2023-09-15 13:43:20
The American university is an object of considerable interest in Europe and is also known reasonably well. Well, at least you know too well to notice what you don’t know. If a dispute over a dorm escalates at Yale or a speaker is booed at Berkeley, articles are guaranteed to appear in German and French-language leading media. However, other developments that cast a much greater shadow over the university (and society) in the USA are almost completely absent. Although it’s worth looking at supposed sideshows.
West Virginia University (WVU) is the largest and most important public university in the state of West Virginia. With its 30,000 students, the university is not one of the large public universities and enjoys a good reputation, but not a top reputation. Since this summer, however, WVU has been a beacon among American academics. Its ambitious president had invested in large construction projects in an attempt to increase student numbers. At the same time, the Republican-dominated state government in the capital city of Charleston cut more and more money from the university. This resulted in financial difficulties. In order to correct this, 170 professors are to be fired, various departments are to be closed completely – and all teachers are to be shown the door.
What makes the spectacle in Virginia so frightening: firstly, the stubbornness of the university administrators, who hardly seem to understand how a university works and what it is actually good for. Secondly, the target of their cuts, namely the humanities, which tend to bring in money rather than cost money at US universities (this is not the fault of the humanities scholars themselves, they just don’t need laboratories or electron microscopes). And thirdly, the delusional tech language and the solutionism taught by whispers to Silicon Valley: When it came to who should teach the WVU students languages if all the foreign language departments are thrown out, the Duolingo app was seriously brought into play. For a non-resident of West Virginia, a year of WVU costs $27,000. Imagine shelling out that – and then being told you can take your Russian course using a free app.
Which brings us back to an optical curvature that results from the European view of these universities. Because you might think that these hypothetical students might simply go somewhere else. Almost half of the undergraduates at WVU come from West Virginia, so they pay the much lower in-state tuition. For them, another university means either complete unaffordability or massive debt. Almost a quarter of the students come from poor families. With its decisions, the university gives the impression that the young people of this state, if they cannot afford to study abroad, are actually only entitled to very specific preparatory majors.
As an engine for upward mobility, American colleges have suffered greatly in recent decades. WVU is the moment when that promise is abandoned entirely.
Every Friday you can read the column of our guest author Adrian Daub here. The author, critic and literary scholar teaches as a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University. He lives in San Francisco and Berlin.
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