situation for students who are already overstretched financially. Except for faculty, none of these are the problems you discussed, but are still complications.
A Streeter
What really gets me is the destruction of WVU’s math PhD program.
I’m a math professor. Many years ago an ambitious Vice President for Academic Affairs (essentially the same job as “provost”) challenged the math department to justify its relatively new (started a few years before I arrived) PhD program. The most full-throated defense of the Math PhD program came from the chair of Mechanical Engineering. The gist was that ME’s own programs, undergraduate as well as graduate, existentially needed some specialized math courses that could be competently taught only by people who could (and would) work only where they could also train mathematics PhD students. (I would not have been surprised by this argument from Electrical Engineering; I was somewhat surprised – and pleased – that it came from Mechanical.)
I think eliminating WVU’s math PhD program will hamstring, or worse, at least two departments in the engineering school, perhaps the most productive type of “vocational” school….
wjca
Mechanical Engineering includes Fluid Mechanics. AKA “rocket science” — a term you may be familiar with. It is extremely math oriented. In fact, at my university, one of the Mechanical Engineering professors specialising in Fluid Mechanics didn’t have a degree (at any level) in Engineering. His PhD was in Math.
moops
I think eliminating WVU’s math PhD program will hamstring, or worse, at least two departments in the engineering school, perhaps the most productive type of “vocational” school….
Having a mechanical engineering degree and a graduate degree in Mathematics I can honestly say that a PhD program in Math is not a valid service program for an engineering department. and I’m from U Waterloo, that pretends this is essential
moops
really, a good PhD in mechanical engineering with a specialization in fluid mechanics is adequate to teach undergraduate ME.
Now, if you want a GRADUATE program ME fluid mechanics, you’ll need to hire a Math PhD. But you can hire them from other schools.
Martin
@mvr: I’m not suggesting that Humanities is a drain on the budget. In a lot of ways, humanities is in better shape than most disciplines. For one, humanities tends to soak up about 1/6 of all instruction. So it gets the kind of necessary economies of scale. Even if their programs are small, their teaching loads are decent. Writing is the most challenging here because you simply cannot teach large writing classes – it just doesn’t work. So you need to do big history, etc. classes to balance those out. But thanks to general education, you have this large, guaranteed demand. You have classes that need TAs to provide support for your grad students, etc. Now, there’s a debate about whether all students *need* to take that many humanities classes, but regardless, you have this demand pool to work off of.
Another upside is that instruction is cheap. Your facilities are usually just basic classrooms and a library. No specialized laboratories, etc.
The final upside is that faculty are cheap. Google is unlikely to throw half a million dollars at a classics professor. Happens all the time in engineering, though.
So humanities has a lot of ways to balance the books. But that’s harder for other programs. Nobody takes engineering as a general ed class. They have a lot of specialized and expensive facilities. And they get poached a lot. So where a small humanities program can balance its books through these other mechanisms, small STEM programs have a harder time, medical programs will need a hospital to subsidize, etc. But this also depends on how the institution handles its budget. There’s a LOT of subsidizing going on, and if humanities isn’t the tentpole for your institution, it’ll be expected to subsidize the programs that are.
So while there is less inflationary pressure in the humanities it’s still failing to keep pace with societies overall productivity, so it’s still inflationary relative to the economy, and a university that is just a humanities program isn’t a successful university, so humanities is stuck in the same boat as everyone else, in the end.
A Streeter
@wjca:
Yes! It’s blindingly obvious, now that it’s been pointed out to me. Thanks! (Seriously.)
Martin
@moops: We never once hired a mathematician to teach graduate fluid mechanics. Plenty of PhD MEs in the US with adequate math background to teach the subject. Fluid mechanics grad programs in the US are sort of uneasily fit into ME departments because the math isn’t as applicable to other aspects of the discipline. There were courtesy appointments going both ways, and students could take some coursework in math for the degree, but I don’t know any US ME programs that don’t in-house fluid mechanics almost entirely.
The US and Canada do package up their disciplines a little differently. I did general relativity out of both math and physics departments, but in Canada that’s almost exclusively math where in the US that’s almost exclusively physics – finding a differential geometry advisor in math was kind of hard actually. In the US, the math programs don’t usually drift into the adjoining disciplines quite as much.
Mai Naem mobile >
@Omnes Omnibus: I thought JC lived off Soros bucks, no???
Gordon Gee sounds like an old fart who needs to retire.
