The First Domino?
On the Budget Cuts at West Virginia University
Rachel King | November 2023
Rachel King
On August 11, 2023, West Virginia University recommended the elimination of thirty-two, or nine percent, of its total majors, including twenty graduate majors, one of which was the MFA in creative writing. 169 faculty members, seven percent of the university’s total faculty, were proposed to be eliminated, many of them in the liberal arts.
In the weeks that followed, dozens of national outlets published articles about this situation, from Slate to the Wall Street Journal, from The Baffler to Forbes, from Ordinary Times to the New York Times. Many mentioned West Virginia University president Gordon Gee’s history of excessive spending at the University of Colorado, Brown, Vanderbilt, and Ohio University, where he’d previously served in leadership positions. They mentioned that state funding for West Virginia University had decreased in recent years, but that Gee promised enrollment at WVU would increase. To that end, Gee built and updated facilities, only for enrollment to continue to decrease, and the university ended up with a budget deficit of $45 million. Instead of asking the West Virginia legislature, who had a surplus, for financial help, Gee turned to a consulting firm, rpk GROUP, who formulated the present cuts. What kind of R-1 flagship university would WVU be, articles asked, without any language programs or PhDs in math?
Given that Gee would not ask the West Virginia legislature for the funds, and that many programs proposed for elimination made the university money, these cuts seemed ideological rather than logical. Gee, it seemed, was using them as an excuse to form his idea of a university. As Dennis M. Hogan writes in The Baffler, “If Gee refuses to try to preserve the school’s academic offerings, it is because he does not want to.” Not only does Gee view these disciplines as contributing nothing of value, he also lacks a basic understanding of the programs being cut. During the appeals process, for example, the administration couldn’t accurately count the number of faculty in the English department.
Although many national articles mentioned proposed cuts to English, including one in the Washington Post by current WVU MFA in creative writing faculty Brian Broome, only one article I found, “The Cost of Loss at WVU” in Belt Magazine by Rachel Rosolina, a 2009 WVU MFA graduate, focuses primarily on the MFA in creative writing. An Appalachian herself, Rosolina laments how the loss of the MFA program would stifle the representation of Appalachian voices: “The act of creating has long been an Appalachian cultural marker of resistance,” she writes, “allowing us to control our own narrative amid outsiders’ labels, misrepresentation, and poverty porn.”
Although I agree with Rosolina, as a non-Appalachian graduate of the MFA program at West Virginia University, as well as someone who chose to apprentice in publishing and to publish my award-winning linked story collection through West Virginia University Press, I would add that MFA programs at public universities like WVU are cultivating as many or more diverse writers and publishing professionals than costly private schools. And in a world of corporate publishing and consolidation where most major book awards are given to writers who attended elite and exclusive schools, MFA programs like WVU’s allow a wider range of regional and national voices and experiences to compete in mainstream publishing.
***
WVU’s MFA in creative writing began in 2001 “out of student demand—from WVU undergraduates as well as our MA students,” Mark Brazaitis, award-winning author and current WVU MFA program director, told me. “Initially, we filled our ranks mostly from those populations. We’re now a nationally—and internationally—known program.”
According to the WVU MFA website, alumni have gone on to careers in editing, to publish in prestigious magazines, win awards, and publish books at both Big Five and smaller presses. The current MFA faculty members, Mark Brazaitis, Mary Ann Samyn, Glenn Taylor, Christa Parravani, Jenny Johnson, and Brian Broome, have between them published more than twenty-five books.
If I were to speak only about my friends from the program, they have excelled in their professions in the decade since graduating. “The myth that the MFA is not a preprofessional degree is pervasive but untrue,” said Sarah Einstein, a 2011 WVU MFA graduate—and I agree. My WVU peers have gone on to lead author programs at the Free Library of Philadelphia, to write and edit marketing copy for a health care company, to teach English as a Second Language, and to serve as a hospital chaplain, among other careers.
“The WVU MFA program creates professional writers, editors, communicators, and educators,” Rebecca Thomas, a 2013 WVU MFA graduate, wrote in a letter to the university to protest the MFA’s slated closure. In his protest letter, Shane Stricker, a 2013 WVU MFA graduate, emphasized that he currently runs a writing lab: “[B]y focusing English education on professional writing,” he writes, “you will absolutely get rid of people like me, who developed their love of story . . . into helping others use their [own] story for wide ranges of rhetorical purposes.”
