Politics

Here is a perspective from within the belly of the beast in case it is interesting to someone: state legislatures starving higher ed for funding is a story that goes back over 30 years. It is responsible to a significant degree for the tuition hikes that have made a college education too costly for many students. In effect, this funding cut and resulting tuition hike has shifted costs of an educated workforce from wealthy taxpayers to young people. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging

Administrative bloat is also a problem, and falls into a couple of categories. You have the university presidents and coaches, on one hand, where the appointments are themselves a political plum in some states and game day is an excuse for rich alumni to drive $300,000 RVs to sit in corporate skyboxes. (State legislatures don’t seem to have issues with that spending, for some reason).

Then there is the multiplication of various vice-provosts, directors, department heads, etc. Some of that is legitimate administrative bloat, but it tends to gets pared back fairly regularly when a recession hits or enrollment drops. In many institutions a lot of the remaining bloat is administrative infrastructure built up around competition for students, compliance with Federal mandates, and research efforts to make up for that lost state funding. You have student life. Dining services. Residence life. Disability services. Equal opportunity offices. Financial aid offices. Faculty affairs offices. Institutional research. Institutional support. HR operations. State mandated procurement and budgeting units. Huge staffing structures around the research enterprise. Units dedicated to service and outreach. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

The point is not that all of these these activities are good and have to be preserved, or that they are bad and have to be axed. The point is that a lot of university activity that at first blush looks like cancerous growth is a response to the need to compete for tuition paying students, to keep the feds and state legislatures happy, and to land that the next big grant. A good bit of THAT can in turn be traced back to the aforesaid budget cuts and rising expectations about the sort of support that institutions of higher education are expected to supply.

Wow, that ended up longer than I intended, but I’ll leave it for the 1 or 2 of you who care about this stuff.

Some choice quotes:

Despite WVU being a public land-grant university, the state has cut its financial support of the institution by 36 percent, or nearly $100 million, over the past decade. According to an analysis by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, if the state had continued to finance the university the same as it had a decade ago, WVU would only be facing a $7.6-million deficit, instead of the alleged $45 million deficit.

West Virginia’s state government ended the recent fiscal year with $458 million in unappropriated surplus. In fact, during a recent legislative special session, lawmakers attempted to add $45 million in surplus funds, the same amount as WVU’s projected deficit, to a bill appropriating millions to Marshall University for a cybersecurity program....

WVU’s President E. Gordon Gee has refused to seek further funding from the state, despite the university’s dire budget crisis. Faculty say that this shows the university is capitalizing on the crisis in order to implement planned austerity measures....

Faculty and staff say that this budget crisis is driven by years of financial mismanagement, reckless borrowing and spending decisions related to a failed growth strategy, and overshooting enrollment predictions.

“The WVU administration played an active role in this crisis,” Myya Helm, a 2022 graduate of West Virginia University, told Truthout. “Their proposal is a result of financial mismanagement, lack of institutional transparency, and an astonishing failure to recognize the power of education in transforming the lives of West Virginians.”

In 2018, the Gazette-Mail reported that Gee spent more than $2.2 million of WVU student tuition dollars on private air travel between May 2014 and June 2017. Despite Gee’s exorbitant expenses, in July, WVU’s Board of Governors extended Gee’s $800,000 a year contract, in the fact of the budget crisis. Gee is planning on stepping down as the university’s president in 2025. He intends to serve as a faculty member in the law school, where the university’s proposed cuts plan to eliminate two current faculty.

So the root cause here seems clear. The state government is clearly underfunding the university, yes, but it seems like the university admin is using the public university's funds as a personal bank account to extract wealth from the state. I suppose I wouldn't want to fund the university either if i were them.