Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 306: Bowtie Economics (feat. WVU Panel)

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

This week we're talking about the proposed cuts and layoffs at West Virginia University, and to do it we've enlisted a damn platoon. First we have Dennis Hogan, a postdoctoral fellow at Haverford College, who has an article in The Baffler this week about the WVU situation (link below). Then we have two grad students at WVU, Bethany Winters and Christian Rowe, who are involved in the union (@westvirginiaunited on Instagram, @wvunitedsu on Twitter). Finally we have writer and professor Glenn Taylor (@GlennTaylorBook on Twitter), who teaches in WVU's creative writing department. Check out Dennis Hogan's article here: https://thebaffler.com/latest/capture-the-flagship-hogan To contact the board of governors [e-mail] To contact the provost [e-mail] To contact the vice president of strategic initiatives [e-mail] Petition for vote of no-confidence in Gee: https://www.change.org/p/support-wvu-assembly-resolution-of-no-confidence-in-gordon-gee Petition to save creative writing program: https://www.change.org/p/save-wvu-s-mfa-program-preserve-the-future-of-creative-writing-education?utm_medium=custom_url&utm_source=share_petition&recruited_by_id=90780690-c462-012f-672a-4040acce234c

Thank you. Okay, welcome, Trillbillies, to uh show this week we are joined by i think the largest guest panel we've ever assembled man we really got a murderer's row here it's like i love it it's i've just i've been trying to add more and more guests over time so that i could talk less i'm trying i'm trying to engineer a situation where we have at least 20 guests on at one time and i just have to say one or two things here and there uh so you know given that we're already heading one step in the right direction um this week we've assembled our panel to discuss the ongoing situation at West Virginia University. It is an interesting situation.

I, you know, in a lot of the things I've read about it, I think this is kind of by design. I haven't really seen a lot of discussion with regards to the state's role in what has happened. It seems like one of our main characters here, antagonists, I keep calling, in my head, I keep calling them G. Gordon

No way to talk about Coach Huggins. Yeah, there's Coach Huggins, too. One day Bob Huggins gets a DUI, the next day they want to cancel the humanities. Like I we have been covering the Bob. We've been covering the Bob Huggins thing on our show for several months now. And so it's like now you got this like other thing. You've got a another criminal with a name sort of like G.

Gordon Liddy, but Gordon D. a another criminal with a name sort of like g gordon liddy but uh e gordon d um who uh is also a new character in this so um so yeah so before we start though before we get into it i just want to have you go around and introduce yourselves um i was going to do that for you but uh as i have pointed out i'm trying to talk less. So and plus, you know, you don't want me representing you to the audience. You want to represent. So, Bethany, why don't we start with you? And, you know, you could pass it off to whoever.

I'm Bethany Winters. I am. I'm a third generation WVU student and I'm from Clarksburg, West Virginia. I am in the Masters of Public History program and I work at the West Virginia Regional History Center. And I'm a member of West Virginia United Student Union and West Virginia campus workers. And I put in my little bio thing, I became interested in labor organizing after years of working terrible customer service jobs and reading about unions and history books. So I'm really glad that I can actually get involved with something now.

Yeah, that's how we all start out there. You know what I mean? You get screamed at by more than one customer and you're like, man, fuck this. All right, we'll go to Glenn now. Thanks. I'm Glenn Taylor. I was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia.

And then left the state for about 18 years. Lived in Ohio, then Austin, Texas, and then Chicago for nine years where I had my first teaching job at a large community college in northwest suburban Chicago. But while I was there, I published the first two of my four novels. All of them take place in West Virginia. The first one was The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart that came out in 2008. And then my most recent one just came out in March, and it's called The Songs of Betty Bache. I did not go to WVU, but both my parents did. They met here. My mom is from Fairmont, and my dad is from Matewan in Mingo County. So I know my labor history pretty well. In fact, I had some family involvement. My grandma Lena was a Chambers.

So her cousin was Ed Chambers, who of course was shot and killed on the Walsh County Courthouse steps alongside Sid Hatfield. And in fact, a lot of material in my books, you know, cover things like what came to be known as the Mate One Massacre and Battle, and then the following year, Battle of Blair Mountains. So yeah, I got some skin in the game, raising my family here. You know, we moved back, we had three kids while we were living in Chicago, and then we moved back here in 2011. So I've been teaching undergraduates and graduates through our, you know, our creative writing track in the English department and through our MFA program for 13 years now. And I've, I've, I've been enlightened and I was a little more hopeful and optimistic when we came back in 2011 about a lot of things for my home state.

I'm used to having the love-hate relationship, as I'm sure Bethany and Christian are as well. Bethany, do you know Jalyn Lant from Clarksburg? She was one of my students. She's a singer-songwriter and a great writer, but now she's actually a reporter for WBOY. So when the students had the walkout, she was actually the one who interviewed me. One of my former creative writing students has literally interviewed me on my thoughts about the discontinuation of all these programs. And she had tears in her eyes, actually. It was quite moving.

So I'm here to follow the students and have their back. They sure seem to have ours. So I'm seeing a lot of solidarity as of late. Great. Christian, we'll go to you next. My name is Christian Rowe. I'm a fifth-generation WVU graduate. fifth generation WVU graduate.

And I'm a history master's student currently, as well as a substitute teacher in Monongalia County public schools where I worked last year as a long-term Soviet university high school. I graduated from WVU with my history BDA in 2019. I'm from Malden, West Virginia, down in the southern part of the state in Kanawha County, up the river from Charleston a little bit. And yeah, I'm glad to be involved

with WVU Students United after sort of reading about labor resistance in my home state all my life, but sort of losing faith a little bit in the way that militancy was sort of going by the wayside in West Virginia. And so, yeah, I'm glad to be keeping that tradition alive. Nice. Dennis. Yeah. So my name is Dennis Hogan. I'm the lone non-WVU person on the panel. So I just want to say thanks so much for letting me crash the party. I am a postdoc at Havisford College outside Philadelphia.

And even though my work, my PhD work was on Central American literature in the 19th century, I got involved in union organizing at Brown University. I helped form the union there, sort of led to me developing an interest in sort of the conditions of contemporary higher education, labor, finance, governance, all of these issues and how they affect institutions kind of throughout the higher ed ecosystem. I've also been a local union political director and a community activist. So yeah, happy to add whatever I can in the way of context. Great. And then, of course, there's Tom and I, who are also not WV students.

I am a graduate of the great esteemed University of Texas. And Texas is also a state that is, And, you know, Texas is also a state that is there's been several interesting like battles over education there. The most recent one was Texas A&M, where the president was recently basically ousted. That president is from our county in Letcher County, Kentucky, which is very strange um and then uh tom is a graduate of morehead state which tom is the school you graduated from uh even accredited anymore my department's definitely not that makes sense but they've they've uh you and steve inskeep npr steven that's yeah me and steve inskeep they were like they uh monty hall no not monty hall what's the guy's name

the game show host uh bob barker recently right wing dude he's like right wing dude now i don't i feel like a lot of game show hosts are tinned towards right wing but anyways i'm getting off topic um so i want to talk. Let's first like let's talk about like what's going on at WVU. So earlier this month, they proposed a series of budget cuts to winnow down several different programs to completely shutter one program to let go X number of faculty. This is kind of the culmination of a larger plan. I think that Guy called, was it academic transformation? Was that what it was? Yeah.

