One Year After Massive Budget Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators

Following up on my previous post, Over 40% Of Full-Time Faculty Depart West Virginia Law School:  Inside Higher Ed, One Year After Massive Cuts, West Virginia Is Still Bleeding Faculty, Administrators:

It’s been almost a year since the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted to eliminate 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs, including all foreign language and math graduate degrees, from its flagship Morgantown campus. About 8 percent of WVU’s majors disappeared in that vote.

Dozens of tenured professors were among the employees forced out. And as the fall semester gave way to spring, and concerns about future enrollment and finances continued, it became clear that those wouldn’t be the only losses. More professors announced they were departing of their own accord, and more still are on their way out. ...

The university hasn’t released figures for how many faculty members have voluntarily left the university atop its forced Academic Transformation cuts. Some faculty members crowdsourced a spreadsheet that lists 38 unnamed faculty members who got new jobs after Academic Transformation and who only started looking elsewhere because of it.

Five law faculty positions were cut as part of Academic Transformation, but an additional seven faculty decided to leave, the Daily Athenaeum student newspaper reported in April. And more departures are coming.

The College of Law dean didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview, and [a university spokesperson] wrote that “attrition at the end of the 2023–24 academic year has not significantly impacted” that school's curriculum. But even before the Academic Transformation cuts, the law school expressed serious concerns about losing faculty, according to its written appeal to stop the cuts.

The document, provided to Inside Higher Ed on condition of anonymity, said, “Our faculty has declined in numbers by 38 percent between 2014 and now,” despite just an 8 percent decline in enrollment. The school noted it faces the start of a new bar exam and an accreditation visit in 2026.

“Any reduction in faculty on this timeline, on top of substantial losses already experienced in the recent past, imperils our ability to meet these and other accreditation requirements,” the school said.

Some current and former law professors told Inside Higher Ed that the university’s layoffs made them head for the exits. “They have slashed us from a high of 43 [faculty members] before the pandemic to we’re down to under 20, and then they expect us to deliver the same services, but there’s only so much a person can do in 24 hours, seven days a week,” said one faculty member who decided to leave last academic year.

“I was afraid that I would be cut,” said the former faculty member, who requested anonymity. “There was no such thing as tenure protection anymore because tenured faculty were being cut, and it was unclear [why] they were.”

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