My WVU peers have also continued to be artists and writers, publishing in prestigious literary magazines such as Witness, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA; winning fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio for the Arts; and publishing many books and chapbooks, several written during their time in the WVU MFA program.
“I wrote the bulk of my first book of poems, After June (Green Writers Press, 2019) during my MFA program,” Charity Gingerich, a 2011 WVU MFA graduate, told me. “There is no doubt in my mind that I was able to accomplish this due to the rigor and truly nourishing mentorship of my poetry professors.”
The debut novel of 2011 MFA graduate Heather Frese, The Baddest Girl on the Planet (Blair, 2021), which she also wrote during her time at WVU, won the Lee Smith Novel Prize and has sold thousands of copies.
***
When I entered the West Virginia University MFA program in 2009, my cohort consisted of nine writers, four of whom were either residents or natives of West Virginia. I’d attended a state school in Oregon for undergrad, so this prevalence of locals didn’t surprise me, but because the acceptance rate for the WVU MFA is only around nine percent, I knew this makeup meant not only that there were talented people in my program, but also that the MFA program had strong ties to the state.
I had received full funding but not a graduate assistantship/stipend, so I found jobs around Morgantown. During my first year in the program, I shelved books at the West Virginia University Libraries, cashiered at a local grocery cooperative, edited 400-level business papers, and substitute taught.
In retrospect, I was working too much, but I needed the money, and as a bonus, I got to know locals, especially at the grocery cooperative. The hippie who would use only his own glass jars, the woman who couldn’t speak because of past abuse, the man who tried to recruit me to his anti-income tax meetings, the lesbian couple who worked remotely for pharmaceutical companies, the lawyer who had stepped down from practicing after a breakdown and just sat and talked with us cashiers for hours. While subbing, I got to know local high school students that I’d see around the university a couple years later, including one who taught me some sign language, which he knew fluently from having grown up with a deaf brother.
This was my introduction to West Virginia—the people in my program, yes, but also these people around town, people who were diverse, independent, kind, guarded, and down to earth.
MFA programs at public universities like WVU are cultivating as many or more diverse writers and publishing professionals than costly private schools.
After living in Morgantown for less than two months, I reported on a domestic dispute of the couple who lived in the basement of the house where I rented the first floor. At the time, I wasn’t sure what else to do; one partner was beating the other almost nightly. The police separated them for the evening, but the next day, the perpetrator’s brother knocked on my front door and physically threatened me for intervening, saying he’d personally take care of me if I ever messed in their business again.
Again, I wasn’t sure what to do—except I wasn’t staying another night in that place. I contacted a fellow MFA student who I’d hung out with once or twice, and she invited me to crash in her apartment for the week. Meanwhile, members from a local church that I’d attended only a couple times found me a better living situation in an apartment with another student.
Charity Gingerich noted the supportive environment even before she started the program, saying she “chose WVU’s MFA program over another creative writing program largely because I was drawn to the warmth and sense of community I felt on my campus visit.”
Lori D’Angelo, a 2009 WVU MFA graduate, said she received a “lifelong community connection” in the program, that her “friends, mentors, and classmates have become like a big extended family.”
That sense of community in the program, as well as the program’s ties to Morgantown and the state, has continued. Current WVU MFA student John Fox says, “The main reason I came to [the WVU MFA] is because I’ve become really passionate about Appalachia, exploring my blackness in West Virginia, and I figured that the best way to do that was to continue growing my roots in my hometown and state . . . WVU was my first choice.”
When I moved to Morgantown, I did not expect or even want a community; I wanted to improve my writing. And I did improve it, in a program that Sarah Einstein calls “supportive and rigorous.” But both within the MFA program and the town, was a community that ended up sustaining me.
***
West Virginia University and the MFA program did not take the recommendations for their program eliminations lying down.