So I don't know which one of you wants to kind of like get into the specifics of the cuts that they're proposing. And again, I guess we have to point out that these are proposed cuts they've not been accepted yet but they are doing this on the basis of a what like 45 million dollar hole in their budget thereabouts 43 45 somewhere in that neighborhood um so yeah so i don't know which one of you would like to kind of like get into the numbers of that. But I think it'd be interesting to kind of, you know, just explore a little bit like the for our budget deficit is the state legislature.

Um, I don't know if you saw the, the state of West Virginia has a billion dollar budget surplus this year, but for some reason they wouldn't put any money into our state flagship university. So that's part of the reason for it. I think administrative mismanagement is another reason. But they're proposing to cut at least 12 programs. I wrote down here. Tell me if that number is wrong, including 132 faculty.

Yeah. And completely shuttering the world languages program. And there's even cuts to math. That's insane. Yeah. I mean, like there's some, there's been some interesting,

I don't want to say it's amusing but it is kind of amusing just the way that they like tried to uh spin this you know as an aside the the guy who's basically doing all this is this insufferable well i don't know i don't want to get you guys in trouble anything i shouldn't editorialize don't worry about it. We're not going to get in trouble for what you say. I've already yelled at him in person. He's got one of those T-Boone Pickens ass names. You know what I mean?

Yeah, you're right. T-Boone Pickens ass name. You know you got an evil motherfucker on your hands. It's like initial something something and it sounds like Foghorn Leghorn or some shit. And he's wearing a bow tie. Like, never trust a guy in a bow tie. Man, that's...

I just want to add here that one great fact about Guy is that when he was at OSU, there was a $64,000 bow tie in Bowtie Accoutrement's budget. So, that included not just bow ties. T-Bone Pickens. There you go. Not just bow ties, you go not just bow ties bow tie pins bow tie shaped

cookies there's a whole sort of bow tie cult around this guy paid for with public money well i think that you know i mean i'm a quirky guy uh-huh uh made my living uh being quirky and and uh i think that i i i don't uh play well in a tightly orchestrated environment. I was truly the first nerd. I say jokingly, but it's not so jokingly. You know, the reason I wear a bow tie is the fact it's much more difficult to hang me. If you're a faculty member with a bow tie than with a long tie. It's just, I hate his, I hate his prose to like the way he talks like his rhetoric.

Like there was one quote that he had that I wrote down, which was I love seeing cranes sprout up on our campus like spring daffodils heralding rebirth and renewal because the university that is not renewing itself is a university that is wilting and withering. That's when a fucker takes his Shelby foot or something, doesn't it? Yeah. And also, there was a remark about content generation, too, that basically they were going to be shifting away from, for example, the languages program, maybe outsourcing it to an app or other universities' departments departments and that this would be the way to generate content and i just have to say that like as someone whose job it is to generate content you don't want that to be the way you're teaching

you know guys like me firing off the hip about world language. I got a question. Is this sort of like, I mean, I know there's a lot of things afoot, and this is a gross oversimplification, but is this sort of like just like an extreme ratcheting up of the we need to move to STEM stuff, like only that we've just heard for the last 10 or 15 years, and then some cowboy over here has finally pulled the trigger, and it has implications for all y'all's lives and by extension us yeah i think that's part of it um

some people in the student union were talking you know um the administration has all these numbers about how they determine which programs to cut based on enrollment, but like they're not counting the people taking classes who aren't majoring in it. But anyway, some of us were thinking that, you know, maybe they just decided which programs they wanted to cut because it didn't fit into their vision for the economy and came up with the reasoning for it afterwards. Yeah. Oh, and I would add, oh, sorry, go ahead, Christian. I was going to say, yeah, to speak to that.

I mean, I think literally today, like this morning, a few hours ago, there was a statement released from Eric Tarr in the state legislature where he straight up said, he's like, I love this vision for WVU. We need to create degree programs that create jobs. That's the reasoning, I think, probably for the state legislature withholding,

or at least one of the reasons for the state legislature withholding that billion dollar surplus, is it is some sort of ideological attack against humanities and things like that. But many things factor in as well to them withholding that billion dollar surplus, including tax cuts and various things like that. So but yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I don't think we want to minimize. You know, all of these culminating factors that are kind of forming in a perfect storm right now. And I'm sure Dennis can probably speak more to this than I can based on his experience, but I'm trying to catch up pretty quick and I'm reading things. I would encourage listeners to definitely check out Dr. Lisa Corrigan. She has written quite a bit about this.

And then I would also recommend that they check out our former student, Maya Helm. That's M-Y-Y-A. She wrote a great piece in Slate. And Corrigan has a really nice piece out in The Nation called The Evisceration of a Public University. But, you know, to just add a little bit to what Bethany and Christian are talking about, But, you know, to just add a little bit to what Bethany and Christian are talking about, this RPK group who was hired as an outside consultant to do this academic restructuring, they've got their hand in quite a few universities and it's growing. And, of course, it'll go to Kentucky next and then Arkansas. All my friends at UK and University of Arkansas, you know, they're always, they're always texting me right now because as Corrigan points out this, this consultant work that, that, you know, universities are paying anywhere between 800,000, which is about what WVU paid RPK group, which is a really lousy organization.

Just look up the resumes of their principal people. I learned a long time ago that if you want to spot a rich asshole that's lazy, just ask them what they're into. And they say, consultant. Yeah. And that's, that's really kind of the tale. It's like, yeah, I just didn't want to get a fucking job. And my last name is not Roosevelt or Alshon Klaus. And so that's that. I totally agree. And, and you can tell when you look at this RPK group, you know, it doesn't take a genius. Just go to their site. And and what they're trying to do is, I think, dovetail, as Corrigan points out with this, you know, what people are calling, quote unquote, war on woke. And, you know, I think that a lot of these programs that are being targeted like mine, like world languages, these are the students in these programs tend to be

more diverse than the typical college student. And I think that, you know, this decimation of liberal arts is all of a piece with like this attempted not only splitting of the electorate and keeping those rich who are rich and those, but also it's part of white supremacy, in my opinion. rich and those but but also it's part of white supremacy in my opinion um it's all of a piece and i am i'm kind of seeing it now like i said i'm learning it on the go and that that's why i think that something like losing my job for speaking out because they had to sign these fucking yellow dog contracts like back in the mining times you know we will not speak against our master you know we will not join the union. That's a joke. And it's unconstitutional for one thing.

And you never think your enemy is going to be the very institute of higher learning that you came home to be employed by. You know, so it's it's pretty extreme. I don't know if Dennis is seeing some of those connections, too, it's, it's frightening stuff. Yeah. I'll, I'm going to, I'll try to just lay out a couple of quick things and be happy to expand on anything, you know, that, that you all want to pick up on, but, you know, I'd say you're right to suggest that what's going on at West Virginia is a culmination of some stuff that's been in the works across higher ed, especially public ed, I read for a long time. And so, you know, I've said to a couple of folks in conversation, you know, that because it's happening at West Virginia, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to happen

everywhere, but that anything that happened there could happen anywhere. And so there's kind of three factors that are really determinative about like the, the, the economic problems that the school finds itself in. And they're real. Like, I don't want to say, you know, that they're completely made up. I think it is, you know, a pretty classic case of like disaster capitalism or shock therapy, right? Like use a crisis to ram through a preexisting vision that further concentrates the wealth and power of the already

wealthy and powerful. But, you know, so one of them is the declining state funding, like Bethany said, right? So when Gordon Gee was president of West Virginia in 1981, he said himself, the state funded 70% of the school's budget directly out of state appropriations. Now that number is 13%. And that's been a combination of outright cuts, as well as just refusing to raise the appropriation as you know, with inflation and with rising budgets. So that's the first factor. The second factor is declining enrollments, which again, are real. You know, I mean, in general, nationwide, there are going to be fewer college students as you know, the millennial baby boom, the echo baby boom subsides. It's also especially true in a place like West Virginia, which suffers from out migration, and hasn't invested enough in, you know, primary and secondary education to produce the high school

