West Virginia spent $3M to create university program to fight ‘woke ideology.’ One student is enrolled
Just one student is reportedly enrolled at a new West Virginia University center designed to push back on “woke” ideology ahead of its opening this fall.
“I’m not happy about it,” Democratic state lawmaker John Williams told West Virginia Watch. “Now we’re in a position where we’ve allocated so much money towards this program, and only one person is taking advantage of it.”
The Independent has contacted the university for comment.
In 2025, Republican lawmakers mandated the creation of the hub, the Washington Center for Civics, Culture and Statesmanship, allocating $3 million in support.
At the time, Gov. Patrick Morrisey said the center would focus on classics and American civics “to push back on the woke ideology that has infected our schools and help return higher education to its true purpose.”
“We said we wanted to teach students how to think, not what to think, and we wanted to ensure that the values that made America great are taught with honesty and pride,” Morrisey said in October as he announced the center’s new director.
The center offers classes on wokeness, the “new right” and Western Civilization, according to the WVU website.
Defenders of the center say enrollment will pick up once the center’s classes can count for credit towards existing majors at the university.
Outside of its curriculum, which some critics saw as an unwarranted imposition on existing faculty, the new center was created at a politically sensitive time for the university.
A recent $45 million budget shortfall had just contributed to 28 academic majors being cut and hundreds of people losing their jobs.
Republican lawmakers across the country have pushed to fight “wokeness” in schools, ranging from school districts banning and removing certain books, often ones that deal with themes of race and sexuality, to states such as Iowa prohibiting diversity-related coursework.
In the Hawkeye State, lawmakers have also mandated students take classes at University of Iowa’s Republican-backed Center for Intellectual Freedom, despite low enrollment.
The Trump administration has led the anti-woke charge, threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding to top universities to extract policy and curriculum changes, while cutting off federal partnerships between the military and top universities, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “woke breeding grounds of toxic indoctrination.”
