It’s not entirely clear what departments, what courses, will be eliminated. Some are named. Most are not. Are they eliminating basic liberal arts courses like English Lit or, as we used to joke before grievance studies became a thing, underwater basket weaving? Hopefully, it isn’t economics, because an education in economics seems critically important.

In proposing last week to eliminate 169 faculty positions and cut more than 30 degree programs from its flagship university, West Virginia, the state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the country, is engaging in a kind of educational gerrymandering.

The planned cuts include the school’s program of world languages and literatures, along with graduate programs in mathematics and other degrees across the arts and pre-professional programs. The university is deciding, in effect, that certain citizens don’t get access to a liberal arts education.

Sounds educationally grim, but this opening gloom omits two rather salient details. The first is that the university is facing a $45 million shortfall, not mentioned until further down and then blaming it on poor planning, which makes little sense.

But the projected deficit is the result of overly aggressive planning more than it is a financial liability created by the humanities. E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, once promised that the school would have 40,000 students by 2020, but the figure is still well under 30,000 across three campuses and is projected to drop. Mr. Gee is now covering up his own failures at the expense of his state’s citizens, instead of putting his efforts toward recruiting and obtaining donor money to fund a broad education for West Virginians.

Is the argument that Gee invented academic departments and hired profs to teach in anticipation of a growth in student population? If so, cutting them merely returns the university to the status quo ante, which shouldn’t be an issue. But that almost certainly isn’t the real grievance, just a convenient stalking horse for blame.

The second is that students are no longer choosing to major in the humanities. There are some rather significant questions about why this is happening that are studiously ignored. Are the profs being paid too much, or is the money going to non-academic administrators, especially for DEI or Title IX bureaucracies? If the students aren’t majoring in humanities, what are they majoring in and why?

What’s more, cutting humanities programs — which make up a sizable minority of the majors slated to be cut, alongside pre-professional and technical programs — is not necessarily the best way to save money. There is substantial evidence that humanities departments, unlike a majority of college athletics programs, often break even (and some may even subsidize the sciences). In defense of its proposed cuts, West Virginia University has cited declining interest in some of its humanities programs, but the absolute number of students enrolled is not the only measure of a department’s value.

I’m as big a fan of the humanities as anyone, a true believer in the value of a liberal arts education as the means to provide students with a breadth of classical education that not only enables students to have a working knowledge of basic academics, but the ability to think critically and apply it to their future endeavors. Yay, liberal arts!

But then, I’m not there. Is that still what a liberal arts education provides? Are humanities teaching what they were once intended to teach, or have they morphed into something else, something different, something…useless? What cannot be ignored, nor overcome to some claim to an existential vagary like “value” is that if there aren’t enough students interesting in taking, then what are universities supposed to do? Should a professor be retained to teach an empty classroom? Do we really need to put out more Ph.D.s in subjects that end in educating students to become future profs to teach future Ph.D.s to educate more students ad nauseum?

It’s hard to blame an academic for believing in the value of her chosen subject, having dedicated years of life and a not insignificant amount of money, to earning the credentials to be a scholar in some ridiculously arcane or abstract niche. It’s understandable that they would argue their butts off about its value, its contributions to society and the loss that will follow its elimination. But if students don’t want it, what’s a university to do?

The finances aren’t the point, anyway. The humanities are under threat more broadly across the nation because of the perceived left-wing ideology of the liberal arts. Book bans, attempts to undermine diversity efforts and remodeled school curriculums [sic] that teach that slavery was about “skill” development are part of a larger coordinated assault on the supposed “cultural Marxism” of the humanities. (That absurd idea rests in part on an antisemitic fantasy in which left-leaning philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse somehow took control of American culture after the Second World War.) To resist this assault, we must provide broad access to a true liberal arts education.

Perhaps this explains more than the writer intended, even if unintentionally. Academic freedom is under assault, both from left and right in their own special ways, but  no matter how disingenuous this appeal to emotion comes off, it ignores “the point,” that students aren’t buying what these academics are selling.

It’s unclear whether this is the case at the University of West Virginia, but a complaint that’s threaded across higher education is that the once classic liberal arts education has been subsumed by woke education, where reading Shakespeare has been replaced by reading unknown authors of untested literature based upon the writers’ racial identities. Is the real issue here that the university is doing away with a liberal arts education, or that it can no longer afford to cover the twisted wreckage of what a liberal arts education has become when not enough students want to waste their time and money on it anymore?