graduates that are going to go on to college, right? You add into that the fact that, you know, international enrollments are down in part, you know, as a result of the pandemic, in part as a result of the immigration policies of the federal government, in part as a result of sort of fear around like where the country is heading. And folks are like, well, maybe if I have the opportunity to study in a different country, I will. And then you're competing for a smaller pool of out-of-state residents who are going to pay higher tuition. of state residents who are going to pay higher tuition. The last thing I'll say is that another important factor here is that West Virginia went on a bond funded building spree. And a lot of colleges did this, right? Money got really, really cheap over the last decade, and especially over the last few years, as interest rates, you know, bottomed out, went negative. A lot of schools

looked at that and said, this is a great opportunity to raise a lot of capital to undertake capital projects, building projects, real estate acquisition projects. So West Virginia University built a bunch of new buildings, but it also acquired a whole campus and added literally hundreds of millions of dollars to its net load that then increased its, you know, yearly debt payments, which meant that, you know, they're going to have to undertake some form of cuts to maintain the bond rating, which is important for university. And so all of these things kind of happened at once. And, you know, from my conversations with both faculty members and, you know, folks

who've been watching this, it seemed like it happened really quickly, right? So last year in November, they were saying it's going to be a $13 million hole. Then they were saying, actually, it's going to be a $20 million hole. Actually, it's going to be a $35 million hole. Then the state legislature went and increased contributions for the state employee health care, which made it a $45 million hole. And now, you know, we're here. So I do think there is an element of ideological attack, but there is also an element of let's find a business plan that works. And for a lot of reasons, I'd be happy to talk about, you know, the business you think is going to work is not going to work also. Like it's also a bad plan. Well, I think we can't let

Coach Huggins off the hook either. If West Virginia would have made a Final Four since 2009, that enrollment problem might not have existed. He was the largest – he did have the highest pay at the university. I think that's probably – I think that's probably university. Either the football or basketball coach is usually the highest-paid state employee at most places. Yeah, he was getting close to four and a half million. I can't tell if that's before or after the DUI.

But, you know, it's like you mentioned this building spree, Dennis, and something that I had read, like you've got a piece coming out in the Baffler soon about this, and there's a particular paragraph in your piece that i found very interesting which was about reynolds hall and maya hell mentions it in her piece for slate too so and christian you're not did you live there no it's it's it's it's like the new business school i mean but there's a there's a lot of different stuff in there.

I think they have a gym, all sorts of stuff. And it is just the symbol. Every single day I pass that hall, and it is the shining symbol of the issue here. There's also, like, you know, they're redoing the sidewalks next to it all around. That whole area is just a constantly moving construction. It is the same thing at UK too. Like it's all centered around the business school. And now they're building this Jim Beam Institute,

like where kids can come major in bourbon, I guess. And like, they're getting all this sort of like, yeah, like fancy stuff. And then you go look at, I don't know, the English department or something. And, you know. Yeah. Tom then you go look at, I don't know, the English department or something. And, you know. Yeah. Tom, you got to know this too. This Reynolds Hall, which, of course, is named after, what's his name? Robert Reynolds.

He's on the board. You know, he lives in Massachusetts. Donated a lot of money, right? Clarksburg originally. Yeah. But, yeah, he donated $ 10 million for this 100 million dollar building and tom you'll be glad to know that they raised to the ground they tore down the house that jerry built to build it and hot rod hunley that's what they tore down the place that was called the

field house when my parents were in school here where they saw hot rod hunley play where they saw jerry west play where i took my kids to play because i met a guy that you know they housed like rotc and philosophy there when i first took the job here and this uh nice lieutenant was kind enough to give me the combination to the lock that opened the steel door to get out on those basketball courts and i would literally take my three kids out there and the pot lights would come on yeah play basketball and then within you know a few years it was like sorry we're tearing this down and we're building the reynolds hall and it's it's it's just as christian says my oldest told me you got to go in there dad they've got an einstein bagels they got this

they got i'm like i'll never step foot in that you don't understand the nba logo played there i was i was gonna say somebody correct me please if if you know this off the top of your head and i'm wrong but i believe that's where the nba logo photo was taken i think yeah it's i mean it's a good good you know the chances would be high i mean all the home games were there i i just want to read Gordon Gee's statement about the Reynolds, the business and economic school, the Reynolds Hall. You know, again, his classic sort of cringe prose about everything. Everything he says is just kind of like, it kind of is like the Anthony Oliver guy.

It's like, it's very obviously like in the lab somewhere. He says, Sounds like Gilbert Dautry from King of the Hill. It sounds like he says, this facility is a laboratory for creative thinking. It's not a building. We do not build buildings at our university. We build ideas and turn them into reality.

I just want to go on to point out what Dennis wrote here in his article. He said, some highlights of the building design are the Hayhurst Ideation Hub, a room supported by a single pillar with a capacity of 66 where students can brainstorm or make a formal business plan presentation. The Hollyman Social Stairwells transforms getting from one floor to another by adding collaborative spaces similar to Googleplex's social stairs. The Rohl Capital Market Center is equipped with stock tickers, Bloomberg terminals that expose students to real-time financial data. Just how stock tickers contribute to creativity is not entirely clear to me. Yeah, I just want to say, and I'll defer to those who've actually been inside it but you know a lot of these details were reported by the the west virginia metro news they went along on this tour with the uh with the state lawmakers

from the house of delegates to to check out the new hall with you but yeah i mean like this idea that getting from one floor to another is an opportunity to transform, you know, we need to rethink, we need to rethink getting from one floor to another, you know, upstairs, escalators, elevators, forget about it, man. Like we're transforming it. And then this top, the stock ticker thing, right. It's like complete magical thinking where it's like, Oh yeah. You know, like if we just created it, it's like a, it's like a stage set for being good at business.

Like if we just create an environment where people can watch numbers go by really fast, then they'll probably get good at business somehow. Yeah. A lot of this. And, you know, and the stage set thing is important, right? Because what is it about? It's about attracting investment. It's about attracting business leaders. It's about bringing folks through to show this off as a centerpiece with the hope that, you know, we can spend money to make money. We can, you know, create something that, and, you know, there's part of it that's like probably realistic, like, yeah, business leaders are going to come by and be like, wow, you know, that must be a really impressive place. But then there's also a lot of it that is just like, you know, dress for the job you want, fake it till you make it kind of thing. Like, well, we're not Google. Google is never going to move to Morgantown, but we can build

something that looks like a Google campus and hope that a little bit of that Google shine rubs off on us. That's the thinking. When I walk through Reynolds Hall, it's mostly empty. They spend all this money to look nice, but there's nothing that actually helps students in there. There are many buildings. Yeah, many buildings like that on this one. I went, I spent some time at, where was that? I think it was University of Charleston at Beckley. And it was a lot like that.