Sebastian
@Dangerman:
In California it’s a felony to have a gun in your car, unless it’s in a locked case in your trunk. Don’t do it.
Kent
@Martin: Your proposal of an education income tax seems pretty close to what we have today with student loans. You get your degree and then pay for it from a portion of your income for the next 20 years.
In fact if we cap student loan payments at x% of your annual income and have loan forgiveness after 20 years of steady payments it would be exactly the same thing.
Kent
Public school teacher here.
I gotta say that the past few years have greatly reinforced our decision to move from a red state (Texas) back to a blue state (Washington). I’m not sure I could get through a teaching day in Texas anymore without exploding in rage and it was actually a very good job and in some ways better than teaching in Washington back when I first started in 2006 before the great recession and GOP takeover of TX.
Not that education is perfect in Washington at the K-12 or higher education level. Far from it. But at least the state is trying to make things better and not trying to undermine the profession.
I have one daughter happily beginning her junior year at UW in Seattle and another who is a HS senior and potentially bound for Washington State or Western Washington University in exactly 12 months. At this point, all those state schools seem to be in reasonable shape compared to TX, FL, or especially WV. How long that will last? Who knows. Hopefully at least a half dozen more years until my kids get through. But if we have grandkids then what?
What is the answer? I have no fucking idea. But I suspect college will look different if I have grandkids entering college in 20-30 years from now. And not likely for the better. On the other hand, who knows.
One enormous difference between the US and most other countries is that college education is not residential. My wife is from Chile and we have family from Europe. In most other countries you basically keep living at home through your college years and attend whatever college is conveniently located near your home. Going across the country to live in dorms and dine at an expensive dining hall is simply not done in most other countries.
I can frankly see college evolving in that direction. Get rid of dorms, let kids live at home and commute to college by bus or subway and the economics of the whole thing starts to look somewhat different. Especially if your regional commuter school only needs to be good enough rather than superstar quality since you aren’t trying to recruit students from across the country. We already have that with a lot of regional commuter schools. It could be that they are the only financially viable model moving forward.
Ruckus
@Dangerman:
I still drive but any time I have to go a distance I take the train. Now the places I go are served by the train so it works. It’s just not worth the effort to drive any distance. And I’m thinking of selling my car for that very reason. I’m an old fart and while I feel I can still drive OK and my reaction times are still good, it is just is beginning to feel like it isn’t worth it. And I really, really do not want to find out that I’m one of those old farts who thinks he’s fine to drive or whatever, right up to the second you prove you aren’t. I’ve been driving for 58 yrs and I’ve watched a lot of people drive past their due date.
Ruckus
@A Streeter:
As someone who machined specialty metal products for decades, I have to say that without good math skills one does not do that job. And we aren’t talking just addition and subtraction. And the pay wasn’t bad. I know because I signed the checks for quite a number of years. We now can get the computer to do a lot of the math if you use it for 3D product design. We bought our first numerical control machine in 1973 and the first product we used it for was a die cast die for Alcoa, an aluminum cover for some sort of communications repeater/amplifier. The last two machines I bought cost just under half a million dollars and could run unattended for days and cut with electricity. When in college I tutored mathematics, because I was so used to using math every day that it was easy.
Ruckus
@Kent:
Do remember that a lot of countries in Europe are smaller than the US. We have 6 time zones in the US and that distance can make a difference.
sab
@Ruckus: My stepson is a machinist now. He wasn’t college material at all ( dyslexic) but he was always good at math. Trades are still out there as a viable career choice, if the high school is up to the job of giving them the basic math skills.
Princess
@Villago Delenda Est: I agree. For instance, there’s a ton of money to be made feeding and housing the students.
p.a.
“Gee’s usage of funds, particularly at Ohio State and Brown, were both criticized in the press. His tenure at Brown ended up so controversial that the school still has a section of porta-jons during their spring weekend labeled “E. Gordon Gee Lavatory Complex.””
Martin
@Kent: But it’s not the same, because your loan amount is a function of your income. In other words, it eliminates the cost benefit analysis of college because the cost of the degree is proportional to its value, not the cost of delivery.
And there’s a fundamental difference psychologically saying ‘I’ve incurred this burden’ vs just paying a tax on income. Nobody thinks of their next 20 years of income tax withholding as some kind of debt they need to pay for. If you lose your job, there’s no debt collector chasing you, unlike now.
