Read the interview:
E. Gordon Gee, President Emeritus of West Virginia University, confronts a sobering reality: public confidence in higher education has fallen from 95% to just 35%. Drawing on his 45 years of leading universities, he explores how institutions lost the trust of the people they were built to serve. Gee argues that restoring credibility requires humility, transparency, and a renewed commitment to storytelling, purpose, and service. He calls on universities to look inward, ask the hard questions, and rediscover their public mission.
I have now been a university president for 45 years, so I've seen four different decades, and I've seen four different kinds of approaches and problems with higher education. I tell the story about where I think higher education is right now, and that is [why] I gave a keynote address to the Gallup organization in Omaha, last year.
So, I decided I would do a little research, and so I went back to the Gallup poll in 1980 [that] showed about 95% of the American public thought higher education was a positive, and was a [public] good. When I gave that speech, it was down to 35%. What has happened is that the universities and colleges in this country, in many instances, have lost the trust of the American people.
And I think, as I've said to you before, when we lose the trust of the American people — we do not produce automobiles; we don't produce steel, or we don't produce containers — we produce ideas and trust. And it's that trust, that I think, is really our major impediment. And so we have to reimagine the university right now.
We have to regain trust. There's the “Re” word. There's a lot of “Re” [words] there’s - regain. But we have to really reimagine a university. Why have we lost trust? We have to ask very tough questions. Universities are amazing institutions, but we're not self-reflective. We never look through the rearview mirror and really say, what is it, what have we learned and what mistakes that we made? We always deflect that.
I think having people who are wise enough and confident enough, and institutions that are wise enough and confident enough to ask the hard questions. And those questions are pretty simple to me. One is: Why have we lost the trust in the American people?
Secondly, Well, why are we so expensive? What do we do about the financial cost of families? Third, why are we losing so many students out of the higher education project, if you want to call it that?
In the state where I'm living right now, in West Virginia, ten years ago, 55% of the student population went on to some form of higher education. Now it's down to 45% and that is reflective in almost every state in this country. So we're losing, we're losing the talent, not only because now we have a demographic cliff on top of, but we're losing people who just simply do not believe that higher education is a value. And so we need to really tell great stories about why we're valued and should be valued. But we also need to make sure that we are valued. And it's gaining the trust of the American people through embedding in their hearts and minds the really good things that we're doing every day.
But the truth of the matter is our universities are really institutions of broad-based intellectual power. And out of that have come jobs and opportunities. I mean, West Virginia University, where I've been serving lately, is the largest employer in the state of West Virginia, creates more jobs and does it through a variety of ways.
We do it through working with our communities. We do it through the research that we've developed. We have discovered a way to take minerals out of coal slurries. Now that's a major issue for this country, is the rare earth elements and what we do. And that is creating a lot of opportunities.
So the universities do a number of things. We are also places in which the arts are celebrated, where our hearts are filled with great things and great deeds and great pictures of prosperity and opportunity. So in many ways, our universities have been the engines that are driving us.
I am particularly entranced, in many ways by Abraham Lincoln, who created the land grant institutions in 1862. In the height of the Civil War, when a young farmer senator from Vermont came to him — now I wasn’t there, some people think I was, but I didn’t attend his inauguration. What Justin Morrill said to Lincoln was that this is simply not a war about slavery. It is a war about access to education. Only the wealthy had access. And so they created these land grant institutions, of which Arizona State itself is very much in quadrant, because it is an institution that was built to serve people. And, so I think very often that if Lincoln were alive today, he would tell us to get back to the business of being consistent servants and leaders. And I think that that is what we have to do to correct many of the ills we have right now.
We've forgotten that, you know, we've become arrogant, we've become isolated. We think we're the smartest people in the room. If we're the smartest people in the room, we're in the wrong room. And so we really need to change the arc of that conversation.