Where Should the Axe Fall?

Look, it’s going to be an ugly decade or so for higher education. The axes are going to start to fall and if you’re not already wise to that, what’s been happening at West Virginia University should be a massive wake-up call to you. I don’t know a lot about WVU, to be honest. I’ve never been to Morgantown. A buddy of mine and I spent a fairly enjoyable evening watching their football team absolutely paste Clemson one year with beers in the back room while our wives had a Pure Romance party in the front room. I’ve seen TikToks about that wild monorail-like thing of theirs and I know after a big victory on the gridiron, the last thing you want to be in Morgantown, is a couch.

Aside from that, I don’t know much– so I can’t speak to all the facts on the ground, but a quick trip on the interwebs reveals that it’s looking at a truly ugly budgetary picture of a $45 million shortfall and state support for public universities has been declining across the country, that instantly puts you in a position where some hard choices are going to have to be made.

This, however, is not a choice I would have made: eliminating 32 majors and 7% of the total faculty impacting (when all is said and done) up to 2% of WVU’s total enrollment. This includes the complete elimination of the World Languages division- because- and I only wish I was kidding here- they think they can partner with fellow Big 12 institutions to provide foreign language instruction or they’ve got an app to do it online.

“Save money, use Duolingo” is the best answer they can come up with, and it also reeks of 'consultant speak', and lo and behold, there's a consulting firm behind this! (And hey, look- the University of Florida is hiring McKinsey now, too!) 

I could write a book on how much I loathe and despite this sort of venture capitalist/vulture consulting culture that badly needs to die if we're going to solve any number of problems in this country, but I will say that this is not surprising. It says to me that the people at the top of the circus want to look like they're doing something while at the same time preserving their own power. And that's the flaw with 'bringing in a consulting firm'-- they're never going to recommend eliminating the high-paying, budget-eating jobs of the people who are paying them. 

There are buzzwords and quotes floating around in these articles that say things like 'we need to rethink how we deliver content' which is the most cringe thing I think I've ever read. Education is not content delivery. Can you think about how you deliver your end product differently? Sure-- you can try different online models, like ASU or Purdue with its acquisition of Kaplan University. But boiling down what you do to little more than a fucking video on Instagram just reeks of people who are so out of touch with the reality of education it's beyond words.

This argument I am a touch more sympathetic to- but one of the consistent pieces of pushback I've seen is that the WVU data used to support this idiocy didn't count double majors and I think if you're going to evaluate languages, I would be very interested in seeing the number of students who pick up a language major in addition to something else. I might be inclined to agree that students majoring in just one language is decreasing as a phenomenon but I'm not convinced you can declare that 'students are voting with their feet' just yet. 

That being said, I also agree that it may seem like less of a good idea than it was given how many translation apps are proliferating and increasing in quality, but translation apps aren’t everything they’re cracked up to be. They are getting better- I’ll admit that- Chat GPT is legitimately impressive for basic translation work- but they don’t capture linguistic nuances of every language all that well. It’s very much a ‘trust but verify’ situation with these things and pretending like we’ve got a Universal Translator now, so therefore, we don’t need language instruction is absolutely infuriating and ignores reality.

This is one of those personal lines for me. I think Shakespeare should be required in every high school in America and I think that every student in high school and college should be required to take at least some foreign language. I didn't want to take choir or band in high school but my parents wanted me to have a full course load, so I doubled up on French and Spanish for all four years of high school. I added Portuguese, four semesters of Swahili, two semesters of Hindi, and a semester of Arabic in college. Languages changed my life in ways that I'm still unpacking today.

More and more, I'm convinced that if I had a time machine, I would go back in time, slap my younger self, and change my major to linguistics and/or speech pathology-- 1.3 billion people speak English in the world, which means that roughly 6 billion people speak something else. 

It's easy to dismiss the notion by embracing provincialism and an attitude of 'well, I don't need to learn that', but it can surprise you sometimes. I remember reading a huge feature piece in the Des Moines Register (I think) talking about how Iowa farmers were partnering with farmers down in Brazil because, at the time, the growing season was year-round so they could grow more crops. WVU is in the heart of Appalachia- you think there aren't coal miners elsewhere in the world? Do you think that WVU students shouldn't be competitive in the global economy? You don't want to open doors of the world to those students? This reeks and yes, I've used that word way too much in this piece, but it's appropriate- there's a stink of classism to all of this. WVU kids don't need to learn foreign languages. Voc/Tech Training for all of them, because (the unspoken implication here) that's all they're good for...

(I'm not a native of West Virginia, but if you want to go unpack the history of classism and just, you know, Appalachia, in general, to see how true that is, there are plenty of more folks out there who can tell you better than I can.)

You can find articles touting the benefits of learning a second language with actual science lined up behind them, but to me, it’s simple: it forces you to think differently. It forces you to engage with the world in a different way. And if that’s ultimately not the purpose of an educational institution, then, what is?

I’m a reasonable guy, though- because we can pretend all we want that we're not heading into stormy weather for higher ed, but we are, so: If you’re teaching, I don’t know, Flemish at WVU and you’re not bringing in numbers, then yeah, I would expect in that financial environment- that perhaps I should seek my fortunes elsewhere in Academia. But if Spanish, French, Chinese– if they’re all putting butts in seats and bringing in revenue- which, according to this excellent thread amounts to a consistent profit- then what are you doing, WVU?

Anyone who knows anything about the state of higher education knows where the problem is. The proliferation of administrative bureaucracy is where the bloat is- and it’s important to note that when I say ‘administrative bureaucracy’, I’m not talking about custodians, physical plant workers, administrative assistants, or campus security. Some support operations are going to be inevitable and needed in any large organization. 

No, I’m talking about the layer above that. The President of the United States, the leader of the Free World has one Vice President. The average University President proliferates Vice Presidents and Assistant Vice Presidents faster than rabbits breed. There are Deans, Associate Deans, Provosts, and Associate Provosts– you’d have to look, but I bet you can draw a correlation between the rise in well-paid administrative bureaucracy and the decline in the quality of a college degree. Administrators outnumber faculty members on most campuses these days, I think- and for all the bluster from the Right about ending tenure, tenure-track positions are increasingly few and far between. (And hey, look at this: it turns out that one administrative position is being cut and it's a 'retiring and position won't be refilled' type of a deal for a salary of $275,000... )

There are hard choices ahead for higher education. It’s going to be an ugly decade, if not longer with the looming enrollment cliff coming. Fiscal houses should be put in order. You should be developing plans to hunker down and figure out what’s next– but if cuts have to come, quite literally every level of upper-level management should be first in line before a single major is cut. And that’s another in a long list of challenges confronting higher education– if the axe must fall, how does anyone expect those wielding it to turn it on themselves?