Signs of administrative bloat loom over WVU restructuring

“If you affect the product that you offer, your revenues are going to go down,� DeGeorge said. “And that’s your worst nightmare.�

DeGeorge said he believes that’s where WVU went wrong in its university-wide restructuring that included Board of Governors approval in September of cuts to 143 faculty positions.

“The faculty is directly related to your revenue,� DeGeorge said. “As you take away your faculty, you’re going to hurt your tuition.�

So DeGeorge has led a group called Stewards of WVU that rolled out a website late last month outlining a plan it says would erase what WVU has said is a $45 million budget deficit without the faculty cuts slated to go into effect in May 2024.

The largest share of calculated savings under the plan — $21 million — would come from a 15% reduction of a wide array of operating expenses under a category of spending in WVU’s audited financial statements called General Institutional Support.

That broad category includes expenses that cover the day-to-day operational support of the institution, according to WVU Communications Executive Director April Kaull. The category includes expenses for general administrative services, central executive-level activities concerned with management and long-range planning, legal and fiscal operations, space management, employee personnel and records, logistical services like purchasing and printing, and public relations and development, Kaull said.

She didn’t evaluate the proposal from the Stewards, which DeGeorge called a “small group,� when asked for comment.

“We are taking a strategic approach to realign all areas of the WVU System to become the modern land-grant University that is increasingly relevant to the needs of today’s students and our global society while also adjusting our budget, so we remain financially sound for the future,� Kaull said in an email.

But the Stewards’ proposal builds on criticism that WVU administrators have spent too much money compensating themselves.

In a Faculty Senate meeting Monday, after months of university community members calling for administrator pay cuts to alleviate budget pressures, WVU President Gordon Gee said he asked senior university leaders to take voluntary salary pay cuts of up to 10% “several months ago.�

In response to questioning from Department of English assistant professor Rose Casey later in the meeting, Provost Maryanne Reed said Gee “misspoke� and that the voluntary pay cuts had come about “fairly recently.�

Reed, who State Auditor’s Office data show made $435,561 in 2022, declined to say which administrators agreed to a pay cut, although she said she is taking one.

Gee, who has said he gives 15% of his $800,900 salary back to WVU every year to support scholarships and that he donates “in the millions� to the school, didn’t say if he is taking a pay cut.

Kaull did not provide responses to questions asking when and how many administrators began taking the pay cuts, as of press time.

Gee said the cuts would stay in place “until the university rights itself financially.�

WVU Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Rob Alsop dismissed the notion of employees making over $200,000 taking a 10% pay cut during a June Faculty Senate meeting, saying it would “devastate morale across the institution.�

Gee announced last week that Alsop plans to leave his role and temporarily transition to a special adviser to the president, effective Nov. 18 through Jan. 31.

“I think that’s a little hard for most faculty and staff to swallow,� Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a WVU alumna and professor of Russian Studies and Slavic and East European Studies, said of previous WVU administrator resistance to pay cuts amid the restructuring in an Oct. 26 phone interview.

Di Bartolomeo’s position has been eliminated, effective May 2024.

But WVU leaders’ new public embrace of pay cuts follows years of growing pay disparities and other signs of significant administrative expenses, relative to other schools.

Administrator pay

The average total salary of WVU’s highest-earning 25 nonathletics, nonclassified administrators increased 35.3% from 2013 — the year before Gee was appointed full-time president after a four-month interim stint — to 2022, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission data.

Nonclassified employees include a wide range of positions, including administrators, and, on average, have much higher compensation than classified employees. The WVU Staff Council, representing classified staff, is set by state code requiring members from five sectors: administrative/managerial; professional/nonteaching; paraprofessional; secretarial/clerical; and physical plant/maintenance.

The 35.3% clip by which nonclassified administrators’ average total salary increased far exceeded the 13.8% and 12.5% clips by which faculty and classified employees’ average total salaries, respectively, rose in that span.

That 35.3% increase also exceeded the 34.9% climb in the average total salary of the top 25 nonathletics, nonclassified administrators across all West Virginia higher education sectors from 2013 to 2022.

Faculty across West Virginia higher education sectors saw their average total salaries increase 15.6% from 2013 to 2022 — more than the 13.8% rise at WVU.

The number of nonclassified, nonathletics WVU administrators with total salaries of $250,000 or more increased 50% from 2017 to 2022, according to West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission data.

Gee’s base salary ranked 26th-highest among 195 public college presidents in a Chronicle of Higher Education survey published in August, indicating that he makes more than 87% of the leaders on the list.

The WVU faculty’s average nine-month equivalent salary was $97,227 for the 2021-22 academic year, less than an eighth of Gee’s 2022 salary.

Gee has downplayed the role of administrative costs in the university’s financial challenges.