I was there for this thing, and it was like presumably while students were on campus, and they had all these like nice new buildings, but nobody was in them. It was like a Potemkin Village or something. But like, you know, whatever. Anyway, sorry. You're right. Ask folks in Montgomery and Beckley how they feel about what WVU and Gee have done to to their campus and you're right I mean it's yeah you know I um there's just some interesting things here I

had read in an article this morning actually so like um a few years or a few months ago, Western Kentucky University started rolling out plans to basically shutter its folklore program, which is one of the most renowned folklore programs in the United States. out the same week that news came out that western kentucky paid one dj diesel who is also shaquille o'neal dj diesel is dj diesel is shaquille o'neal's uh you know creative moniker um they paid him i think nearly two hundred thousand dollars to do like an aux cord dj set or something and i thought about the same thing with regards to wvu because i saw an article about welcome week on wv wvu campus they um they featured american idol winner chase beckham pop group driver driver era disney star ross lynch and flo rida. So I guess my question is to, you know, Bethany, Christian and Glenn. Do you feel like your needs are being met with the performance of Flo Rida? You know, is the what's the campus climate? Let's take the temperature on Flo Rida.

I'll say no to Flo Rida because i already saw him in charleston west virginia like a month ago he's just he's just doing a west virginia tour right now and it's it's it's too well i think that's the question i guess the larger question here is like what is the impact this has had on campus like the budgetary cuts do you feel like you are more like, I guess, okay, there's two questions here. What are, because there were protests on campus last week. So like, what are faculty and students doing to push back against these? And then I guess the other question is, is have you noticed any pushback against your pushback? Have you noticed any attempts to curtail your ability to criticize this?

First question, Glenn, do you want to talk about the yellow dog contract thing? Because you mentioned it, but you didn't really explain it. I kind of just didn't pay any attention to it. You know, the Board of Governors has been running wild for the last, I don't know how long, just here's a new clause. You know, it'll literally come out in e-news to all of us. Here's a new clause in the Board of Governors, you know, rules. And it'll say something like, I will not speak out against West Virginia University. I will not tarnish its image. So you had to sign your year-to-year contract. If you didn't want to be offered the door in a year's time, you had to sign that. I, of course, knew I wouldn't pay any attention

to it. And I would speak my mind. But the reason Bethany brings up the yellow dog contract, that's what miners used to call the contracts that they would have to sign before they went to work for the coal company that pledged they wouldn't join the union. Some people called them yaller dog contracts. And so there's that. I would say in answer to your questions, you know, the students, they came out with over 300 strong, I would say, in front of the Mountain Lair, which is our student center. It was one of the biggest, you know, I've been to a lot of protests on this campus over my time here. That was one of the largest ones and definitely the loudest. As far as pushback, two-hour pushback, well, and I should say I was probably the only faculty member who spoke there, but they didn't want a lot of faculty members speaking.

This is student led. I also neglected to say I am a dues paying member of the West Virginia Campus Workers Union, which is a wall to wall union started last year, mainly by graduate students and a lot of them in the MFA program. I started paying dues last year, you know, to join the AFT against our paying dues just because I wanted to support them and stuff like these new, you know, we were out protesting last spring for these new Stivas fees. I think they're called an extra five hundred dollars a semester for any international grad student who wants to study at West Virginia University. And what kind of message is that sending to the international community? I mean, and so the only pushback I've seen is that the DA, our student paper, interviewed Guy after the student protests. And once again, he just puts his foot in his mouth and says things like, well, when asked about the complete decimation of world languages, well, we'll take that 5.9 million we saved there and put it into forensics, which completely exposes that this isn't really totally about a budget crisis. Yeah. And so I don't really see much pushback to the pushback.

And it's the same old story in West Virginia. You hear all this stuff like we're giving the people of West Virginia what they asked for. Finally, no, you're giving dumb asses like tar what he asked for. Yeah. And these people want to kill public education in the state of West Virginia. We've seen it. You know, you all remember the teacher strike in 2018. That was a wildcat strike. You don't mess. And that's that started with the Mingo County teachers. And we don't have that. You know, I'm one of the few faculty members in the union.

But and so I'm not going to pretend that we're going to have some big walkout. But it's it's a lot of misinformation coming. And, um, and I don't sense, you know, my parent, my dad is pissed. He graduated law school here, undergrad here, everybody's pissed that I talked to. They think it's, um, terrible. Uh, the campus workers, uh, does not have the right to collective bargaining because the 2018 teacher strike, the legislature outlawed collective bargaining for public employees. Wow. Yep. Can you imagine the change in a state from what West Virginia once was in terms of movements compared to what it is now well the the article you mentioned earlier christian about tar eric tar the um multiple times he's referring to the um with the teachers union i can't remember the name of it

but basically calling them uh is it the nea you're talking calling them a socialist union or something like that yeah aft american federation of teachers yeah you notice he also listed like he lists aclu aft all these and then he just lists like lgbtq he thinks that's like a professional organization i mean this guy don't put me in a room with him because he said a lot of worse stuff than this about it. Because we have a whole lot of others. We have trans kids being, they're coming after them in our state right now, like so many other places. They're running the whole right-wing Christian fundamentalist white supremacist playbook, in my opinion.

And a lot of us will not stand for it. stand for yeah it it it seems like so education is kind of the arena that this is all playing out on you see it everywhere from desantis to uh like i was just mentioning earlier greg abbott in texas bevin i think when bevin when matt bevin was governor of k Kentucky. I think he said something like, we're not going to pay for French studies anymore or something like that. Which is funny because there's like a, you know, for sales, Kentucky. It's like, I've tried to make that joke before, but you know, I think you have to be a Kentuckian to be able to say it. To get the show. Yeah. You live, in louisville yeah yeah um but you know this this is an interesting thing i because like we i think attention that we've kind of highlighted in this

episode so far is trying to tease out how much of this is ideological versus how much of it is like driven by crisis budget demands i i don't think that in a weird way there's there may not even be that much of a difference between those two things obviously ideology feeds into crisis and crisis feeds into ideology um there is an element of there is an element of universities not wanting to put investment into humanities programs just because they won't bring back the same return on investment as a stem program would that they could then patent the innovation from it's like you know there's not going to be any breakthrough in like history history or english or anything that they can like you know then go forth and get their return on investments from i guess yeah ever since marx came out with historical materialism we've

not been able to find any more compelling narratives of history, much to our detriment. But I think that there's also a sort of larger thing going on here, which is the neoliberal university as an institution in and of itself. And I know, Dennis, you've written a lot about this. of itself um and and i know dennis you've written a lot about this and especially like me and tom have talked a lot about it in the past few weeks specifically the role that student debt has played in how not just in how universities achieve revenue but the social function of student debt to basically put family obligation put obligations back onto families student debt is not something that you can shed in bankruptcy it is often something that then gets like spread out through a family kin network and a lot of this is like this a lot of this is ideological. And we've talked a lot

about that before. It goes back to something called like the poor law tradition. But this, you know, this was kind of devised by neoliberal thinkers like Milton Friedman, who thought that like the liberalization of credit would be the best way to open up the university to all kinds of students after they had already done this in the 60s in the Fortis University. So I guess like, you know, how does this my question is for Dennis, but for any of you, how does this fit into like what we're seeing like nationwide right now? Like what what is you know, what is the neoliberal university? What what is it? What are some of the like demands and imperatives placed upon it that

it then feels like it has to do this yeah so there's there's a lot there and i'll try to address as much as i can you know with the caveat that i'm gonna produce some stuff that i remember and uh if i had time to like write it all out, it might be slightly more accurate. And so what I'll say first is, you know, I really recommend folks read Tracy McMillan-Cotton on this stuff, Sarah Goldrick-Rabb and Chris Newfield, all of whom have taken on this question of like how the student debt crisis was produced and why college is so expensive and who it benefits. And so I'll try to like, reproduce whatever I can from, you know, my reading of those folks and others. But you know, this really does start in the 70s, when the federal government decides that it's going to start

making student loans much more available to students as a replacement, basically, more available to students as a replacement, basically, for directly funding universities as a way to push the responsibility for funding their educations back onto individual students. And so this has kind of two effects, right? One, it makes students more indebted so that they ultimately are the ones who bear the costs and not society as a whole uh as individuals they bear the cost right that's what makes it neoliberal right we're pushing social costs onto individuals um it also means that uh the colleges get paid up front and that it's the it's the feds who pay them right so the colleges see the money immediately and the students are the ones who are you know paying for a lifetime of like the money that the colleges got guaranteed from the federal government on day one.

