Essays Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

WVU Athletic Director Takes Issue With Professor's Opinion on Stadium Renovations

There is another point of view as to whether West Virginia University should spend millions of dollars to fix up its football stadium than the one expressed by visiting law professor Michael Blumenthal in his essay for West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia.

Blumenthal questions whether such an outlay is appropriate for an institution of higher learning. Needless to say, as athletic director at West Virginia University, I believe it is – and for reasons that are both practical and educational.

Addressing education first: There is no argument that West Virginia University’s first responsibility is to provide the best and broadest educational experience possible for its students. It is the first part of our land-grant mission of teaching, research and service.

For many current and potential students, high-quality intercollegiate athletics are a key part of that experience. Successful athletic programs also provide an important touchstone for alumni and help keep them connected to their alma mater, a connection which can result in increased support for the academic mission.

And high-profile athletic programs provide a platform and audience the University can use to draw attention to the stellar academics of the institution.

But being successful requires first-rate facilities, and that is where the practical side comes in.

Just within the past couple of weeks our department announced investments of more than $100 million to renovate specific areas at Milan Puskar Stadium, the WVU Coliseum and the Shell Building. This money will come from $75 million in bonds and $25 million from private philanthropy.

All three structures are at an age where renovations and upgrades are required.

The Coliseum is 44 years old, Milan Puskar Stadium is 34 and the Shell Building is 33. We plan to take advantage in the departure of the College of Physical Activity and Sports Science to its own building this coming fall to renovate the Coliseum and Shell Building – which by the way has essentially been untouched since it was built. We also plan number of other smaller projects, such as a new locker room at Dlesk Soccer Stadium and re-purposing the existing baseball park, Hawley Field.

Historically, WVU has maintained its facilities extraordinarily well and I give kudos to both the Facilities Department as well as Athletic department employees. However, there comes a time when modernization is called for and that time is now. It would be negligent on our part to not invest significantly in renovating and upgrading our athletic infrastructure, particularly given that athletics is a self-sufficient auxiliary unit.

We will be able to pay for these improvements in large part due to the guaranteed payments we will receive during the next decade from both the Big 12 Conference and IMG College. These payments are substantially higher than in years past.

These projects have been fully reviewed and approved by a number of different groups – all with some oversight responsibility for the complete mission of WVU; the West Virginia University Planning Committee, the Board of Governors as well as the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission studied our mid- and long-term revenue and expense projections and determined that we were on solid ground with our plans to repay the bond.

It is also important to remember that while the Athletic Department is a integral part of the University experience, it is a self-supporting auxiliary unit and as such does not pull funding from the University’s core mission. All these costs are funded from Athletic Department-generated revenues.

Significant capital expenditures are taking place all over Morgantown and Monongalia County, not all of which are directly tied to the University. That is just one of the reasons it is such a vibrant and dynamic community.

We would be shirking our duty as a part of that community to do anything less than provide the best athletic program possible, and that means keeping our facilities in first-rate shape.

Oliver Luck is Director of Intercollegiate Athletics at West Virginia University.

Fond Memories of a Mountain Childhood in Appalachia

I want to invite you to walk with me through the woods and around the rugged hills of my home.

Our house was situated beside the community water tank, with a rock cliff behind it, and the mountains that rose high above the cliff…well, they were my mountains.

We made a path around the side of the hill that led us to a garden spot which we tended annually, It was an open plot of ground, with good sun exposure and a natural spring flowed nearby. It was the perfect place for a fresh drink of water.

That garden path served a dual purpose as it was the highway that took us up into the mountains, to play, and to explore.

My childhood in the coalfields was filled with explorations offered by nature.

The mountains were my classroom, beckoning me each summer when school was out. It was a great feeling to sleep a little late, get up and have Momma’s gravy and biscuits, pack a picnic lunch consisting of a jelly biscuit and a Mason jar filled with water or Kool-aid and head out to the mountains!

