Recently, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sent a letter to state and university officials objecting to the drastic cuts at West Virginia University and imploring the state to help.
Sen. Eric Tarr (R-Putnam), the Senate Finance chair, responded last week in a rebuttal filled with name-calling and right-wing buzzwords.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether the West Virginia Legislature should have kept up funding levels in the past and whether the state should provide financial assistance to WVU now.
But Tarr’s comments reveal that he and his party (and therefore the Legislature) are not engaging with the issue in good faith: “All we need to validate our conservative decisions as legislators is to have the AFT, WVEA, ACLU, LGBTQ, or AFL-CIO complain about those decisions.”
Tarr’s comments will make excellent campaign fodder: They contain the perfect mix of buzzwords, negative rhetoric and groups conservatives dislike (in this case, unions, civil rights groups and education leaders). That’s the point — campaigning, fundraising and politicking.
Tarr shows West Virginia’s Republican Party are more concerned with “owning the libs” or “winning” against people and organizations they’ve branded the enemy than addressing problems. They are governing primarily based on identity and grievance politics — not good policymaking.
Ultimately, we all want what is best for our state and all its residents. And as we said, reasonable people can disagree about what that looks like and how we get there. But West Virginia’s majority party seems disinterested in having a conversation to find the best path — on higher education and virtually every other issue. They are refusing to engage in good faith with those who may disagree with them; rather, they are simply doing the opposite of what their “opponents” want and calling the resulting frustration proof of their success.
That’s not how good governance works. Good governance and good policymaking bring together stakeholders — often of differing views — to find a solution to a problem or, at the very least, a way forward. As the saying goes, in a good compromise, no one gets everything they want, but everyone gets something they need.
Tarr and his ilk, however, have zero desire to compromise, even if their obstinacy hurts the state.
Is Tarr wrong that WVU needs to take responsibility for its mess? No, he’s not.
But it can’t be denied that the Legislature hasn’t done as much as it could to support the state’s land-grant institution. And it also can’t be denied that a crippled WVU will hurt the whole state, not just Morgantown and north-central West Virginia. Yet, Tarr and his peers feel justified in their inaction merely because it irritates a group they don’t like.
