West Virginia University alumni target where Gee cares most, pocketbook

Sep. 11—MORGANTOWN — Whenever social upheaval takes place, red bandanas come out. It's a tradition that goes back to the coal miners who fought mine bosses for the labor rights millions enjoy today.

However, this time it was WVU alumni and other members of the scholastic community that drew upon those symbols, to protest WVU President Gordon Gee's proposed cuts to university programs.

"They try to argue that they're making these cuts to protect the future of poor West Virginian children who are gonna grow up and then hopefully come to WVU," Taylor Miller, an alumni of the university and one of the protest organizers, said Saturday. "Well, how many children in West Virginia are really exposed to different languages, different cultures as they're growing up? Eliminating that entire department, it's not only getting rid of the jobs for people, but it's also robbing West Virginians of the education that they deserve."

The union theme, Solidarity Forever, which harkens back to the struggle for labor rights, even played at the protest.

Miller said she hopes to build a movement of WVU alumni who will cease donating to the school out of protest to the cuts. The idea is that by applying pressure on an area in which WVU already feels pain, money, that people in power will start listening to her and other members of the school's community that oppose the cuts.

"We're gonna continue growing, we're gonna continue fighting for this," she said. "Because they're not done cutting the program. So we're not done fighting."

Miller got both her undergraduate and master's degrees at WVU.

She said that the university had plenty of forewarning that a budget catastrophe was looming as far back as 2018, but never saw the administration take any steps to avert it. She acknowledged that the university couldn't control an enrollment drop off, but that it could have taken steps to adjust as necessary in advance, rather than taking drastic measures now that will damage the state's ability to educate its population in the long run.

The protest happened in the wake of a letter from the university's board of governors which acknowledged the no confidence vote in President Gee from the faculty on Sept. 6. The letter itself was a hot topic at the protest, especially the line characterizing the faculty senate's position being borne out of misinformation.

"I had no idea that you were misinformed. I guess it was misinformation that you lost your [expletive] jobs," Barbara Evans Fleischauer, a graduate of the WVU College of Law, said through a megaphone. "It was misinformation that all the staff that helped you do your job, helped grade papers teach lower courses, they were misinformed. We alumni, we're a bunch of idiots, we're misinformed. I really resent that insulting comment."

The timing of the letter's release itself contributed to what was already a prevailing feeling among many members that the school's administration is detached and out of touch with the school it oversees. Ela Celikbas, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, said she was surprised by how quickly the board of governors released a letter after the faculty's no confidence vote.

It's an observation that also caught Leslie Wilber, another WVU alumni, by surprise.

"I think that it speaks to a lack of good faith," she said. "The administration and the Board of Governors say again and again that this is a transparent process, that they're listening to faculty and students, to alumni, they say they're listening to us. But there was an event by which faculty can make themselves heard and they didn't even take the time to actually listen before releasing a statement."

Celikbas, especially, fears for the university's ability to keep its R1 designation, which signifies the school's ability to remain at the forefront of research and innovation. The cuts will structurally jeopardize WVU's ability to maintain its research, which could lead to diminished output and cause the school to lose the R1 designation. The designation is important, because it comes with federal and private funding that helps the school do its work. The university is already $45 million in the hole, losing the extra funding from the R1 designation would only imperil it more.

"Is this really helping the state of West Virginia and its residents," Celikba said. "Are we really following our land grant mission by these changes? What are they going to accomplish by butchering liberal arts education and mathematics, graduate programs and many others? Will they be able to keep the R1 title? I don't think so."

There has been one recurring narrative that has flowed out of the larger discussion around the cuts. There have been certain historical parallels to West Virginia's history that people like Miller haven't been able to ignore. She said the coal camps that built West Virginia brought in a lot of immigrants but didn't educate them, paying them in company scrip and only allowing their wages to be spent at the company store so the money would stay with the business.

She said there was an active attempt to keep workers uneducated so that nothing could prevent the coal companies from extracting the state's natural resources at the expense of its residents.

"I think you know, it's just coming around again, then it was coal," she said. "Now, I think you could argue that it's natural gas, or forestry, they're coming here for our resources, and it's going to be easier for them to take it if we don't know the importance of that."

Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com