There are some problems that you can’t protest your way out of. This is one of them.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Despite National Pushback, West Virginia Will Cut Faculty, ProgramsDespite pleas from students, faculty members and academic organizations to change course, and despite student protesters disrupting its Friday meeting, the West Virginia University Board of Governors voted today to slash 143 faculty positions and 28 academic programs from its flagship Morgantown campus.WVU will lose all of its foreign language degree programs and its math graduate degree programs, among other offerings.Some students wept, and assistant math professor Ela Celikbas said, “God bless WVU” and stormed out of the meeting room Friday morning as board members approved cut after cut. Only the student body president, the Faculty Senate president and another faculty representative consistently voted no.Board members approved the reductions with no debate among them Friday. Taunja Willis Miller, the chair, was the only vocal one; she responded to interrupting audience members and tried to continue the meeting after roughly 25 students, who had been sitting uncharacteristically silent on the floor with protest signs, leapt to their feet and began chanting, “Stop the cuts!”Student protesters had swelled the crowd in the small meeting room to more than 100, including board members, WVU officials and others.Just after the board members took their first voice vote to approve cuts to the first department, an audience member asked that they at least raise hands when voting. When Willis Miller resisted, someone said, “I would like to see some transparency” and the students began their disruption.The chanting students eventually left the room, but Mai-lyn Sadler—a senior philosophy and political science dual major from southern West Virginia who has helped lead the opposition—re-entered and chanted through a megaphone.
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