BY HANK REICHMAN

If there’s a better examplar of the higher education administrative establishment’s failures than E. Gordon Gee, I can’t think of one.  Gee, who has held more university presidencies than any other American, has cut an extraordinary path of scandal and negligence pretty much everywhere he’s been.  Yet he continues not only to reap rewards (especially monetary ones); at age 81 he is still called upon to help lead even institutions whose problems are at least to some degree of his own making.  Until late last year Gee served as president of West Virginia University (WVU), where his remarkable run of controversy had begun in the early ’80s.  Returning to WVU in 2013, Gee engineered a massive fiscal crisis that resulted in the layoffs of hundreds of faculty members and the closure of multiple programs, still leaving the university with a crushing debt.

Gee has now come back to the scene of other previous scandals, the Ohio State University (OSU), where he served two terms as president and has now been named a consultant for the new Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, a problematic venture, as we shall see, mandated by the state legislature.  Upon Gee’s appointment, OSU’s recently appointed president Ted Carter, a retired United States Navy vice admiral and flight officer, called Gee his “wingman,” which suggests the consultancy may be more than an honorary title.

But before turning to Gee’s current role at OSU, let’s review briefly his astonishing career of misconduct and mismanagement.  After his first stint at WVU from 1981 to 1985, Gee served as president of the University of Colorado Boulder from 1985 to 1990, of OSU from 1990 to 1998, of Brown University from 1998 to 2000, of Vanderbilt University from 2000 to 2007, and of OSU again from 2007 to 2013, before returning to WVU in 2013.  Gee left Brown under a storm of criticism, widely accused of departing because Vanderbilt offered his wife a corporate-level salary and a tenured teaching position.  “Marijuana at the Mansion,” a 2006 Wall Street Journal investigation, revealed Gee’s lavish spending as chancellor of Vanderbilt, and his then-wife’s marijuana use in the university-owned mansion, which I suppose must be the least of his alleged transgressions.  (Gee divorced his wife five months after the article was published.  In 2012, she cashed in with a book on the experience.)

During Gee’s first term at OSU the university failed to protect male student athletes from sexual abuse at the hands of an athletic doctor.  (At the time, MAGA Congress member Jim Jordan was an OSU wrestling coach who “turned a blind eye” to his athletes’ complaints.)  The university has paid $60 million to settle cases with nearly 300 victims.

Gee ended his second term at OSU about a year after an exposé revealed elaborate spending and a month before trustees placed him on a remediation plan that included a warning that he could be fired if he continued to make offensive remarks disparaging Catholics, exposed in a recording of comments he made at an athletics’ council meeting.  Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that Gee did successfully raise many millions of dollars for the OSU endowment and spearheaded important building projects.  So, on the way out he signed a five-year, $5.8 million sweetheart deal to be the university’s president emeritus and a tenured professor.

Unsatisfied, Gee returned to West Virginia where, over an eleven-year period, he all but destroyed the institution.  Here’s what I wrote about the impact of Gee’s WVU presidency in the second edition of Understanding Academic Freedom:

In August 2023, West Virginia University (WVU) president E. Gordon Gee announced a $45 million budget deficit.  With no meaningful faculty participation, his administration prepared an “Academic Transformation” plan that proposed closing thirty-two academic programs and cutting 169 faculty positions.  After widespread protest from faculty—who voted 799–100 to approve a no-confidence vote in Gee’s leadership—students, and national groups including the AAUP, the Board of Governors voted to discontinue twenty-eight academic programs and ten minors and eliminate 143 faculty positions.  An  additional 8 positions, including faculty, were later cut from the business college and 16 more employees were dismissed from the university library.  Sixteen faculty positions were eliminated in the School of Mathematical and Data Science, a third of the current  faculty.  The proposed cuts originally included all foreign language programs, but after protests undergraduate programs in Spanish and Chinese were retained. . . .

Gee . . .  bears much of the responsibility for the crisis that his cuts allegedly aimed to  resolve.  In 2017, he announced a plan to boost the university’s enrollment from 28,409—after peaking previously at 31,000—to 40,000 by 2020, ignoring the commonly held  expectation of enrollment declines nationally and the state’s shrinking population.  To achieve that ambitious target, Gee invested lavishly in debt-financed construction projects and industry partnerships.  By 2023, the university still enrolled just over 26,000 students but was $33 million in debt.  WVU now projects a loss of 5,000 students over the next decade, costing it $72.5 million.

Gee’s current OSU appointment can be viewed as emblematic of the arguably symbiotic relationship between neoliberal educational administrators and illiberal government interference.  The Salmon P. Chase Center was initiated by a 2023 Ohio law mandating creation of an “independent academic unit” at OSU to teach and research the American constitution.  The state law provides the center with $5 million in funding in each of its first two years of operation and calls for the creation of 15 tenure-track professorships.  In January, the university senate, made up of faculty, students, staff and administrators, voted 64 to 57 against approving the Chase Center.

“There’s been strong agreement among us that the legislative justification for the Chase Center — that teaching and research at Ohio State is ideologically biased rather than evidence-based — is based on fundamentally false premises.  We all have agreed on that,” said University Senate Faculty Council Chair Sara Watson, an associate professor of political science.

The Center purports to provide “intellectual diversity,” a claim that, as a columnist for the Columbus Dispatch points out, is made by “the very lawmakers who stomped out diversity, inclusion, and equality efforts at Ohio State and other public campuses.”

“Time will tell,” she concludes, “if the so-called ‘intellectual diversity’ center is a dusty attempt to revive the good old days (bad days) that many — me included — fear it to be.”

In a recent volume on the Orbanist assault on academic freedom in Hungary, one scholar argues that his country’s experience demonstrates how academic freedom “is situated within the Scylla and Charybdis of neoliberalism and illiberalism. . . .  (neo)liberal and illiberal threats can even be combined and cumulative.”  (See my review for Academe forthcoming online in September.)  Perhaps that is also a lesson to be learned from the ignominious administrative career of the notorious E. Gordon Gee.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.