As a result, you know, state universities start raising tuition. This is this is kind of the story of how tuition starts going up in the 80s because students have access to credit so they can pay more. going up in the 80s because students have access to credit so they can pay more. State legislatures see that and they say, hey, look, university is generating all this money so we can actually reduce appropriations. And that's when you go into this sort of like appropriations death spiral, which then unfolds over the last 30 or 40 years, which produces this idea that, you know, and education is not unique in this. We're starting to do it to all of our public services. Think of the postal service, right? This idea that something that is a fundamentally a public service should earn a profit. And so that's why, you know, you start to see the, these, these fantasies about like, we should invest only in things that we can monetize, right? We should invest only in STEM STEM because, you know, that's going to produce revenue for the state or for the university so that we can be less dependent. This idea that like the really successful flagships are going to operate functionally like private schools with their own endowments and their own donor networks. All of this is is is kind of a result of that idea.

And kind of in true sort of like plutocratic fashion, one of the ways that this is being accomplished is that anything that is a stock of public value is now being offered up to various capitalists who are attempting to sell the idea of profitability. So give me your public dollars for my ed tech venture, and I'm going to save you all this money that you don't have to then pay to teachers, which will free up your money to invest in some program that you think is going to generate a jillion-dollar copyright. But as Chris Newfield says, when I was talking to him about this for the article, you know, these strategies, everybody's doing them, right. It's like,

it's like, it's like me being like, I know a really great idea for me to make money. I'll start a successful podcast. Well, like, great. You know, like, unfortunately the trailbillies already exists, you know, so there's not that much more room in the podcast world for like really successful ones um and yet everybody's gonna try it and and in the meantime they're rating the things that are really valuable that are cheap right like whether it's the folklore program at western kentucky or the puppetry program at wvu which has been, you know, held up as like this punching bag, like, oh, you know, kids paying a million dollars to study puppetry. It's like, all right, but you know what? Like it is one of the best in the country.

It didn't get built overnight. It operates on pennies compared to, you know, what it costs to operate real, um, like giant scientific research. And also you made it cost that much. Right. Right. Exactly. Right. And so and so the last thing I'll say here really quickly is, you know, when Republicans attack the cost of college as a pretext to defund it. Right. The reason that that attack works is because college does cost too much. And it's because we as a society have decided to make it as expensive as possible for individuals, which has the effect of forcing them to only get themselves educated in things

that they think is going to generate an immediate return. Education doesn't have to cost that much if we would socially fund it the way that it deserves to with something like the billion dollar budget surplus that you know bethany mentioned at the top of the episode and so when you look at somebody like ron desantis who's really like at the forefront of doing this ideological warfare he's pumping money into florida's public universities right he's not defunding them because he understands that they are and like they are potentially useful as an ideological cool and so you know

the like so-called war on woke is uh is like a is a defunding strategy for certain subjects but you know there is a difference i'd say right between somebody like desantis who's willing to spend public money to achieve fascist ends and you know folks like the west virginia delegates who are like oh yeah like well we're willing to go along with this if it saves us money that we can then use somewhere else. And it also eliminates stuff that we already dislike. Well, the whole trend Dennis just explained, I've seen exactly that play out here at WVU, where ever since the year that Gordon Gee became WVU's president, enrollment started going down. And I know from talking to West Virginians that enrollment's down

because people can't afford college. Like when I worked at Goodwill, I was talking to my coworkers, getting to know them, I asked who were college students and they laughed at me. They were like, college is for rich people. What are you talking about um but then gordon gee rob alsop uh some of our politicians go to the media and say

that the reason enrollment is down is because uh the universities are taken over by liberal professors right that that it doesn't reflect the community that's something he keeps saying does like it doesn't reflect the community like we're finally listening to the needs of the community it's like what community are you talking about like what does that even mean i don't know yeah well said everybody and i'll just I'll just add one more thing beyond this, the surplus that Bethany brought up. Right. You have, you know, I always try and focus on the few good ones we have left. So in our district up here in Morgantown, we have Evan Hansen. He put forth a bill to just bail us out. Forty five million. Boom. Of course, it goes nowhere. There's other good delegates, too.

Like from my hometown district, we got Sean Hornbuckle now, first black minority leader in the history of the state. Of course, there's only a handful of Democrats in, you know, the House of Delegates now. But we used to have Danielle Walker. Now, of course, she's head of the ACLU of West Virginia. But we've got a lot of good ones and they have been fighting for a long time. But beyond that ability to just bail us out that they refuse to do, you have to understand, and I'm bad with numbers, but maybe Dennis can speak to this. We have the WVU Foundation here. Everybody knows about the foundation. Everybody gives to the foundation. And I think starting in 2005, that's when the legislature first started letting WVU invest in itself through the foundation. And right now, I believe the foundation holds one hundred and

eighty four million dollars in reserves. This would be what other universities call a reserve fund. If I can, you know, if I'm understanding it correctly. So not only is the legislature refusing to bail us out, our own, quote unquote, foundation. Right. Which is just another scam, in my opinion, to, you know, fill the pockets of the very rich and powerful at WVU. While this idea of, you know, us liberal professors, you know, taking over is hilarious because I took a pay cut from my community college in Chicago to come back and teach here in 2011. What you get hired at as an assistant professor at WVU is not where, you know, where these tuition increases are coming from. So it's, I feel like we could be bailed out on many fronts. I'd love to hear them defend the 184 million in the WVU foundation fund and why, why we can't use that to save our, you know,

status, our students, people who want to tell stories, people who want to do puppets, people who want to study world languages and linguistics. I mean, yeah, it's something. Is the foundation their endowment? Is it the same thing? That's a great question. I wish I understood WVU's financials more, but, you know, we've already established the Reynolds Hall, Robert Reynolds. You've also got people like Bray Carey on the board of governors. You got people like Charles Capito. You know, that name sounds familiar, of course, because of Shelley Moore Capito. I mean, the, you know, and Bray Carey is a former senior advisor to Justice. Justice just appointed Robert Reynolds.

You know, I don't even think people know that every board of governors member in the state of West Virginia is appointed directly by Jim Justice. So that's why they're all working together. Yeah. Including who, Tom? Baby Dog. Baby Dog on the board of WVU. Maybe honorary.

Honorary member, I think. Just Baby Dog's backside maybe Baby dog sees her shadow this winter It's another program cut Just going off of that Tying this all in Sort of full circle The chairperson of the board is

Tanya Willis Miller who works for Jackson Kelly the law firm that famously, you know, sort of influenced Johns Hopkins doctors to lie before the court on the validity of coal miners' long cases that about 20 years ago or so. Thank you, Christian. And let's also not forget who sat on the board of Massey coal with all those years. And that was Gordon G himself. And in fact,

most people don't know he was even a member and maybe even chair of the safety commission. I didn't know that. He resigned one year before upper big branch, you know, where 29 miners died in 2010, but he, I think at least two miners died while he was on the safety commission.

