Morgantown, WV - Yesterday, September 12, 2023, a so-called “open letter” was distributed to West Virginia University’s community and addressed to the people of West Virginia. For those who received the letter via email, the subject line read “An Open Letter from WVU to the People of West Virginia.” The WVUToday headline for the letter read the same.

The most striking element of this letter was that it received only ten signatures while being propagated as an open letter from the university. Furthermore, of the ten signees, seven are current or former members of the Board of Governors (BOG), and one is WVU President E. Gordon Gee. Not one of the over 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students at WVU signed the letter. Not one member of WVU’s faculty signed the letter. If this letter was, in fact, an open letter, then it failed to receive support from an incomprehensible majority of the individuals who make up what we call “West Virginia University.” It follows that framing the letter as “from WVU” is a gross misrepresentation of reality created by the university’s administration and BOG. 

The letter was written in first-person, and due to the makeup of the signees and the narrative espoused in it, most instances of first-person language (such as “we”) will be understood to refer to the administration and BOG.

The letter claims that the administration and BOG have been committed to transparency, which neglects every moment they have failed to provide information or even altered information to suit their environment. Even in the text of this letter, it’s stated that “we are not facing a budget crisis,” yet when pressured to slow or freeze the academic transformation to allow time for a fuller exploration of facts and options, administrators or BOG members say that we must go through with cuts and reductions with haste as even prolonging the process would lead to worse outcomes than those of the current recommendations.

The letter claims that the administration and BOG “have appreciated the input from faculty, staff, students, alumni and the broader community.” If it’s true that they’ve appreciated the input, then it’s all they’ve done in that realm. Neither the administration nor the BOG have actually accepted the input of the enumerated groups. The closest they’ve come to accepting input was during the appeals process, which was still riddled with inconsistencies and did not allow the academic transformation itself to be challenged. The administration and BOG have not allowed faculty, staff, students, alumni, or the broader community to challenge the academic transformation and have doubled down on their vision time and time again.

The letter claims that WVU will remain a premier R1 research university. This notion dies in the face of the downstream effects of cutting programs or reducing faculty in programs whose existence supports quality education across disciplines, especially research. For instance, by cutting the graduate math programs and reducing math faculty, math sections will increase in size as the pool of available instructors decreases. Large sections may be prevented by increasing the number of sections for a course, but this will still leave the remaining faculty with a larger workload. In both instances, the quality of math education will decrease. STEM and non-STEM students will feel shockwaves if the math recommendations are adopted.

Our takeaway from the letter is that it’s another attempt by the administration and BOG to push and defend a narrative that our student union and its allies successfully counter each day.