WVU and the Importance of Flagship Universities

Hi friends! I am back after a brief hiatus to focus on other things—primarily the Austrian workshop (which went great!) and the STEAM summer camp I run for the Urban League of Greater Chattanooga (which went even better!). I’m happy to be back with you now!

WVU is in the national, and even international, news right now because of the current “realignment” that seeks to radically change the shape of the school’s offerings. Most of you are probably already aware that the proposal calls for cutting 16% of the faculty and closing down 32 degree programs, including all foreign languages. Also on the chopping block is WVU’s MFA in creative writing, the program from which I graduated and without which I wouldn’t be a professor or writer today.

I am, as you’d expect, particularly disappointed by the idea that this MFA isn’t an important part of the university’s offering. It’s easy to play on public misconceptions of creative writing as a field of academic study, particularly that it doesn’t lead to good jobs. This just isn’t true. Most of the people I went to graduate school have jobs for which their degree is a qualification; there are academics, editors, writers specializing in corporate communications, novelists, and entrepreneurs all of whom rely both on the credential and the skills learned in the program for their success.

WVU has the only traditional Creative Writing MFA in the state. (West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-residence MFA is EXCELLENT and Doug Van Gundy has put together an amazing program. I’m absolutely a fan. But low-residency and traditional programs differ in some significant and important ways, and WVWC is a private school.) Cutting it will essentially end the state’s support for West Virginian writers.

Why does that matter?

There are a number of reasons, but among the most important is this: West Virginia’s story is too often told by outsiders for outsiders to confirm what outsiders (want to) believe about the state. It’s told by New York Times reporters who fly in and look around until they find a place full of people who confirm their biases about who West Virginians are and what they believe; by national politicians on both sides whose primary interest in us is to claim a kind of folksy everyman position, but whose policies never deliver for the specific needs of our state; by celebrities and pundits who want to use West Virginians as a synecdoche for backwardness. We all know this, and none of us like it.

The only antidote to this is for us to tell our own stories in all their complexity and wonder, and to tell them with the skill necessary to capture a national audience. For our voices to be heard in a conversation in which so many others want to speak about us without being of us. If West Virginians who want to study writing are forced to do so out of state, many won’t return, and their stories will become the stories of the new places where they’ve been forced to settle. (I know, because if I could have stayed in WV, I would have.)

But this isn’t even my biggest concern about the “restructuring” at WVU. My biggest concern lies with the language about making our next generations “job ready,” and focusing on training them for “what employers want.” This means that our flagship university has given up on the idea that it is training tomorrow’s leaders, and settled for the role of training the people who will follow those leaders. That it’s not training entrepreneurs and innovators, but technicians and middle management to fill the companies of other people.

West Virginia deserves a flagship university that believes our people are capable of leadership.

Fellow West Virginians, call your legislators. Call the WVU Foundation if you, like me, are an alum. Tell those in charge that you want West Virginia’s flagship university to believe in our state and its citizens, and to foster our talents in all fields.