Um, you know, he's who is this asshole? I, I saw that I read in, I think it was Maya's piece. Yeah. She wrote,

um, his expense report at OSU okay you mentioned that Dennis his bow tie expenses um when he was president at Brown the university spent three million dollars renovating his home under his supervision as chancellor at Vanderbilt Vanderbilt spent six million dollars renovating the mansion where he lived um what wait a hold on a second so this guy's been at at all those places it was the chancellor yeah and he was at brown he was at osu that explains the bow tie thing he's like a hired killer another thing about gordon g do y'all remember the university of austin i'm saying that in quotes.

Yes. Yes. By Barry Weiss. He was on the board there. Yeah. He still is. Still is on the board there. I thought that whole thing closed down.

Wow. Maybe so. The audacity of this motherfucker to walk around campus and try to appear as someone who is friendly with his the students and he's ingratiating himself with everybody and like well we're we're a happy community here what's that christian literally like goes out to the bars shows up at house parties i had friends in undergraduate he like just showed up at their house party and took selfies his big thing was oh let's take a selfie, that sort of thing.

It's really sick. Really fucking twisted shit. That's when you get him hopped up on some bathtub gin and ride on him when he passes out. Jackson Kelly, since they came up, are also the bond counsel for West Virginia University. So all those bonds that the school has been issuing over the last decade, Jackson Kelly has been the ones who've been working on them

to ensure the compliance, you know, render legal opinions, that kind of thing, which, you know, I'm not an expert in finance by any means. But I assume that they do not offer their services for free. Exactly. Doesn't that make you think that if we, obviously the state's going to do nothing, but if a federal audit of some sort were to come down on WVU's financial portfolio for the last several years, surely, I mean, all these things we're talking about would amount to something. Do you think? I mean, you know, I'm not a lawyer. I think that I would say that the

most interesting reading that I've done as far as the financial situation is concerned is contained in the audit from Fitch Reports. They're the credit rating agency. They're the ones who actually go through the disclosures and kind of render an opinion on the credit worthiness of an institution. And, you know, someone told me, because I was kind of asking around to friends of mine who understand this stuff a little better as I was trying to make sense of it, you know, that if FITS has not downgraded its bond rating for West Virginia, that's not actually a reflection of the fact that the school is not in financial trouble. It's a reflection of their assessment of the school's willingness to do whatever it takes

to plug the hole. And so I could share that link with folks, but it's enlightening reading from a very dispassionate perspective. And what's the job of Fitch? They're the ones who make sure that investors can invest knowing they're going to get their money. So when we pay bondholders back on the backs of cuts, what we're really saying is that the most important thing is that the people who signed up to buy these bonds, the creditors, the funds, the banks who lent the capital, they have to get paid back first, right? It's not about the students. It's not about the folks who were employing. It's not about the programs. It's not about what an institution like this means to the people of West Virginia, to the generations of

folks who studied there. It's about, you know, some people gave us money and the number one thing, our number one priority is to make sure they get their money back in full with interest. You know, I think that's perverse. Gordon Gee, he would say, right, president is like a politician, president of the university is like a politician. So all that investment in, you know, renovating his house and funding his bow ties, you know, that's really investment in the university, because how would it look, you know, if the president, who's really the figurehead and the leader you know was allowed to live in like a little hovel you know he has to maintain that cult of personality because that's something that he sells right to the yeah yeah he's so concerned about reflecting the community

that's so funny that a guy that has a bow tie budget is grandstanding about reflecting the community you guys all wear bow ties down there right everybody in west virginia big bow tie yeah i guess this is why he bills reynolds hall as like a creative hub it's like in their minds it's like you can't just go out there and say that like business is a management of power relations and in capitalism like it is basically ways to exert power over people and like squeeze constituencies out of as much surplus as possible it's like no you got to get creative about it and come up with different ways to like lie about what it is that you do and uh so i guess that makes sense why he says it's

creative i think that the great gift that we all have is the fact that we are individuals. And I think that all too often, and I say this particularly to our students here at the university, that many times they spend a lot of their energy trying to look and act like each other. Each of them are individuals. And, you know, one of the great characteristics, I think, of the American psyche has always been that they have a habit of the heart, which to Tocqueville said they had this kind of sense of individuality. And I think that the future of many of us is going to be celebrating that individuality. A final thing, you know, we're coming up on an hour here. I kind of wanted to touch on some of the specifics of the cuts they proposed.

on some of the specifics of the cuts they proposed um one of which is that they proposed cuts to the math program which i find very interesting and i've tried to like like reason through this in my mind and like the best i can come up with is that like okay so yes these are ideological cuts like a lot of these people are kind of drinking from the same trough as like ronald reagan and everybody who got really freaked out after lbj's opening and you know the fortis opening up of education and you know allowed a lot of like students in the 60s and 70s to be like fuck the system like we're not going to contribute to the imperialist war machine and anti-communism so a lot of them are they are ideological in that sense that they're like we got to get rid of humanities but maybe so so if that is the same thing being applied here plus the kind of like like we said

the crisis induced like sort of budgetary concerns it's like why are they going after math and it's like what the best thing i can come up with is that like math math mathematics is an abstract uh exercise it's an abstract and like it's an exercise in abstract thinking and in uh sort of abstract deduction um and so maybe that could be part of it it's like maybe they have decided that like to be able to participate in stem uh everything from physics to chemistry to um you know finding out all the latest in like pharmaceutical whatever like maybe or or dod uh contracts like figuring out how to use ai to like strafe uh you know yimini villages or whatever maybe they've decided that like they know everything they know about like math and they don't need to like pursue any more like cutting edge developments. We're at peak math.

We're at peak math. Well, they're keeping the undergrad math. And I think that they're trying to get people like grad students to go into engineering or something instead of just math. Like they think that learning for learning sake is a waste of money. Like everything has to have an applied dimension to it. Yeah, that's what I was going to say is it's all, it is just totally geared towards application. I mean, I like this past year working with kids at UHS here in town,

like the only way that they thought about their degree was what they would do when they graduate, right? And I would always say, okay, well, that's cool. But like, what do you want to learn? Right. And that was never really, like, they would sort of have an idea. But the main driver is, is that application. And so if you, I think if you were to go to someone like a high school kid right now and say, well, you know, do you want to major in math? They would say, well, sure, I need to know math, but just so I can be a chemical engineer, right? Mathematics as a field is, like you said, it's sort of closer to philosophy

than a lot of people give it credit for, I think. And that's part of it. And yeah, they're eliminating the graduate programs in math. And that's who teaches all of the math classes. I mean, one of the things that we pointed out in, or one of the things that the math department pointed out was they sort of ran the numbers on class sizes after, if these cuts go through without any of the graduate students to teach classes. And the smallest class they could come up with was 75 kids. And they said that the majority would be over 100. How do you and that's, you know, one of our driving questions in the union in terms of trying to generate the right conversations and get people to ask the right questions is Gordon Gee claims he wants to bolster engineering and neuroscience, two that he specifically talks about. how do you do that if all of your kids

in those programs are learning math in these massive lecture halls and have no one-on-one connections with faculty whatsoever? It's totally, I don't know what to say about it. It's illogical. I mean, they could have just sort of gone totally with what RPK,

completely with no input, which is sort of a theory i've heard floating around i don't know um that's what it seems like with that though yeah i think it gets at a contradiction that you mentioned in your piece dennis that if you're cutting all these grad programs who is going to teach undergrad you know like this bethany go ahead oh i have an answer it's um they're gonna contract out undergrad classes to private companies it really seems that way it's all to please big tech and i've got you know some insight on this too because i'm of course in the english department and so you know we have a phd we have an ma we have an mfa um they have when they come here and get on their roughly sixteen thousand dollar a year stipend to be gtas here they have to teach two sections

of freshman composition every semester not just one like most graduate programs in creative writing but two so even if you just go with our little MFA program, which admits nine students per year, it's very competitive. We have 27 in total because it's a three year program. Those 27 students teaching two sections of English 101 and 102 per semester per semester. As Christian said, you know, I'm not a math person, but that's just completely illogical. There is no one left to teach. And so then the next theory is, well, they're going to erase the requirement. Students don't need to take English 101 and 102. Why would they need to communicate and write effectively and think critically?