As I read angry pleas and heartfelt missives from professors in disciplines as diverse as puppetry, ceramics, mathematics, and Russian, articles detailing their programs’ expertise, communities, and accomplishments, I felt a collective undercurrent that challenged President Gee’s indifference. We are going to make you see us as individuals and as individual departments, they seemed to say. We are going to make you see our value.
MFA alumni and current students also joined to protest. Immediately after the proposed cuts were made public, Lori D’Angelo, who told me the program “helped me go from being an aspiring literary author to being a published author,” started a change.org petition, “Save the MFA,” which at the time of this writing has just shy of 2,000 signatures. Kori Morgan Frazier, a 2010 WVU MFA graduate, shared quotations from the petitions’ signers on her social media. Many other MFA alumni called or wrote letters. On August 21, current WVU students participated in a walk-out, on September 6 faculty participated in a vote of no confidence for Gordon Gee—results: 797 for no confidence, 100 against—and a WVU alumni protest took place on September 9.
On August 23, at a local Morgantown venue, 123 Pleasant Street, musicians Chris Haddox and Annie Neeley led “Which Side Are You On” with verses rewritten to highlight the proposed cuts. They called for “administrative blood.” “We’ll have an institution / It’s no more than a shell / Of the greatness that it could be. / What story will you tell?”
On August 30, Mark Brazaitis served as the MFA representative to appeal the MFA elimination and the department faculty cuts. From what I read of the appeals process, it seemed demeaning, to have to beg an administration who could have easily kept your program and should have known its value. Nonetheless, Brazaitis and other MFA faculty wrote up a compelling list of reasons:
1) Spots in our MFA in Creative Writing Program are in high demand; 2) Our students are exceptional writers and scholars—and we nurture Appalachian voices; 3) Our MFA in Creative Writing Program is essential to our university’s identity as a storytelling center; 4) We want to be part of the financial solution—and we’ve proposed how we can be; 5) We have the departmental and program leadership to reduce costs and maintain excellent instruction and a top-flight MFA Program; 6) Our graduates succeed as academics . . . and in a variety of other careers; 7) Our graduates succeed as writers; 8) Our faculty writes exceptional works of literature and wins important recognition; 9) Our reputation for excellence is growing; and 10) Our graduates and admirers have voiced their loud and strong support for our program’s continuation.
They elaborated under each reason, suggesting a reduction of the incoming MFA class by one-third and increasing the teaching load of the faculty by one class each academic year. Both concessions seemed unfortunate and unnecessary, but it’s possible they saved the program. On September 1, the university said the final recommendation would be to keep the WVU MFA.
***
One reason I chose to attend the WVU MFA program was because the writer Emily Mitchell taught there. Unfortunately, she left the program after my first year. By then I’d already benefited from one class with her and had also found other excellent professors and formed friendships, but for a couple months I doubted my place in the program. My preferred faculty member was leaving, and writing while subsisting on too many and less than ideal jobs around town wasn’t easy. That’s when an editorial and production graduate assistantship opened up at West Virginia University Press. I applied, and after an MFA faculty member recommended me, I was hired.
Because so many people with paid jobs in publishing first hold unpaid internships, I’m grateful that WVU Press took that gamble on me, someone who had never held any kind of internship. Every year or two, the WVU Press gives another graduate student this chance to learn the ins and outs of publishing, often a student from the MFA program.
WVU Press also publishes many creative works of WVU alumni. Abby Freeland, WVU Press’s sales and marketing director from 2009 to 2019 and the press’s fiction and trade nonfiction editor from 2014 to 2019, told me that, in addition to quality, she looked for books that presented and/or uncovered the complexity and richness of Appalachia, and that she was determined to publish more women and underrepresented writers, such as those identifying as LGBTQIA+. Among her many acquisitions were Radio, Radio by Jessie van Eerden, a 2006 WVU BA graduate, which explores a rural, isolated childhood full of grief; The Sound of Holding Your Breath by Natalie Sypolt, a 2009 WVU MFA graduate, which features West Virginian women full of defiance, determination, curiosity, and insecurity; Jaws of Life by Laura Leigh Morris, a 2005 WVU MFA graduate, which details daily struggles of inhabitants in a West Virginia town; To the Bones by Valerie Nieman, a 1978 WVU BA graduate, which dissects the current state of West Virginia’s coal industry; and the anthologies LGBTQ Fiction and Poetry from Appalachia edited by Julia Watts and Jeff Mann, the latter a 1984 WVU MA graduate, and Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods edited by Doug Van Gundy and Laura Long, a compilation full of West Virginia University graduates, including the celebrated fiction writer Ann Pancake.
