What is to be done?
[UPDATE, August 22, 2023: We have edited this post, changing some wording and adding new text to clarify our position on the financial situation and our proposed solution. This is in response to criticism from some members of the WVU community that we appeared to be targeting all non-classified employees at the university, which is not our intention.]
It’s been 3 months since we posted our original report here, and a lot has happened since then. This is not meant to be a blog: we published on WordPress because it was the easiest way to distribute the report quickly and anonymously. The original post has been viewed 66k times by 45k visitors and cited in many news articles. We stand by everything that was written there. We think that it is now time to post some updated information in light of developments over the last few months. We still wish to remain anonymous; developments since the original post suggest that that was the correct strategy, most notably the WVU administration’s unconstitutional insertion of a speech code into our 2023-24 faculty appointment letters. That speech code makes criticizing administrative decisions a fireable offense.
As most people reading this will be aware, the WVU provost released her office’s recommendations for program and personnel cuts in early August. They are outrageous and unprecedented. A small subset of the programs to be cut include all graduate programs in math; the entire department of World Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics; all programs in jazz; all programs in ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture; the master’s degree in Special Education; the MFA in creative writing; all programs in landscape architecture; and the bachelor’s degree in Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Resources. Many other programs will not be eliminated entirely but will be cut until they are no longer viable.
This report is not about the radical and nonsensical nature of those recommendations, the utterly unqualified consultants who conducted the sham study of programs, or the dire consequences for the university of going through with this suicide plan. This report is about a different question: what would a competent administration have done instead? We offer one answer here. There are probably other options; this is just a particularly obvious one to people who don’t have a vested interest in stealing money from the taxpayers of West Virginia.
Administrative bloat
In our original report, we tried to document the explosion of high-paid ‘executive’ administrators at WVU on a micro level, by looking at specific administrative offices and their growth in executives from 2014-2022. We have since become aware that the official state agency in charge of overseeing colleges and universities, the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission (HEPC), publicly posts detailed data on personnel trends at all WV colleges and universities dating back to 2013. We don’t need to guess any more about how the WVU administration has grown. HEPC’s Human Resources section contains detailed data on all employees at all institutes of higher education in West Virginia. The website is interactive and easy to navigate; it is not easy to print or link to data in neat tables, so we summarize data pulled from the website in our own table below. The website tracks 3 kinds of employees: faculty, classified employees, and non-classified employees. Classified employees are generally low-paid staff members who don’t have any policy role at the university, like campus service workers or warehouse assistants. They made an average of about $39k a year in 2022, according to the ‘Salary Snapshot’ tab on the HEPC human resources website (all data on employee counts and average salaries reported here come from that page). Non-classified employees are staff and administrators who play a policy role in the university’s operations, are deemed ‘critical’ by university leadership, are involved in IT operations, or satisfy one of a handful of other criteria established by the state. This includes employees from communications specialists all the way up to the President. They made an average of about $86k a year in 2022.
[Addition, 8/22/2023: We recognize that the category ‘non-classified employee’ includes a broad spectrum of jobs and pay levels, including people who do work that is critical to the university’s academic mission and are paid much less than $86k a year. We share the opinion voiced by some of our non-classified colleagues that most of the waste in this category involves the employees with the highest salaries. We certainly do not believe that all non-classified employees are a waste of money or that all parts of the salary distribution should be cut equally. The ‘long right tail’ of the salary distribution in this very heterogeneous category is the most promising target for cuts, because there is more money to be cut there by definition than at the bottom, and because this is where the ever-increasing number of executive administrators at the university are located. Nonetheless, ‘non-classified’ is the only category split that HEPC gives us. We can’t split this further into ‘staff’ vs. ‘administrators’, critical functions vs. less critical ones, or worthy vs. unworthy, to see how much each category has grown. The data we have is on total non-classified payroll. If cuts ever are made, they should proceed precisely by examining such distinctions and details.]
As we noted in the original report, WVU’s enrollment was at a peak in 2013, right before Gordon Gee became president for the second time. This report shows the peak from 2010-13, and p. 18 of these slides from Vice President of ‘strategic initiatives’ Rob Alsop shows the trend from 2014. As of fall 2022, WVU has lost 10-15% of its students. What happened to administrative jobs over that time? The official data on the HEPC website show that the university eliminated about 1,200 classified positions from 2013-2022, but they added nearly 1,000 non-classified positions. The net result has been a $50 million increase in administrative salaries over that time, as the university’s enrollment fell by 15%. We obtained this number by multiplying the number of employees in each category by their average salary as reported by HEPC to get a total payroll number, then comparing the summed payroll between 2013 and 2022.
What would it take to solve the WVU budget crisis? Cutting administrative payroll back to 2013 levels would completely eliminate the FY 2024 budget deficit. Cutting it back to to 85% of 2013 levels, to match the decline in enrollment, would generate savings of $74 million. This would eliminate the entire projected budget deficit for the next 5 years, through the ‘demographic cliff’ expected to begin in 2026-27.
When asked about this at a Faculty Senate meeting in June (starting around 1:20:00 here), Alsop publicly stated that the rise in non-classified employees was a shift in job labels only, due to a change in West Virginia law, and that it had ‘nothing to do with rate of pay’. The data on the HEPC website show that this statement is false: the new non-classified positions paid about $50 thousand a year more on average than the classified positions they replaced.
This report is meant to demonstrate that the entire budget deficit at WVU could be closed by cutting administrative positions back to 85% of 2013 levels, when the university had far more students. Faculty at the university agree almost unanimously that high-level executive administrators do not aid the core business of the university, which is teaching and research; in fact, they frequently impede that work. Gordon Gee and Rob Alsop have been stubbornly resistant to the idea of cutting administrative salaries or positions, and have repeatedly refused to even acknowledge that administrative costs here have skyrocketed over the last decade. For that reason, this common-sense approach to solving the university’s budget crisis can only work if the entire senior leadership of the university is fired, starting with Gordon Gee and Rob Alsop.
There are likely other solutions. Legislators could restore the public funding that they’ve slashed over the past decade. The university could spend more of its $2.5 billion endowment to aid a gradual reduction in force by attrition (ideally coupled with large cuts in administration). Or the university could get serious about making their athletic department pay their own way: despite frequent claims that athletics are self-sustaining and separate from the main university budget, their 2022 financial statement shows that WVU athletics only turned a ‘profit’ by siphoning close to $9m from student fees and direct institutional support (see p. 3) and omitting depreciation costs (p. 13) pertaining to their facilities. All of these are promising ways to reform WVU’s budget. Cutting administration is likely the least painful. But it will require new leadership.
WVU Facts 