And so they'll just keep chipping away and keep chipping away. And that doesn't make any sense. And that goes into when you start chipping away at those sort of academic basics like math and English, then that's when you start to get into like, well, the WVU degree now means absolutely nothing compared to what it used to and starts to really just look like a joke if you went to this this school and and i guess a lot of people would say okay well well people have literally said this to me on campus okay well just don't pay to go to school here but like we pointed out earlier i mean this university means so much to so many i mean there was nowhere else i was going to go it's just it's a family tradition grew up going to sports games bled blue and gold my whole life, all that type of shit. And, and there is nowhere else for some, some people to go. This was the only place.

This, this, this is supposed to be sort of the lifeline for kids in West Virginia to get a, a, an education that's on par with other larger States land grants, you know, places like Ohio state, Penn state surrounding, surrounding places like places like Ohio State, Penn State, surrounding surrounding places like like that. And it just it just destroys it all. And so it affects anybody who went to or goes to WVU, no matter what your degree is in, because it's going to start to look like a joke. I think their goal is to turn WVU into a very highly specified vocational training so that it's like de-skilling people it's like um the middle and lower working class kids that go to the public schools will be more easily replaceable when they work well and it's it's like the fact that gordon g is on the board of university of

austin it's like these people do see a value in some level of humanities but it's like just to be able to have the freedom to say that like race science is real if you know what i'm saying it's like it's just like there's no like okay they do they yeah they agree that like yeah but i think that's partially because like the elite they don't want their kids to grow up in that kind of like educational vacuum like the elite teach their their kids and like you know they raise them in the classics and humanities and everything right yeah no that's right sorry go ahead no no i was just gonna say you know this is that they're turning they're turning a liberal arts education back into a status object that's really only available to the, you know, the children of the wealthiest. And, you know, like like Bethany said, right, they're taking away that ability for folks from other backgrounds to be able to actually study something that, you know, would expand their minds and not just their ability to, you know, get a job right out of college. There's more going on here too, right? When you

take away the math PhD program, what you actually say is we're giving up on the idea that anybody like at WVU is going to do high level mathematics that would change the field, right? We're giving up on that. What we have a math department to do is to teach kids just enough math that they can go into engineering, right? And take that vocational training. It's also a way, right? And I'm not against, you know, people thinking about how they're going to use their education in their careers. You know, I don't think that technical or trade or vocational schools are bad by any means, you know, and I think that there's plenty of ways to think about like a higher education being an ecosystem that has a variety of different opportunities for folks to study different things in different ways. But

when you take when you turn the the flagship right into the technical school or the vocational school, there's no other place for that stuff to go except outational school. There's no other place for that stuff to go except out of state. There's no other place for it to be except in private hands. And then even then, you know, we've given up on the idea that like your employer pays to train you, right? Employers are like, no, all education must be vocational education because like, don't expect us to teach you what you need to do to work here. You go pay for it yourself, learn it yourself. And when we decide that your qualifications are outdated and the economy has moved on, then, you know, you can go back to school and get into more debt to get a second degree. Cause like we have given up on training you. Gwen, I just wanted to

ask what's the, how many kids, how many students are in a creative writing or in a freshman composition section? Used to be 20. Then they upped the cap to 22. Now 24, I believe, as of this year. Again, these are the incremental changes. Now, you know, my colleagues are so good at playing the game. And we're all doing these appeals hearings in front of members of the board and others are date for English and, you know, not having to cut 10 full-time faculty members, as well as the entire MFA program is on the 30th. So that's Wednesday. And, you know, I think that some things that my colleagues are going to be offering up is to

raise those limits even more. We'll teach, you know, please just don't do this and we'll teach 40, you know, we'll teach 70 like Christian was talking about. They're willing to give so much just to hang on to jobs. And, you know, think about it the way it already is. Right. 24 students. Let's say they're in states and they pay nine thousand dollars a year. So they're paying like twelve hundred dollars a credit. Right. Which a lot of students are paying out of state. So $1,200 of credit, 24 students in a class, two sections, you're talking about each TA is bringing in over $50,000

a semester in tuition revenue, making $8,000 of that $42,000 or more being pocketed, right, if you just want to do like a basic calculate the rate of exploitation so i think the key here is that they have already they're already getting a bargain by like underpaying people hyper exploiting people keeping folks precarious the idea that there's like more savings to be found in instruction is totally bogus that's exactly right that's exactly right they're acting like there are more say you know each department department who's under threat, you must come to this hearing. You must show us how you can generate more revenue. And we're sitting here like we already generate revenue. World languages generates revenue. English department generates revenue.

As Dennis just pointed out, what a bargain to get these GTAs coming in here every year and being paid a wage, which qualifies them for SNAP benefits to teach, you know, all these, you know, they want to know about FTE, full-time enrollment. How many asses do we have in the chairs? Well, we've got them and we keep putting more in and we don't pay anyone to teach them. And still, it's not enough. So, yeah, it's really a bad deal. Like decades, you know, like a decades long process of, you know, of stripping these institutions down to this to this point has created the perfect scenario, the sort of perfect terrain for the sort of culture war things that we were talking about earlier for the reactionary, you know attack on uh queer and trans people for this moral panic about crt uh because it it has placed these institutions at a crisis point it then uses that crisis point to then you know explode outwards all of these other moral panics

about these other things and um yeah i i don't know it's i think i think that that's a fascinating thing it's not even just higher education it's like sort of all levels of education uh but uh you know you know there's the kind of like old canard but you know about like you know canaries in the coal mine, obviously, that it's sort of doubly true here. As you said, Dennis, this doesn't mean that it will happen everywhere, but it definitely can. And, you know, as we've seen with Appalachia, with West Virginia, in eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee and other places that like a lot of general trends you see, you know, will start in these areas because, you know, social conditions are so deracinated. So, you know, they're sort of sort of like unequal and and working conditions are so bad as well.

And and so I don't know, it just kind of creates a sort of like perfect storm of of a sort of laboratory for those types of experiments. And and so I but I think that that just goes to sort of it just goes to magnify how important it is what you you guys are doing on campus to sort of push back against this and to highlight this and to show, you know, what the contradictions here are and how we are all at risk of this in one way or another. And so, yeah. So thanks for coming on to talk about that and for, you know, showing us what to do and how to better employ those things in our, wherever else we go, whenever universities, you know,

and, uh, you know, just want to encourage you to keep, keep up the fight. I think that it's, can't be easy. You know what I mean?