Sarah Einstein, a West Virginia native, said, “West Virginia’s story is too often told by outsiders for outsiders to confirm what outsiders (want to) believe about the state . . . 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.”
The English and MFA programs help hone the skill, then WVU Press introduces some of these stories to national—and international—audiences.
Before her decade at WVU Press, Abby Freeland, also a West Virginia native and WVU MA graduate, worked at Berg Publishers, now a part of Bloomsbury, in Oxford, England. “Because of that experience I learned and brought back—to my lifelong home —a kind of international sensibility,” she said, “something that I’ve applied to my entire publishing career, something that I knew would help elevate the people and places of West Virginia and Appalachia. And it has.”
Derek Krissoff, director of WVU Press from 2014 to 2023, told me, “I think university presses, because they’re outward facing, are well positioned for [the] work of connecting writers, artists, teachers, journalists, and booksellers to build communities.”
During Krissoff’s tenure, West Virginia University began to acquire more books outside of Appalachia, but still rooted in place, including Jim Lewis’s Ghosts of New York; Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Awards; and many titles in James Lang and Michelle Miller’s series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, several of which have sold over 10,000 copies.
Although I think of West Virginia University Press primarily for its historical and creative works, someone at the 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle stopped by the WVU Press table looking for the higher education series, saying he’d read every book in it, and that it had had a national impact.
“I don’t think my colleagues and I really thought of ourselves as regional publishers,” Krissoff told me. “We chose instead to identify as grounded in place. What interested me was cultivating an outsider sensibility by drawing on different kinds of networks, including those in the university’s MFA program, and being attentive to the artists and activists in our community, who might be less visible from New York.”
By the time I had completed a linked collection of short stories focused on labor and steeped in the landscapes and people of Colorado, where I’d lived from 2012 to 2016, it was a no brainer to reach out to West Virginia University Press. Sarah Munroe, a 2017 WVU MFA graduate, former graduate assistant at WVU Press, and the then WVU Press acquisitions editor, helped me deepen it, and in 2021 the WVU Press board approved it. A year later, the New York Times called West Virginia University Press, my press, one of the university presses “keeping American literature alive.”
***
In 2020, when I was the editor of Ruminate Magazine, while sifting through hundreds of applications to hire genre editors, I noticed that the number of applicants who had attended a state school for either their undergraduate or graduate degrees was very slim—maybe one in twenty, despite that close to three out of four college students at all educational levels attend public institutions. Since what writers know inevitably influences what they write, I worried this perspective, of attending a state school, of going on to jobs and careers and partners and families and neighborhoods and communities influenced by that attendance, might become underrepresented in literature.
‘What’s happening at WVU is the test case for what’s coming for other public universities as consultants and politicians bring them to heel.’
—John Warner
And I think these perspectives are already being submerged. In 2021, Claire Grossman, Stephanie Young, and Juliana Spahr reported in Public Books that writers “with an elite degree (Ivy League, Stanford, University of Chicago) are nine times more likely to win [prizes] than those without one. And more specifically, those who attended Harvard are seventeen times more likely to win” and that “nonwhite writers needed elite credentials more than white ones.”
I used to not understand the point of prizes; I thought they were a status symbol more than an indication that more people would—or even should—read the prizewinning books. However, over the past several years, as I’ve noticed some of my favorite books written overseas would not have been picked up by US publishers had they not won a prize—and after my own linked collection won a Colorado Book Award this year, and was subsequently picked up by more libraries and received more press coverage, both leading to more readers—I have started to understand prizes’ importance.
During my final year in the WVU MFA program, the last year I lived in West Virginia, while visiting Brooklyn, I ended up at a party on the porch of a brownstone, where I remember one guy going on about NYC, how much he loved it, how he didn’t understand why anyone would ever leave. I thought him annoying and stopped talking to him, but later labeled him more accurately: he was provincial, I decided, the most provincial person I met during my years living in the Eastern United States, more than anyone I’d met in Maryland, West Virginia, or Maine. Sure, provincial people exist everywhere, but how funny and fascinating that I found him in New York City, supposedly one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world.
