West Virginia University cuts

From Inside Higher Ed:

Despite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted today to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.

Some students wept, and an assistant math professor stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut, with only the student body president, the Faculty Senate president and another faculty representative consistently voting no. . . .

The university is eliminating all its foreign language degrees, which include bachelor’s degrees in French, Spanish, Chinese studies, German studies and Russian studies, along with master’s degrees in linguistics and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).

WVU will also eliminate all its foreign language minors, with the possible exceptions of Spanish and Chinese, the two languages in which it will still offer courses. There was one relevant change Friday: the board preserved two faculty positions in the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.

The current minors allow students to study Arabic, Italian and Japanese. Those will all be eliminated. The languages and literatures department will go from 24 faculty members to seven.

The university will also end its master’s in public administration program, along with its master’s degree in higher education administration and its Ph.D. in higher education. There are also cuts in the arts, though the board saved one faculty position each in art and music.

The university is also eliminating its current graduate degree offerings in mathematics, though it says the School of Mathematical and Data Sciences has been given “approval to begin the intent-to-plan process” for replacement master’s and doctoral degrees. Sixteen faculty positions will be eliminated in that school, a third of the current faculty.

University officials have said these and other cuts will take effect at various times, as WVU provides individual employees notices of planned termination, and as professors finish teaching graduate students in discontinued programs and undergraduate students who have accumulated at least 60 credit hours toward their degrees. Those with fewer credit hours have no guarantee they’ll be able to finish their intended degrees at WVU.

Some faculty members may lose their jobs as soon as May.

WVU is led by E. Gordon Gee, who has the (dubious, to my mind) distinction of having held more college presidencies than any other American. He is seventy-nine years old and is being paid $800,000 a year.

You can find the grim paper trail leading to the cuts here.