The wide sweeping limbs of the Rhododendrons, like outstretched arms, greeted me at each visit. Those limbs formed a canopy under which I sat, quietly undisturbed, to bask in nature. My mountains were always filled with intrigue and beauty; Brilliant white trilliums graced the setting of orange mountain azaleas and crimson red wildflowers which bloomed in the rich earth beneath the trees. Toadstools had happy homes against the base of the tree trunks and thick, green moss carpeted the grounds around them. One secluded spot beneath the dense growth of trees could paint a vivid portrait. And it did! And every painting has been framed in my memory and beckons me to visit often.

My West Virginia mountains. “My” mountains.

Writer Phylenia French is a West Virginia native currently living in Christiansburg, Virginia. Her self-published book is ‘Home Spun Yarns, Tales to be Told from the Front Porch Swing.’

Moving Around, But Keeping Those Appalachian Connections

When people ask me where I’m from – I tell them “West Virginia.”

When they ask, “where in West Virginia exactly?…Where’s ‘home’?”…

Well…that’s a little tougher to answer.

You see, I’m a “PK”.

For those who don’t know, that’s a “Preacher’s Kid.”

Specifically, I’m a United Methodist PK.

United Methodist pastors are itinerant.

Meaning…they move from place to place.

They agree to go wherever the bishop sends them.

They’re sent to serve in a given place for a year at a time.

They usually stay longer than a year, but rarely are in one place for their whole ministry.

So my family moved several times as I was growing up – always within West Virginia.

I was born in Charleston, but before I graduated high school and left for college, my family also lived in Westover, West Liberty, Charleston again – different church, New Martinsville and Keyser.

The year I graduated from high school my family moved to Clarksburg.

I studied at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon – and have since lived in Charleston, Morgantown and now Fairmont.

There were a few years there in my twenties when I lived in West Germany and then Columbus, Ohio – but for most of my life, I’ve lived in West Virginia.

For me, this has meant a strong sense of connection with our state and a strong appreciation for her people.

“People” are “home” for me – my family; church members, neighbors, classmates and teachers in all those towns I grew up in; my colleagues in the jobs I’ve held.

Earlier this month I was reminded of this strong sense of connection.

Every June, clergy and lay members of the West Virginia Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church gather at West Virginia Wesleyan for a yearly business meeting.

This is a meeting which includes serious business – you know…motions and amendments and amendments to the amendments and calling the question and budgets – but also a whole lot of celebration and worship and fellowship and…connection.

I serve as a lay member of the annual conference and have attended for a number of years in that capacity.

But for many years, I was among the PKs who tagged along with their parents to this conference in Buckhannon – exploring the campus, participating in activities, attending the worship services, embraced by the people of the conference.

The people of the conference and Wesleyan’s campus with its tree-lined walkways, Wesley Chapel and its white-painted pews, pipe organ, hand-carved sculptures of the disciples and the large statue of John Wesley out front…these have been constants in my life and in the lives of many other West Virginia United Methodist PKs.

The connection is strong at this annual gathering.

You have to leave plenty of time to stop and talk as you make your way across campus, because you will run into many friends.

And when the conference ends, the people head to their cars, point them in the direction of their current physical homes, and fan out across West Virginia and Garrett County, Maryland.

They disperse to go and serve their communities and the people there.

At the conclusion of this year’s four day conference, as I steered my car onto Corridor H and then I-79 north, I was tired and glad to be going home…but also thankful I’d just been there.

Sarah Lowther Hensley is a former West Virginia Public Radio reporter and higher education administrator who lives in Fairmont, West Virginia. Her writing appears on her blog Home Among the Hills.

One Professor is Asking: Should WVU Spend Millions to Fix Up its Football Stadium?

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.

Essayist Misses the Old Ways Of Communicating

Athena!

I just found out that if I were a Greek goddess, I’d be Athena! A proud and insightful warrior.

Or if I’m not Athena, maybe I was a royal queen in ancient Egypt. And this is fascinating—it turns out my aura is blue! These revelations must mean something!

