Enough already with "land grant"

The Atlantic has the best treatment so far of the implosion at West Virginia University, an institution I fled over the summer. Like a lot of the current batch of critical attention, it zooms in on President Gordon Gee’s fixation on “land-grant” status, a designation for select universities stemming from the nineteenth-century Morrill Act that’s fairly vague (do lots of agriculture, but "without excluding other scientific and classical studies"). Land-grant verbiage is being mobilized in communication by WVU to, for example, justify closing departments and firing people—around 300 workers so far. Depicted not as an unfortunate concession to budget realities that might be addressed by asking the state legislature for additional resources, WVU’s program of layoffs and cuts is instead sold by administrators as a triumphant realization of its land-grant mission.

Gee’s story, in other words, is that his austerity program counts as part of the university’s service to the people of West Virginia—a role that’s mandated by its land-grant status. But even if you buy that reasoning, what sorts of disinvestments constitute serving the needs of the state’s people? As Mitchell Powell notes in his Atlantic piece: “Administrators are making cuts that look puzzling even through a purely utilitarian lens. The administration has cut recreation majors and a resource-management doctorate even as West Virginia officials talk of economies built on outdoor sports and the repair of waterways and forests. The state suffers a severe shortage of public-school math teachers, yet the university has cut the only math doctoral program in the state.”

It would be one thing, I think, to use land-grant status to open up conversations about service to a population by asking those most affected what they value. The example of WVU, though, moves in the opposite, top-down direction. Students, faculty, staff, and other West Virginians are told what’s going to happen, with a lot of “land grant” language sprinkled in to make it all sound virtuous. As for the conversations determining what counts as land-grant service to West Virginians—those appear to be happening behind closed doors when university administrators meet with state legislators to set baffling priorities (more eSports, fewer languages) for the poor state’s largest university.

How are administrators getting to those closed-door meetings at the state capitol? “The use of charter flights is part of efficiently conducting the business of an R1, land grant flagship university,” one university flak told Powell for his Atlantic piece. They’ve spent more than $800,000 on private jets since May. Because, land grant.

There’s a publishing angle here, since Gee regularly invokes his books on land-grant universities (from, alas, a university press) to justify his austerity program. “I have written three books on this damn issue,” Gee told faculty in a contentious meeting earlier this year. And just this week he was pictured hoisting his land-grant book in a piece about WVU’s cuts. Both the Atlantic and the New Yorker mention Gee’s published work, with links, so the attention is presumably being noticed by his publisher.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a university press publishing right-wing work (praised by the National Review, just to give you a sense). If the books are being deliberately employed to gussy up a program of defunding large public universities, though—and Gee is clear that he sees West Virginia as “the tip of the spear”—then I think the house may have certain responsibilities. I wouldn’t want to see books I’d worked on used to advance this sort of political program, and I wouldn’t (for example) further promote them or seek to work again with their authors. It will be interesting to see whether this tangle of issues has ramifications in the publishing sphere.

When I think about my last couple of months at WVU, I remember a colleague asking for permission to use money from the sale of books to buy toner for the printer, only to be told that the university’s land-grant mission prohibited it. My sense is discussions about whether and how to cut higher education would be more honest if we put this sort of silliness aside.