No that's a dishonest framing. What actually happened was: 1. WVU is running out of money 2. They hired a team to devise a way to fairly eliminate programs.

No that's a dishonest framing. What actually happened was: 1. WVU is running out of money 2. They hired a team to devise a way to fairly eliminate programs. 3. That team decided that student enrollment should be the key metric to drive program elimination, but recognized three exceptions. 4. Both World Language and Extractive Resource Engineering programs have declining enrollment, thus would be slated to be eliminated. 5. The extractive resource engineering programs qualify for one of three exceptions which was significance to the local region and economy. 6. Thus those majors will be combined/restructured and downsized rather than being outright eliminated. It's also worth noting that while you can merge the Mining Engineering major with the P&NG Engineering major in a clean way since there is significant overlap in coursework it's unclear to me how you would merge the Chinese and the Russian programs into a single major. So even if they did qualify for an exception, I don't think you could use the same solution.