The Maleficent Gordon Gee and His Malfunctioning Money Machine

Not just me being a bit of a homer for a moment, the hot mess at West Virginia University is getting national attention now, and there are plenty of lessons for the coming downturn in higher education for those willing to listen. But this isn’t an enrollment story, or even really a funding story. It is the story of Gordon Gee, and there are many like Gordon Gee, who have seen higher education as an unlimited and mostly unaccountable ATM for personal wealth and lifestyle padding instead of a business and leadership position.

Lenne Ray, who is also a WVU graduate, for West Virginia Watch:

WVU currently has a $45 million budget shortfall. The administration’s response is to cut 32 majors and 169 faculty jobs at the Morgantown campus.

Now, hold onto your bowties for a minute.

How did WVU get into this mess? No one seems to be sure, but let’s take a look at University President E. Gordon Gee’s career history.

From 1998 to 2000, Gee was the president of Brown University, and was the second highest paid university chief executive in the country with a purported total compensation package of more than $1.3 million, according to a 2003 article by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Students at Brown were distrustful of Gee after he cut the popular residential string quartet at the arts friendly university. Around the same time, he announced plans to sell $80 million in bonds to construct a biomedical sciences building.

After Brown, Gee served as chancellor of Vanderbilt University, where he had a problem with lavish spending. In 2004, Gee was again the second highest paid university head in the U.S. with a salary of more than $1.3 million, and during his tenure more than $6 million — which was never approved by a full board — went into renovating the university-owned mansion where he lived. The university also paid for his frequent parties and a personal chef, which exceeded $700,000 annually.

I may be crazy, but if you’re being paid $1.3 million a year, you should be able to afford your own chef and parties.

Vanderbilt had a $2.2 billion annual budget, but the full Board of Trust never approved it. The board also didn’t approve most big-ticket spending projects or debt financing between 2000 and 2005. The university was so concerned that the trustees created a special board committee to monitor Gee’s spending.

In 2007, the bow-tie wearing Gee became the president of Ohio State University. Now, this one here is the one that really got me. It was reported that between 2007 and 2012, “Ohio State has spent more than $64,000 on bow ties, bow tie cookies and O-H and bow tie pins for Gee and others to distribute.”

Sixty. Four. Thousand. Dollars.

Gee announced his retirement on June 4, 2013.

So imagine my surprise when Gee was named interim president of WVU on Dec. 5, 2013. And I was absolutely shocked when he was named president months later on Feb. 28, 2014.

You might be thinking by now that he had learned to be better with money. But you’d be wrong.

In 2018, the Gazette-Mail reported that Gee spent more than $2.2 million between May 2014 and June 2017 in private air travel that was paid with tuition money. At the time, Gee said using tuition was “perfectly legitimate,” but he told the Gazette-Mail that the university probably will pay future costs out of an account that uses only private donations.

Since 2015, WVU has had a 10% decrease in student enrollment. WVU’s debt has risen more than 50% since 2014, the year Gee was hired, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education analysis. It also found that state appropriations for the university fell nearly 36% from 2013 to 2022.

In May, Rob Alsop, the university’s vice president for strategic initiatives, said WVU needs to adjust its margin by at least $75 million over the next five to seven years because of a potential enrollment decline of 5,000 students over the next 10 years.

Gee’s main focus as president is to bring money to the university, yet he is refusing to ask the state to help with the $45 million budget shortfall.

Gee told the Washington Post, “If I had gone down and asked for $45 million from the state legislature, they would have thrown me out.” His plan is to make cuts first, then ask the legislature for support. Never mind that the legislature just approved bills to give Marshall University $45 million for a new cyber security program and and $25 million to Pierpont Community and Technical College to build an aviation hangar.

Despite all of this, WVU offered Gee an extension until 2025. He has said he will step down when that extension ends, but he wants a job at the law school. It takes a lot of nerve to make faculty cuts then to say you want a lecturer position.

Everything rises and falls on leadership. Too many in education have discovered that in the malignant administrative part of education in the United States of America, one can get top grade leadership pay without any of the usual leadership accountability or pesky need to actually perform well at the job. For a university head like Gee, keeping a small cabal of influential people properly enriched along with you is more than enough to get a high salary, immunity, and a golden parachute.

The problem for higher education is the Gravy Train Unlimited is not what it once was. While some of WVU’s issues are unique, and hiring the despicable and proven waste of spending that is Gordon Gee is a problem of the university’s own making, the college and university system in America is about to find out the oldest of investment adages: Trees don’t grow to the sky. After decades of constant increases in tuition to keep the money flowing, there isn’t enough students, tuition, and funding to go around in the near future to keep it all going. Add in the COVID-19 era where an entire generation of students discovered online learning coupled with constant blaring headlines about the student loan debt mess, and you have the greatest threat to the higher ed pipeline in recent memory. Maleficent personal enrichers like Gordon Gee are going to get exposed first. Then the more general-purpose incompetent leaders will follow suit. Following that will be the leaders that just refuse to change, adapt, or scale back to the coming realities of what is going on, and what is to come, in higher ed.

Money covers a multitude of sins. A crisis of money and funding is going to reveal those sins in ways the mostly sheltered professional education class is really not going to like, or take well to.

And under all that is the students who will be hit with even more tuition increases for more cut programs, and all complaints will be answered by too many high-level administrators with a snide comment about how dare you not care about education by funding my office renovation and permanent position. Meanwhile, the actual teaching faculty, staff, and students will wind up paying the real world cost.

When more and more young people start not only looking but finding other options than throwing money at institutions run as social standing job programs first and institutions of learning second, don’t blame “the system,” or the economy, or changing times. Blame the Gordon Gees of the world, who were not satisfied until the golden goose choked to death on that last egg of administrative entitlement to enrich themselves, students and faculty be damned.