Martin
@Kent: More than half of the cost of college is dorms/meals. It’s yet another way that universities balance the books. There are benefits to getting kids out of their homes, but it’s a substantial part of the cost that can be eliminated.
This is why some of us pushed for kids of faculty/staff to get preferential admission at publics. We get no tuition support for our kids, but if we can at least have them living at home, that’s a massive savings.
Martin
@Ruckus: Most states have pretty robust community college systems that could be permitted to offer 4 year degrees. CA community colleges can offer 4 year degrees that regional UC/CSUs don’t offer.
Gvg
@Martin: wait, how come you have 1 student per 6 residents in the state? And are you letting everyone major in what they want, or is admission to something like engineering competitive?
Florida funds its students at a much higher rate, but not as much as it used to and it’s a shame. I think the legislature is failing our kids and should pay for more instead of loading them with debt. I have noticed other states tuition is higher. We don’t have nearly that ratio of students to population and we are not as old a state as people think. Admissions to the Universities is competitive and admissions to certain majors are more competitive. Some more than others. Obviously the ones with a reputation of making more money tend to be harder to get into. The community colleges are open enrollment but even there, they need certain grades to remain in certain programs I think. The community colleges are cheaper and only grant 4 year degrees. All state schools use a common course numbering system and class work is transferable between the schools so you can start a degree at one school, stop because of finances or family reasons and finish 20 years later in a different city in Florida after the kids are almost grown to set an example.
The last I heard we were getting about a third of our costs from the state. In addition, in the 80’s the University of Florida football got caught in some scandals that caused sanctions and we split the athletic program and funding apart from the actual University. They are not state employees and fund raise separate and the funds are not mingled. The coaches do get really high salaries, but the school doesn’t get money from the football program and oddly enough this has meant our program is one of the few in the country that says it is running at a profit. The others may be in the red because they support academics? Our athletics gives us donations. They like to donate to out libraries for some reason, especially funding longer hours open. They have also been know to fund when the legislature has had budget fights that delayed our funding so we would not have had as many classes for summer sessions. That would have impacted athletes trying to make up eligibility in summer classes I guess but I personally benefited by graduating early in the 90’s. We have not had any big scandals since splitting the programs apart. I think other schools should consider it, but they probably don’t want to give up control of the money.
evodevo
@Ohio Mom: Yeah…it’s usually expressed as he/she is “eat up with jealousy” or some other negative emotion, but count on Justice to misuse the phrase lol
evodevo
@a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): I would imagine the Board hired him especially since he obviously was in sync with their ideas …they didn’t really care about his academic or administrative qualifications lol
Buskertype
@Spanky: “eat up with” is a common phrase in the vernacular of southern and Central WV, it means “obsessed with” or “dedicated to”
Gordon Gee can 100% eat shit, and so can Jim Justice for that matter, but I wish people would lay off Justice’s use of language, it doesn’t help.
Buskertype
@evodevo: disagree, I frequently hear it used in reference to a kid who is obsessed with a musical instrument or a sport
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Yeah, but we still need that productivity.
Trust me, I know. My wife and I were in academia before we became government statisticians. While we weren’t adjuncts, we knew people who were trying to keep afloat by teaching five courses a semester as adjuncts at multiple institutions.
The flip side is, we can’t afford not to.
But I think you’re right, it really has to be done at the Federal level, as the states don’t necessarily realize the economic gains from educating people at their state institutions. We’re a nation, not a collection of states, and we should act as a nation to subsidize higher education.
HinTN
@lowtechcyclist:
Hell, we’re more and more against the idea of decent public rights of way (roads) here, FFS.
Also, Gordon Gee was briefly Chancellor at Vanderbilt. My gawd I’m glad he was shuffled quickly down the line, to the detriment of every subsequent institution that bought his patter.
BellyCat
Ding ding ding.
AND…. In PA, the retirement system pays based on the average salary of one’s LAST THREE YEARS. At Penn State, guess how “loyal” (meaning: goes along to get along) administrators are rewarded? HUGE pay bump for their last three years.
Taxpayers can’t figure out why the retirement system is underfunded (by half?) for its members. Gee, wonder why?
AND, Forbes just cut Penn State’s ranking dramatically. Lowest of all Big Ten and (if I recall correctly) the second most expensive. Shit gonna hit the fan at PSU.
elboku
The voters chose this. Their elected officials promised them what is happening. So be it. There is only so much outrage to go around. WV is gonna WV.
