What Critics Are Missing About the Washington Center
This week there has been a series of negative stories about the Washington Center. They all have the same talking points: that the Center is unduly expensive, that the Center is partisan, and that the Center is of no interest to students. One goes so far as to declare the Center a failure.
It comforts our ideological critics to declare victory over what they see as a threat to their stranglehold on academic culture, but it’s important for readers to understand that their attacks are nothing more than opportunistic bluster. So in this brief note, we wish to help West Virginia citizens understand how these critics are misrepresenting the situation.
First, it’s worth knowing that the Washington Center is not some one-off educational experiment. Over three dozen civics centers have been established around the country, and more are on the way. Some are privately funded, but most are publicly funded, as we presently are. Most are meant to help close a gulf between the values and vision of the universities and the citizenry sending their children and taxes to them.
None of these centers has failed, and none shows any sign of failing. In fact, they’re thriving. The Washington Center is following strategies developed through trial and error by older and larger centers. We have no doubt that the Washington Center will be a particularly successful instance of the civics center movement.
Anything worth building must be built in a certain order. For us, that order is as follows. Step One: recruit and hire faculty. Step Two: design permanent courses, which must then be approved by normal WVU processes. Step Three: develop and get approval for a minor. This all takes about 18-24 months, and we just completed Step One, with the hiring of Josiah Lippincott, our Americanist, in mid-June.
Because we want to be as useful as possible to WVU while we wait for our courses to be approved, our faculty are teaching honors and other courses—we absolutely will be in classrooms this fall. We also offered a number of experimental “special topics” courses, which do not require curricular approval, as a preview of our eventual offerings. It is to be expected that these special topics courses have low enrollment, for a variety of bureaucratic reasons:
a. First, they don’t count toward a degree, which means students on financial aid can’t always take them.
b. Second, special topics courses don’t show up in normal course searches. (Typically, students only hear about them from their professors, but we haven’t taught any classes yet, so that’s an impossibility.)
c. Third, advisors at WVU are attached to academic units, with incentives to funnel students into courses in their own colleges. The Washington Center is a new, freestanding unit. No advisors of our own, no incentives elsewhere to send students our way.
So although we’d be happy to be deluged with students before we have normal courses, there is nothing surprising about the enrollment in this year’s “special topics” courses. Few students have even heard of us yet, and there are various disincentives—soon to be removed—to taking our courses.
Our critics have been especially misleading about our budget. Although it’s true that about $3 million has been allotted to the Center so far, less than a sixth of that total has been spent, and most of that has been used on renovating the suite we were assigned, which required significant asbestos abatement. We haven’t even moved into our offices yet, which shows how premature rumors of our demise are.
As our center builds out this year, our faculty will be busy teaching, researching, speaking, publishing, grant-writing, and fundraising—and, as it happens, responding to the periodic hit pieces. Indeed, addressing and weathering such attacks are themselves part of the maturation process of institutions such as ours, just as facing bullies is a necessary and healthy part of growing up. In the meantime, we are excited to be part of WVU and honored to be of service to the people of West Virginia.