It's very, it's easier for me to sit here on a podcast. Maybe, you know, um, if they're outsourcing, um, instruction to other places,

maybe me and Tom can get like a, we set up our own like PragerU LLC. And then like before long, we can be your instructors. Just before you stop recording, I'd like to encourage anyone listening to contact West Virginia's senators and Congress people, call them and specifically say that you're calling to oppose WVU's program and budget cuts. And WVU people, join the Student Order Workers Union and keep sending emails to the administrators. workers union and keep sending emails to the administrators? They say contact the board of governors too. And, and you kind of have to search to find their emails. They, they distribute,

supposedly distribute emails through this one person on the board. But, you know, email Tanya Willis Miller at her Jackson Kelly email address, call them, put pressure on, let them know, email Tanya Willis Miller, uh, at her, her Jackson Kelly, uh, email address, call them, put pressure on, let them know you're watching stuff like that. That's really what we're, what we're just trying to do right now so that we can save as many jobs and programs as we possibly can. Uh, the board vote is on, it's on the 15th. It's in two or three weeks. So like, this is sort of a critical moment in terms of applying pressure to get them to do the right thing. So please do, if you're listening, contact those people.

It really is timely. As Christian says, you know, time is of the essence because of the September 14th and 15th, two days that the board will be meeting, you know, I don't hold a lot of illusions that our legislators or board members will listen, but I think what Bethany and Christian are pointing out is definitely important. All kinds of little things can accumulate. You know, like I just saw this letter from the deputy. Her name is Dr. Cindy Blanco.

She is the deputy director, deputy editor of learning content at Duolingo. And she has sent a scathing letter to the university, you know, kind of outrage that they would suggest that an app like Duolingo could could place this. You know, and this is someone very high up at Duolingo who got into this. You know, so even people in the corporate world, you know, she, she has her master's in Slavic languages, you know what I mean? Which is dead in the water here. You'll have a faculty member who teaches Slavic languages here. Lisa de Bartolomeo, who's very outspoken right now, because what does she have to lose? You know,

her job's done. She was born and raised in this area. Her parents went to school here. You know, there's a lot of us like that. So I think we have to combine the financial audit with our personal stories, with, you know, things like unlikely bedfellows, like Duolingo saying this is outrageous, you know, to kind of come with a multi-headed approach. But certainly the head of the serpent needs to be cut off here. But certainly the head of the servant needs to be cut off here. I mean, the, you know, Guy has got to go. Yeah, I think that her, the Duolingo pushback against this gets at something that's very interesting, which is that even the people who develop these apps realize that like education and learning isn't just something that you do in a vacuum. Generally, it has to be a social experience and universities themselves are they have to be social experiences like students faculty everyone should have a say in how the

whole thing is run because generally if you are learning something that should be a community process and again it kind of gets at the sort of inherent contradiction or the sort of hypocrisy of gee saying that like this is this doesn't mirror the community it's like you you have no sense of community you your entire career has been going from place to place and having community play pay for your fucking mansions and houses and stuff and then run you out of town he was he was run out of vanderbilt brown and and ohio state i mean yeah i think that's know, I mean, only for all the talk of, we got to run the university like a business.

Like, remember, he came in in 2014. All this stuff was his doing, right? This expansion plan, this, we're going to enroll 40,000 students. This, we're going to pile on, you know, $500 million of debt. We're going to do, we're going to, for all these tech partnerships, like this million of debt. We're going to do, we're going to, for all these tech

partnerships, like this was his plan. His plan failed. He put his institution in financial jeopardy and now they're going to hand him the reins to fix it, right? In the corporate world, if you bankrupt your company, you're out, you know, they're going to bring somebody else to do in the restructuring, right? Only Only only in academia does it turn out the professors lose their job, but the administrators get to fix it. So he's now come up with a second plan. Right. Which is just as bad as the first plan. And it's also going to be just as big of a disaster. Exactly. And I got to say one more thing, because I keep forgetting. And that is, you know, what we're what we talked about earlier.

That is, you know, what we're what we talked about earlier, you know, Dennis's point just right now about, you know, culpability as a leader is, you know, is incredibly obvious. But even beyond that, you know, one thing that's being kept really quiet and it's all part of this like two tier societal thing we have going on, as you all talked about earlier, where the elite will get to take what they want. And, you know, the working class slash middle class will get to take these courses. There's a two tier thing going on where there's the reason West Virginia campus workers cannot grow like we need to. It's, there's a lot of reasons, but one thing is they're being so hush hush about all the staff firings. You know, all you hear about are faculty firings and, Oh my God, even 10 year people can be, there's no, we're trying to have a wall-to-wall union, but there's a big wedge between staff

and faculty. And the thing that can really get rid of that wedge is the fact that, hey, 130 some staff have already been laid off and you don't hear shit about that. Believe me, there's a lot more fixing to be laid off. And of my good friends i i asked him hey you want me to see if trill billies wants you to you know because he's staff and he knows he's gone but he for various reasons he you know there's a lot of fear people don't want to people don't want to make you know they think maybe i can hang on to my job you know, but that's a big point that needs to get made is that this isn't just faculty. This is everybody. I mean, this is classified staff, non-classified staff, everybody's getting, getting chopped. Well, is there any final thoughts anybody wanted to, uh, anything anyone wanted to add to, uh, to close out to kind of put a sort of

to close out, to kind of put a sort of bow on this. I mean, Dennis, you've got an article that's about to come out in the Baffler about this. I've read it. It's very good. And so when that comes out, we will alert our listeners to it. And then as Bethany pointed out, and Christian, there are people who you can contact about this.

And maybe we can put some of those contacts in the show notes. Glenn, you have sent me quite a few articles here. We can put those in the show notes as well. I think that's all very helpful. And so, yeah, so like as you said, Glenn, time is kind of of the essence. You've got this meeting in mid September, so that's coming up. So people definitely can, uh, plug into this. Um, and is there, is there anything you all wanted to plug before we, before we sign off here? I just want to say, thanks. Thank you, Trill Billies, very much for doing what you do.

You know my thanks to the students. So as I said, we'll follow you all anywhere. Let's not allow them to create wedges. And then Dennis, thanks for writing pieces like you do in this one. I'm looking forward to in the baffler because I have noticed I've been interviewed by Washington Post. I've been interviewed by Wall Street Journal. And know, and then they either don't use anything I say or they use like one little quote. So there's really a failure on the part of mainstream journalism to do much more, except for a few, you know, examples that we talked about. the numbers that the administration is putting out this only affects two percent of our population this only you know that's bullshit those numbers are so fudged because they only count majors they don't count double majors you know all that stuff is is bad data yeah well they have no framework for understanding this i think that this is why you have to have a kind of like long duray a sort of like secular understanding of like how we've got here um and like you said dennis you you've uh you've written a lot about this you quoted some other writers to check out

i think tracy mcmillan cotton was one of them i've been reading a book called um family values i sent it to you earlier dennis uh between neoliberalism and the new social conservatism by melinda cooper this has an entire chapter about just about the sort of um the role that family as an ideology plays in uh the liberalization of credit and the ideologies around the university and how it has been sort of as an institution beyond just like higher learning that is that has become a site of so much of our society's externalities. And it's like I said earlier, it's a crisis point. It's a place it's a place that right wingers will exploit to then further their own social agenda. And so, again, that just speaks to the need, the greater need to what you all are doing.

And we thank you very much for that. So, and so thank you all for coming on the show. Thanks, that was fun. It's great. It's been a great panel. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. People can follow West Virginia United Student Union on Instagram and Twitter for updates. Perfect. I will put that on the show notes as well. So thank you all for listening. You can go check us out on Patreon. You can support further panels and interviews and inane discussions like, you know, not like this one. This one's not inane, but Tom and I have quite a few inane discussions. So please go to Patreon and support us there. W.W.W. P.A.T.R. E.O.N. Dot com slash Trill Billy Workers Party.

And, you know, continue to listen, spread among your and uh keep fighting the good fight guys Thank you.