But aren’t we all provincial? Don’t we all have internalized biases? Don’t we often pick friends or colleagues who are like us? This is true, but I still ask: Are we mainly going to train and publish the minority of writers who go to elite universities or are we also going to train and publish the majority who don’t?
I was unattached in my mid-twenties when applying for MFAs. I could have gone to University of Pittsburgh, where I was also accepted, or reapplied and gone elsewhere. But what about native or resident West Virginians who have responsibilities and families in the state, who want to be writers—who are writers—but need to train at a highly ranked school to be competitive?
“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,” says Sarah Einstein.
I understand this, partly because my linked collection, Bratwurst Haven, is set in Colorado, a place I lived and loved and internalized, but am not from. But I’ve also been lucky to return after many years to Western Oregon, and now my stories are again focusing on current issues and people here. I wrote a short novel from the perspective of a full-time Uber driver, a job my brother has held, and want to write stories set in East Portland, where I’ve lived the past six years. I’m writing as always about people, but also about the increasing changes in climate here, about the mental health issues and the politics. And I can write about them not only because I’m here in the present, but also because two miles away my great-grandfather owned a tire shop that
folded in the Great Depression; two miles away I grew up swimming at my great-aunt Marie’s, a cluttered house with the TV always on that I can see as I write this, a backyard that perpetually smelled of chlorine, cigarettes, and beer.
And where would I be without the paid assistantship in publishing that West Virginia University Press provided me? Perhaps with a master’s degree, I would be fine. But maybe I wouldn’t have served as the managing editor/editor of Ruminate Magazine for three years, and given opportunities to talented writers from state colleges and/or who hadn’t had internships, because I had been one of them, and people in positions of power had left doors open for me.
This is how it often works. Someone gives you a chance, and later you give a chance to others. But if the people giving one another chances have similar elite educational backgrounds, whose voices are we not hearing? And because the practice of creative writing is life-giving and life-affirming outside of any public-facing accomplishments: Who is given the opportunity to prioritize this art form in their lives?
“What’s happening at WVU is the test case for what’s coming for other public universities as consultants and politicians bring them to heel,” John Warner wrote on Twitter on September 6, one of many academics expressing this view. “These people don’t believe in a university as a place to develop as human beings.” West Virginia Senator Craig Blair seems to agree, but in a positive, not a negative light, backing Gee even after over eighty-five percent of the faculty voted no confidence in him: “The world is changing around us, and we must adapt,” Blair told Morgantown’s Dominion Post, “a two-year degree with a certification can actually generate more revenue.”
Of course, some students want or need rapid job training and/or certification— but others will want or need to study the liberal arts, and land-grant universities should have programs for them. “Some people might argue that you don’t really need a college degree to be a writer, and there’s some truth to that,” 2010 WVU MFA graduate Kori Morgan Frazier told me. “But that doesn’t mean that people who would benefit from an academic environment shouldn’t get to experience it . . . When people help you to clarify who you are and where you’re from and how that relates to your work, it changes you on both the personal and creative levels.”
Claire Grossman, Stephanie Young, and Juliana Spahr entitled their 2021 Public Books article on the inequalities in publishing “Who Gets to Be a Writer?”—a valid question. And I’d add, “How Do We Not Succumb to Provincialism?” Maybe we do that by supporting fully funded creative writing programs at state schools. Maybe we do it by supporting university and small presses. Maybe we form unions, like the burgeoning ones at universities all over the country, including at West Virginia University. And when people in power threaten our institutions, as they will again, we come together and demand— probably haphazardly and imperfectly, but together—that our programs not only have the right to exist, but are integral to the state, the nation, and the world. In that way, readers might continue to hear from the perspectives of the majority, not only the few.
Rachel King is the author of the novel People Along the Sand and the linked short story collection Bratwurst Haven, winner of the 2023 Colorado Book Award, Literary Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in One Story, North American Review, Northwest Review, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere.
