West Virginia University students hold walkout to protest cuts in academic programs

Christian Adams arrived at West Virginia University this month to begin his second year of work toward a degree in Chinese studies, only to receive devastating news.

His undergraduate major is being yanked out from under him, eliminated along with dozens of other academic programs, including every foreign language taught on the sprawling Morgantown campus.

“I freaked out,” said Adams, suddenly without an obvious degree path. “I was very distraught.”

He was also angry, as are other students and faculty across the campus 90 minutes south of Pittsburgh. They say the cuts intended to ease a budget crisis threatening to alter the face of West Virginia’s flagship public university, long a symbol of hope in a state rich in coal but poor economically.

At noon Monday, hundreds of students, including Adams, walked out of classes in protest. They and others are calling the reductions announced 10 days ago an existential threat to WVU, its students and the Mountain State.

Outside the Mountainlair student union Downtown, one of the protest sites, students, faculty and others jammed a plaza and walkways, chanting “Stop the Cuts!” as a protester with a bullhorn egged them on. Many wore red in solidarity with faculty, graduate teaching assistants and staff facing job loss.

One sign visible in the crowd and on social media questioned why WVU can spend millions on a football coach but nothing to teach art or modern languages.

Another read, “Duolingo U,” a biting reference to suggestions by WVU that language apps could replace campus language instruction going forward.

A second protest site on recreation fields across from Towers dorms at Evansdale drew a separate crowd that also followed instructions from organizers to “be loud, have fun and raise hell!”

Adams, 18, a sophomore from Clarksburg, said he knows what’s at stake for those suddenly without a major, given his own predicament.

“There really is no recourse for me,” said Adams, who has not earned enough credits to qualify for a teach-out. “I’m going to have to pivot and go into a different major.”

He had hoped to apply language study toward a career in labor or immigration law.

Now, he is thinking about accounting, though that could mean more time and cost for him to graduate, since courses he already took are not compatible with that major.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said.

During the last decade, enrollment and financial woes at regional public universities nationally – Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education, among them – led to program cuts and campus consolidations.

Now those troubles have spread to better-endowed flagship campuses in the Northeast and Midwest, among them Penn State University, which has made program cuts to reduce a deficit once projected at $140 million.

On Aug. 11, university President E. Gordon Gee and WVU unveiled preliminary recommendations to curb a potential $45 million budget deficit that the administration blames on declining enrollment, shifting student demand and skepticism about the value of a college degree.

Leaders plan to discontinue 32 of WVU’s 338 majors and reduce faculty ranks in Morgantown by 7% or 169 positions. Twelve of the majors are undergraduate level and 20 are at the graduate level.

In announcing the cuts, Gee said the university can no longer avoid harsh realities about the higher education market.

“Students have choices, and if we aim to improve our enrollment numbers and recruit students to our university, we must have the programs and majors that are most relevant to their needs and the future needs of industry,” he said.

The cuts could be finalized by WVU trustees on Sept. 15. They would impact areas from mathematics and law to engineering.

But the reduction would hit the humanities hard, in particular the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which would be dissolved on the Morgantown campus.

French instruction would go. So would instruction in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, German and Russian. WVU is also reviewing a plan to eliminate its language requirement for all majors.

Groups on and off campus argue that the potential loss of all languages undermines the role a university such as WVU plays in preparing young adults for careers in a global economy – be it banking in Germany, law in Mexico or public policy in China.

“We’re in a ground war right now in Europe. You think maybe we might want to be teaching Russian studies,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor and supervisor of the Russian Studies Program, which faces elimination.

The university says enrollment in languages has declined, but Di Bartolomeo said so have enrollments across the university. She said languages are revenue generators for WVU.

The university has suggested that language apps and reliance on instruction from peer universities could suffice.

The cuts have garnered national attention. Groups expressing alarm include the Modern Language Association, whose executive director Paula Krebs wrote Gee on Aug. 11.

“I can tell you that no other state flagship university has forsaken language education for its students or made the kinds of cuts to the humanities that WVU is undertaking,” she wrote. “A full liberal arts education includes providing students with the tools that enable them to interact both with their neighbors in West Virginia and with the rest of the world. Science, technology, and business courses and majors are not enough for WVU to offer if it wants to produce fully informed and thinking citizens for West Virginia.”

Officials including WVU’s provost, Maryanne Reed, have said the school must be forward-thinking and put personal biases aside as it decides what programs to jettison.

According to its website, WVU enrolled about 27,000 students last fall, with 25,000 on its Morgantown campus. It and other universities have experienced enrollment losses, and are warning of an “enrollment cliff,” when birth-rate declines after the Great Recession of 2008 reach college campuses by 2026.

But faculty and students say the university bears fault for inaccurately projecting growth and spending choices. A Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found the debt load at WVU tripled between 2008 and 2021 to $969 million.

A petition condemning the cuts posted on change.org blamed lack of preparation, transparency and accountability by Gee, the Board of Governors, and other members of the administration.

Gee recently announced he plans to step down in 2025.

“Instead of addressing the budget issues ahead of time, President Gee continuously averted them, and later placed blame on the faculty and students, questioning the ‘quality of education’ that students were receiving,” stated the petition. It said the cuts “will actively harm the university’s capability to deliver quality education, through unfair staff terminations, critical program discontinuations and restructures that will negatively impact WVU for the foreseeable future.”

Adams, part of the West Virginia United Students’ Union, a group fighting the cuts, said the walkout was intended to make a statement. “Our goal is to get as many people as possible there to show solidarity with workers, with the professors, and with everyone who has been cut.”