Author: Michael Blumenthal

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine what you would do with seventy-five million dollars. Better yet, close your eyes again and imagine how much suffering, how much disease, how much poverty and homelessness, how much gross inequality, that seventy-five million dollars might relieve.

Now open your eyes and go take a look at WVU’s Milan Puskar Football Stadium. Because that’s where– with the recent approval of the WVU Board of Governors– those $75 million are about to go.

Now you don’t have to be much of a retrograde, or even a girlie-man, to think that seventy-five million dollars is a pretty penny for a University that could easily improve the sorry conditions of adjunct professors, devote more money to the Arts and Humanities, reduce the cost of medical spending, or provide more financial assistance for underprivileged students to spend on a football stadium that already more than adequately holds over 60,000 mostly well-endowed, big spending, fans.

But to argue such a thing, I’ve come to realize, particularly in a state like West Virginia, is to present yourself as downright un-American. Nonetheless, when I read about the proposed expenditure the other week, I got a bad, though highly inflated, case of déja-vu.

In the year of my very first full-time paying job, as a $6,000-a-year high school German teacher in Upstate New York, the public high school I taught as was on a severe austerity budget: Not only were there no books for students, no Xerox paper for teachers, no chalk or erasers for blackboards, but– on certain occasions– school hours themselves were cut to save on utilities and other costs.

But the good citizens of Vestal, New York, ever devoted to the welfare of their children, pitched together to try and remedy this disastrous situation.  And pitch together they did, raising $25,000– the equivalent of $164,119 in present-day currency– to do the thing they most felt their high school needed: re-sod the football field.

And so, as the French say, le plus ça change… the more things change. And I suppose it’s also about time to fuss up to the fact that I must be possessed of old-fashioned, if not Neanderthal, values. I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least. None of which allows for spending $75 million on a football stadium that is more or less fine as it is.

It will, of course, be argued that the money being spent on renovating the football stadium doesn’t derive from the same sources as money spent on more traditional educational purposes. But that misses the point, the point being that it is not so much where money comes from as how it is spent that truly testifies to our deepest values. And money, in the end, is a zero-sum game: What is spent, or donated, in one arena, quite simply, will not be spent or donated in another.

For myself, much as I love teaching at WVU, I’d be much prouder of the university that pays my bills if it had a slightly less state of the art football stadium and provided more scholarships for the law and medical students who graduate with tens of thousands of dollars of debts and thus feel the need to charge massive fees with which to repay them. I, and I suspect many others in this state, would happily trade a less comfortable seat at the game for a clearer conscience when I sleep.

Writer Michael Blumenthal lives in Morgantown where he is a visiting professor of law at West Virginia University.

For those of us who like to make up our own minds about who, what, and how we are, this is a strange country, where U.S. News and World Report, TIME Magazine and the Gallup Poll profess to know more about our human condition than we do ourselves.

According to those harbingers of happiness and taste, for example, I and my fellow West Virginias  are now served by (and, in my case, teach at) the nation’s eighty-third best law school (up from ninety-ninth in a single year) and reside in its unhappiest, unhealthiest and most obese State.

Funny thing about that: I, along with most of my friends, neighbors and colleagues here in West Virginia, am relatively happy with life here. Happier, for example, than I was in sophisticated and ectomorphic Boston, Washington or New York, where I grew up, or somewhat more mesomorphic and less cheerful Clarksville, Tn. and well, as for my health, whatever lacks I am currently experiencing in that domain have more to do with my own negligence than any shortcomings on the part of this wild and wonderful state.  

Most of my friends and neighbors, in addition, seem in reasonably good physical shape, though I would be last to deny that West Virginia, along with the other eight American states I have resided in, has more than its share of people who are overweight, and more than its fair share of bad teeth.

I’ve lived in West Virginia only a scant five years, but I’ve already grown more than a bit tired of having the place I’ve chosen to live, and maybe even die in, constantly maligned and belittled by our superior-feeling fellow citizens and journalists in New York, Massachusetts, Washington and California, to name but a few. To my mind, at least, the people depicted in the condescending documentary The Wild, Wonderful Whites of West Virginia are no more representative of our State than is Bernie Madoff of New York, or the Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and TamerlanTsarnaev are of Massachusetts.

The wonderful law school I teach at, insofar as I can tell, is equally good as the far snobbier, higher rated, and far less cheerful one I myself attended; our environmental laws may leave something to be desired, but, then again, it may be the breathtaking beauty of our state that draws our attention to them.

Nor is a West Virginia farmer is any more likely to call his sheep “darling,” or marry his cousin, than is a native New Yorker to take a chain saw to a parking meter, or cheat on his taxes.    

Yes, students at WVU seem to have themselves a good time, and probably do a helluva lot more drinking than teetotalers like myself, but whoever it is that’s counting up the party hours, or the drinks, at U.S. News & World Report might be better off finding a worthier subject for his or her skills than making lists no right-thinking person could care less about.

The moral of the story, methinks, is not only that those who can’t do sometimes teach, or that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but that those who judge the rest of us according to polls might do better taking a long, hard look at themselves: What they find there–who knows? Might take them down a few notches on their polling data where they will have us happy and healthy West Virginians to keep them company.

Michael Blumenthal is a writer who lives in Morgantown, W.Va., and is a visiting professor at the West Virginia University College of Law.