JML
@Martin: except for the fact that students who live on campus (instead of living at home or even living off-campus in rat-ass apartments) do better. Higher grades, better persistence rates, faster completion of their degree, etc. The stats on this are unassailable which is why universities often have freshman living requirements. Dumping on-campus housing (whether for public-private partnerships or just eliminating it altogether) comes with other harms. (and frequently staggeringly bad ideas; when my campus decided it was time to take down one of the outdated dorms, a bunch of people started loudly campaigning that we had an ethical responsibility to turn it into a homeless shelter. bearing all the cost of turning it into an adequate facility and giving away the property for free, of course)
Universities are also facing the problems of mission-creep from the community & technical colleges. Because of cost, people are being encouraged to spend their first two years at a 2-year institution and transfer, which supposedly saves them money. Of course not all the credits transfer cleanly, and the AA degree the student picked up doesn’t ensure they took the pre-req courses they need for their major, and once they transfer in they still have to get admitted to the major and into the first layer courses for the major…which won’t happen for everyone, no matter what they were promised. so now they’re actually spending an extra year or more because they’re out of sequence. And now the university is getting hollowed out on their general education program and the larger class sizes they need to support their smaller courses for the upper division.
We have old models that are mess because they’re underfunded and being undermined. We also have a new drumbeat where college is being treated entirely as a transactional experience, where you are supposed to get through it as quickly as possible, for the lowest cost, and shouldn’t have to pay for anything on campus you don’t personally use.
R-1 schools are having the problem of overcosted departments, particularly in STEM fields, but the rest of the public higher ed world is simply getting buried by the changing paradigms and decades of underfunding.
mvr
@Martin: OK, I better understand your perspective.
I’m still not keen of the claim that we add to the inflationary pressure on universities. The costs of the inputs to what we do have likely kept up with inflation in general, while at the same time the university has cut support staff for our departments, kept operating budgets roughly flat in non-inflation adjusted dollars, and cut library holdings.
But our disagreement is smaller than I thought based on the first posting.
Another Scott
@JML:
Exactly.
That’s the bottom line.
There’s a lot of benefits in being away at college, as you outline. There’s a lot of benefits to public funding of education – at all levels. There’s a lot of benefits to paying teachers enough so that they don’t have to chase scarce grant dollars. There’s a lot of benefits to paying researchers enough so that they don’t have to teach. There’s a lot of benefits to teaching the liberal arts at college, rather than expecting community colleges to do it.
The biggest problem with our national educational system – at all levels – is lack of funding. And there’s plenty of money out there to fund it, it’s just the MotUs have it all squirreled away and are doing nothing productive with it.
We need higher taxes on those who have benefitted the most in the last 40 years. Taking a chainsaw to our university systems – the envy of the world, even with all their problems – is not the solution. Cutting things and restructuring things because of fear of raising taxes on the top 1-2-3% is never a solution, because they’re never satisfied. Just wait until they start demanding that every university and community college be privatized….
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Helena Montana
Reminds me of the Last Days of Larry Summers at Harvard.
wjca
Having, likewise, a graduate degree in engineering, I can only say that my experience is otherwise. As mentioned, one of my grad school professors was a math PhD. But the rest were engineering PhDs. With the exception of one (also, as it happens, Dean of the College of Engineering** at the time) who only had a BS in engineering — he was an aeronautical engineer who had grown up with the field.
** As an aside, this was UC Berkeley, not some small local college somewhere.
wjca
Precisely. Silicon Valley grew up where it is because it had two world class universities (Stanford and UC Berkeley) right on its doorstep. Plus several California State Colleges as well. And what that has meant for our economy is pretty obvious.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: All that sweet, sweet ad revenue…
moops
@wjca:
I happen to know, for a fact, that the ME PhD in fluid mechanics classes were mostly taught by mathematicians. Phil Colella taught the graduate fluids classes. I don’t think Phil Marcus is an engineering graduate either. Panos is a Civil Engineering background. I think now the fluids team are ME adjacent, but that is only happened over the last 5 years.
Paul in KY
@Another Scott: Oh, wow! University of Chicago! Did you party with Lip while he was there?
Gravenstone
To be fair, that’s just Gee acknowledging that the higher profile sports programs wagged the dog that was the university as a whole.
Another Scott
@Paul in KY: [ Google popular culture reference…]
Unlikely!
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Paul in KY
@Another Scott: Probably for the best. He’d have brought your grades down, trying to hang with him :-)
Ryan
Does he mean het up?