Just take a few, or fifty, Facebook quizzes and you, too, can learn just how fascinating you are. It’s easy. Answer a few inane questions such as what’s your favorite movie or actor and the answer is: you’re Marilyn Monroe or Ryan Gosling!

I wonder: what did we do with our time before Facebook quizzes? Go down the street to visit a neighbor, who might offer you a cup of coffee and a chat? Or work in the garden cutting fresh flowers for a sick friend?

No need to find pen and paper, or type a letter, then struggle to find an envelope and stamp, just to keep in touch. Do it Cyber quick and post on a Facebook feed: how u doin? Lol — smiley face.

Give me the days of porch sitting on a hot summer night, listening to the stories of relatives. Lengthy conversations in person let us know who we come from and how to be in the world. The value of learning how to be in deep, lengthy, face-to-face conversations is still priceless.

Not one of my family or friends ever thought I was Athena, but they loved me anyway. And they showed it by listening to me, really hearing what I had to say. And the touch of my grandmother’s hand on mine as I listened to her funny or sad stories reminded me I was a vital part of a family.

Social Media is a wonderful way I contact folks via Facebook (but not Twitter—I can’t say anything in 140 characters) or to read their blogs. For people who aren’t mobile or who live far away, it’s a blessing. But it is one degree of separation that seems to stretch forever.

I fear we are forgetting how to be in one another’s proximity, like sitting in a coffee shop mirroring one another’s joy or sadness. And I know through teaching that the upcoming generation is facing increasing anxiety once placed amidst real people, not avatars.

I hope we find our way back to being in touch—real touch–like a hug, or a handshake, more and more. Podcast or Skype if it’s impossible to be together, but if it is, then let me know your true self, and you can know the real me. I’m not a super hero or a movie star, but I am a little like Athena, a bit insightful: because I wish you were here.

Cat Pleska lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia. She is a regular writer for Wonderful West Virginia magazine. She teaches English at West Virginia State University and is the director of the WVSU Writing Center.

Essay: Pothole Season Has Arrived With a Vengence

You know the drill.

Eyes trained straight ahead – glued to the patch of pavement directly in front of you – picking and weaving and bobbing your way along the street.

Yep.

Pothole season.

That perennial pox of problematic pavement.

Drivers miss a lot of beautiful scenery this time of year just because we have to focus our gaze straight down and straight ahead.

There’s an illustration making the rounds on social media – you may have seen it. It compares the trajectory of drunk and sober drivers. Normally, sober drivers will drive in a straight line and drunk drivers will bob and weave. In “Pothole Land” – it’s the sober drivers who weave in and out and snake their way along the road. Drunk drivers just drive straight through the pothole minefield, oblivious – allowing their vehicle to dunk into hole after hole in a strut-busting, rim-rocking wave of destruction.

Truth be told, sometimes – no matter your skill level and experience – you can’t avoid all potholes.

You’re just going to have to come to terms with the fact that you’ll hit some.

I read someplace years ago that the worst thing you can do is slam on the brake if you realize you are about to hit a pothole. I don’t know if that’s true, but if I can’t avoid a pothole, I always do try to keep my foot off the brake pedal at that moment of impact.

Just in case.

For me there’s also a series of involuntary and useless physical reactions to hitting a pothole.

In that moment when I realize I am about to hit one, my arms and legs stiffen, my shoulders scrunch up to my ears, and my hands put a death grip on the steering wheel…bracing for impact – and I actually lift myself up a bit off the seat, as if those actions will somehow soften the blow or keep the car from sinking quite so deep.

I also grimace.

Yeah…

If I hold my mouth “just right”…that dang pothole won’t damage my car quite as much.

It’s worth a shot.

This spring I have four new tires, a new alignment and a healthy respect for the dangers of a hidden or carelessly missed crater.

I’m doing my best to maneuver for minimum impact.

But I’m still hitting my fair share.

With warmer weather, the road crews are out addressing the problem.

And I send out a big “thank you” to the guys and gals working hard to patch up this year’s bumper crop of potholes.

In the meantime, I wish you well on your journey – and in the words of that traditional blessing…”may the road rise up to meet you…”