Academy Fight Song: WVU’s Struggle is Class Struggle

Photo of West Virginia University | Credit: Pete Chacalos

It is common knowledge that American universities are in a state of crisis. Critics, both within and outside of the academy, have addressed matters such as administrative bloat, the adjunctification crisis, the status of student-athletes, and the consequences of the cheap and widespread use of artificial intelligence. Most of these critiques have focused on what Peter Fleming calls “the restructuring of the university into a knowledge factory.” According to Fleming,

“Departments and schools across the university have been forced to undergo [a] corporate metamorphosis. Social work and medicine, physics and astronomy, the biological sciences, engineering, philosophy, law and economics, to name only a few, are now meant to behave like independent business units; that is to say, compete for resources from central administration, attract external income (from industry, etc.) and grow student enrollments. [ . . . ] If a school or department fails to add to the university’s bottom line, then serious questions are soon asked about its future viability.”

Today, a grotesque example of this reduction of higher education to a moneymaking racket is West Virginia University under the administration of  President Elwood Gordon Gee. Under the pretext of COVID and shifting demographics in West Virginia, Gee and Vice President for Strategic Initiatives Rob Alsop have proposed the outright elimination of thirty-two academic programs and 169 faculty positions.  Among degree programs to be eliminated are undergrad degrees in both Art History and Environmental and Community Planning, along with graduate programs in Education, Theater, and Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences. WVU currently plans to shutter all of its foreign language degree programs. Jackal Gee, if he gets his way, will almost certainly wind up all but destroying West Virginia’s flagship university. Cincinnati Socialists stand unequivocally with the faculty and staff of WVU, the people of West Virginia and Morgantown, and all educational workers affected by the ongoing ruling-class war on higher education.

The swindles carried out by Gee and Alsop are nothing new. Capitalism erected itself on what Marx and Engels called “primitive accumulation”—appropriation of commonly-held resources and diverting them for purposes of private gain. English professor Matt Seybold has shown how the WVU administration is doing something similar here. He writes that WVU’s problems began with

“a delusional plan to grow WVU’s enrollment by 25% through a combination of international recruiting, online degree programs, and campus expansion. Gee’s administration spent hundreds of millions on these projects, a sizable proportion borrowed at high interest rates, and most of it paid out to real estate developers, construction companies, tech entrepreneurs, and consulting agencies. In just under a decade, Gee increased WVU’s debt load by 55%, and shrunk enrollments by 15%.”

In other words, Gee and Alsop are employing state power—under cover of the vapid and cynical rhetoric of “responsiveness” and “relevance”—to rob the commons and funnel value to capital. Cincinnatians cannot help but see the similarity of these schemes to the various development rackets carried out here under the aegis of 3CDC, and not infrequently, with the participation of the University of Cincinnati itself. Aside from its leading role as a gentrifier, UC’s role in using state power for the ends of capital can also be seen in its public relationship with the Cincinnati Police Department. James Whalen, previously a CPD Lieutenant and Assistant Chief of Police, is credited for fostering the current close relationship between UC and CPD and using those ties to both develop and justify increasingly violent policing methods. UC provided much the technical wherewithal and ideological cover for CPD’s Strategic and Tactical Analysis Review for Solutions (STARS) program and its so-called hot spot interventions, which led in turn to the aggressive place-based policing program PIVOT, which resembles most notably the Louisville Police unit that murdered Breonna Taylor. Cincinnati’s own experience shows how an academic institution that is compelled to compete in the so-called free market is especially susceptible to accepting funding from the military and law enforcement, the armed branches of the ruling class.

However, we point out that the plunder of the commons under advanced capitalism is, in a crucial way, much different from the primitive accumulation of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Four hundred years ago, capitalism was in its vital infancy; today, grifters like Gee and Alsop are extracting value from a senescent, and indeed failing, mode of production. In the seventeenth century, wealth from primitive accumulation provided the original hoard upon which capitalism itself was founded. Today, instead of fueling industrial production, the theft of the commons primarily enriches the unproductive FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sectors. Today, capital grows by betting against itself. The ruling class may condemn Marxist theory and popular socialist movements, but the advent of the leveraged buyout, the hedge fund, and private equity shows that capitalists themselves know that capitalism is riddled with fatal and inherent flaws. The schemes of so-called neoliberalism are nothing more than capital itself recognizing the truth of Rosa Luxemburg’s observation that humanity inevitably faces a choice between socialism and total collapse. As Nancy Fraser writes:

“[C]apitalism’s chief irrationality is its built-in tendency to economic crisis. An economic system oriented to the limitless accumulation of surplus value, appropriated privately by for-profit firms, is inherently self-destabilizing. The drive to expand capital by increasing productivity through technical advances results in periodic drops in the rate of profit, the overproduction of goods, and the overaccumulation of capital. Attempted fixes like financialization only postpone the day of reckoning, while ensuring it will be all the more severe when it does arrive. ”

What this means for us is that we reject any approach to the crisis at WVU—and in higher education in general—that proposes more capitalism, more ruling-class  power, more bureaucracy, more reliance on markets, more technocratic obfuscation. Capitalism has had its day, and it has been a vicious, sadistic, irrational, warlike, and genocidal day. We call on workers in higher education to reject entirely the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeois state, the legions of class-collaborationist university administrators, and all cooperation with the ruling class. We call on faculty and staff to join communist, socialist, or revolutionary Marxist organizations, and to combine their struggles with that of the international proletariat to completely and finally abolish the capitalist system and to replace it with a people’s socialist democracy.

Cincinnati Socialists condemns without reservation the corrupt and unprincipled Gee and Alsop. We call on all education workers, along with all oppressed and dispossessed people, to do likewise. We urge all radical labor, socialist, and communist organizations to denounce publicly the looting of the commons at West Virginia University, and to lead the way in calling for  collective political struggle against WVU administrators, up to and including direct action. We say that a united people can and will never be defeated. We say that the working class and oppressed people have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to win.