BY APARAJITA DE

As the sixth poorest state in the nation, West Virginia has always identified a large part of its working-class (primarily) white population as coal miners. With the steady downgrading of coal and related industries, the working class’s only way out of poverty and into alternative livelihoods seemed to be housed in the state’s flagship, West Virginia University. A major revenue generator for the state, the Carnegie-rated R1 university has meant aspirational mobility for coal-mining families looking for release from the epidemic of opioid addiction and from unsustainable mining-work conditions through the degree programs and development of civic and social consciousness that WVU offers. The 2023 fall student stats show more than eleven thousand students to be West Virginia residents. WVU’s programs and colleges are meant to foster and train young, aspiring minds to take on the world with a spirit of debate and critical inquiry. A recent message, on the contrary, is, however, loud and clear in disenfranchising students through sweeping program cuts and faculty terminations. With the termination of thirty-two of its 338 major programs, including the elimination and dissolution of the Department of World Languages, Literature, and Linguistics, the flagship and its administrators have insidiously paved the road to destroying the state’s infrastructure and betraying its responsibility toward the citizenry, who need its support towards pathways of social mobility. It has set a dangerous precedent for nefarious corporatists elsewhere in the nation who seek to break the backbone of US higher education.

In systemically dismantling liberal education and terminating the foreign language and creative writing and other programs, the sweeping cuts across disciplines—as the provost’s office deemed programs with annual external research expenditures of less than two million dollars exempt form the review—imply that humanities programs were already predetermined to be hacked. In truth, humanities professors not only attract undergraduate student tuition for the university, but also the liberal arts faculty and programs provide the required core courses that students need before they take on the electives in their chosen majors. In a portfolio review of programs decontextualized from the ground-level work and far-reaching financial and social-civic reach the programs have, the review results dictating which “deserve” dissolution are specious at worst and supported by a preset corporate logic at best. Indeed, the proposed cuts blatantly disregard the scope and nature of these programs and their impact in the lives of students enrolled in program courses, regardless of their majors. However, attributing a lack of knowledge of the reach of these programs to the architects of these sweeping cuts and their allies might be giving them leeway to carry out actions informed by a predetermined mindset that seeks to create a technical school without liberal education and the humanities.

In depriving students of the ability to grow community among people honing critical thinking abilities, the program reduction is a casual gambit to ensure only vocational and technical education while compromising any critical thinking based on dissent, debate, and the spirit of inquiry. Mimicking the classic white supremacist ideology (know less, ask less, obey more), the corporate scissors sustaining the neoliberal university model show that WVU is a symptom of a larger malaise. It would be naïve to think that the ideologies governing the logic of defunding and terminating liberal education and critical inquiry are new; in fact, they are in keeping with dangerous precedents being emulated elsewhere in the nation. WVU is on the chopping block today, its people disenfranchised and disowned by its flagship; tomorrow, it will be your state’s flagship, using your tax dollars to terminate degrees that make your family upwardly mobile and sustainable in the globally competitive world.

Aparajita De is a graduate of West Virginia University’s English Department and currently associate professor and chair in the Division of Arts and Humanities at the University of the District of Columbia.