“It’s always easy to point to the high cost of the administration or the high cost of this, that and the other thing,� Gee said in a Sept. 20 interview with the Gazette-Mail Editorial Board. “The truth of the matter is, that’s a deflection.�

Gee said at a May Faculty Senate meeting that WVU had “one of the lowest administrative cadres in the country.�

WVU had the second-highest number of noninstructional management employees among Big 12 Conference schools in the 2021-22 academic year, according to the Chronicle’s analysis. That category consisted of staff members whose job it was to plan, direct or coordinate policies or programs, including postsecondary deans.

Employee rights scrutinizedWVU administrators have made moves during the restructuring that critics say have restricted employees’ rights.

Administrators decided to keep a proposed amendment to a Board of Governors rule clarifying that faculty weren’t to be involved in the formulation of position-elimination planning, despite comments that faculty members should be involved in plan development, according to the board’s July meeting minutes.

WVU leaders determined that, while the faculty should be involved in program reviews, it wasn’t fair to ask faculty members to choose which of their colleagues should remain at the university or be subject to position elimination.

Another amendment changed a board rule’s language saying the value of a severance package should be equivalent to one year of a faculty member’s annual base pay to saying the amount of severance faculty may be offered will be determined based on a board-approved schedule.

Commenters called the language change unfair, but administrators said the university didn’t have the financial resources to pay everyone an additional year of salary after their employment ends.

The university has said all tenured, tenure-track, teaching-track, service-track, clinical-track and librarian-track faculty members subject to a position elimination or contract nonrenewal following an academic program review this year would receive a severance equivalent to 12 weeks of their base salary, payable in bi-weekly installments, generally starting in May 2024.

In September, the American Association of University Professors, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit membership group of faculty and other academic professionals, said in a letter to Gee and Board of Governors Chairwoman Taunja Willis-Miller that a board rule appeared to lack meaningful faculty involvement and academic due-process protections called for in the association’s guidelines.

The rule governing “Reductions in Force,� or position eliminations, fell short of an association guideline requiring that “termination of an appointment with continuous tenure ... may occur under extraordinary circumstances because of a demonstrably bona fide financial exigency.�

Such a condition is “a severe financial crisis that fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means� than terminating tenured appointments, the association noted.

Gee has downplayed WVU’s spending challenges, saying the university’s budget deficit has been only an accelerant in the restructuring process, rather than its root cause. Instead, Gee has said the cuts are part of a repositioning responding to what he argues has been a decline of trust in higher education institutions like WVU.

“[W]e would be doing the same thing now that we were doing even if we didn’t have that deficit,� Gee told the Gazette-Mail Editorial Board in September.

When asked for the rate of faculty appeals that led to reversals of previous administration decisions on positions during Monday’s Faculty Senate meeting, Reed said they weren’t appeals.

“This was to make sure that we had followed the criteria and to ensure that the process had not missed anything,� Reed said. “But these were not appeal hearings.�

WVU general counsel Stephanie Taylor subsequently said 1 of 25 or 26 due-process hearings resulted in the school “work[ing] through a different path,� with the employee not ultimately subject to a Reduction in Force.

Kaull said Tuesday that Reed had misspoken and that previous WVU notice characterizing the ability to challenge a position elimination decision as an appeal was still accurate and reflects what has taken place.

‘Doing the right thing’

Expenses in the General Institutional Support category, including general administrative expenses and central executive-level activities, targeted by the Stewards of WVU, have ballooned during Gee’s presidency.

Salaries and wages in that category grew 42.2% from the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014, to the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022, according to audited financial statements. That rate far outpaces the 22.2% in total salaries and wages over the same span.

Overall General Institutional Support expenses grew 46.2%, again far exceeding the 22.7% climb in overall expenses in that stretch.

Kaull said in an email that an increase in General Institutional Support functional classification in that span is mainly related to a centralization of administrative personnel within WVU administrative units and the expansion of teams within some areas.

Kaull also cited increased salary costs in areas such as information technology services, sponsored programs and the University Police Department, in addition to reorganization of staff between functional classifications.

Reed said Monday that the timeline and process for program reviews at WVU’s regional campuses will be announced at the Board of Governors’ Nov. 17 meeting, at the latest, but possibly next week. Reed said administrators are wrapping up their review of two other units: libraries, and Teaching and Learning Commons, with plans to release findings and results by mid-December.

The Provost’s Office in September required its libraries unit to cut up to $800,000 from its budget by Dec. 1. The libraries unit already had seen its operating budget decreased in past fiscal years. Teaching and Learning Commons, an academic support and resources unit, also was slated for a reduced-but-unspecified level of activity.

The Stewards of WVU website says the group was created to show that there are better options.

“You never, ever go to your board with only one option,� DeGeorge said. “That’s disrespectful to your board.�

But after years of administrative expenses increasing as enrollment declined, WVU’s path appears to be chosen.

“I believe we’re doing the right thing,� Gee told the Gazette-Mail Editorial Board.