On this West Virginia Morning, pumpkins are an iconic image of Halloween. They are also part of an unconventional learning experience at West Virginia University.
On this West Virginia Morning, pumpkins are an iconic image of Halloween. As Chris Schulz reports, they are also part of an unconventional learning experience at West Virginia University.
Plus, technology company Sparkz will soon build lithium batteries for energy storage and electric vehicles in Bridgeport, on the site of a shuttered glass factory. Curtis Tate spoke with CEO Sanjiv Malhotra about the batteries and why West Virginia is a good fit for his company.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is solely responsible for its content.
Support for our news bureaus comes from Shepherd University and Marshall University School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Maria Young produced this episode.
Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning
State education leaders hope to prepare the state’s workforce for big economic changes with short courses called microcredentials. Microcredentials are short, focused courses that educate and certify learners in a particular subject.
Schools like West Virginia University already offer such courses. But the Credential WV program from the Higher Education Policy Commission is working to expand and standardize microcredential offerings across the state to meet the growing demands of industry and economic development.
Corley Dennison, vice chancellor for Academic Affairs for the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission, said teams from all of the state’s institutions, as well as industry leaders, came together for a microcredential summit earlier in October.
“What are best practices? What’s the best advice that you can give to the institutions that want to offer these?” he said. “We had presentations from some of the institutions that are already offering these, and they were able to talk about what worked for them and what didn’t work for them. Primarily, it’s providing support at a state level, working towards some uniformity in offering credentials and advising institutions and best practices.”
Also in attendance were representatives from other states like New York, where Dennison said microcredentials are helping medical workers increase their earnings by thousands of dollars.
“There can be immediate impact off these microcredentials, and I really think it’s something that will, over time, really help the state of West Virginia,” he said.
Dennison said more than half of the workforce will need retraining in the coming decade.
“There’s a huge demand for relearning, for retraining, for giving workers new skills,” he said. “The idea is, by going to micro credentials, it will be easier and faster for institutions to be able to answer this workforce need.”
Dennison said there are fewer students of college-going age in the state every year, and many are wary of committing to a traditional degree program. Microcredentials can offer them a more affordable way to continue education and gain useful skills.
“These micro credentials, they can be standalone, but they also can be stackable,” he said. “Someone might come in and say, ‘Well, I don’t want to commit to a degree, but maybe I’m willing to go for a microcredential,’ and then they go for another, and then they go for another, and then an academic advisor can say, ‘Hey, you realize you’re getting close to a degree program.’”
On this West Virginia Week, we hear from first time voters at Marshall University about what matters to them leading up to this year’s election.
Briana Heaney will tell us about a unique way some people are enjoying the Gauley River’s whitewater rapids.
Plus, we’ll hear about an artistic expression of identity at Shepherd University, and what could become the state’s latest public charter school in Morgantown.
Chris Schulz is our host this week. Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert.
West Virginia Week is a web-only podcast that explores the week’s biggest news in the Mountain State. It’s produced with help from Bill Lynch, Briana Heaney, Caelan Bailey, Chris Schulz, Curtis Tate, Emily Rice, Eric Douglas, Jack Walker, Liz McCormick, Randy Yohe and Maria Young.
October 7 marked one year since the start of one of the deadliest conflicts in the modern history of the Middle East. Students at West Virginia University are commemorating a grim year with a display on campus.
October 7 marked one year since the start of one of the deadliest conflicts in the modern history of the Middle East. Students at West Virginia University are commemorating a grim year with a display on campus.
Two thousand red flags were arrayed in the ground leading up to West Virginia University’s Woodburn Hall Tuesday evening.
Each flag represents 100 people who died, and the flags together are meant to show the 200,000 total deaths since the start of the Israel-Hamas War that has now spilled over into Lebanon and Syria.
The flags, along with informative posters, were placed by the West Virginia Coalition for Justice in Palestine.
Omar Ibraheem is one of the student organizers who set the flags in front of one the university’s most iconic buildings.
“This field is full, and that’s only 2,000,” he said. “200,000 is just an unimaginable number that, when you think about it, all you hear is numbers.”
Ibraheem said visual displays like the flags outside Woodburn Hall make things more understandable.
“This is to put that into reality and to show people that, hey, these are real lives. Each and every individual was breathing,” he said. “They had a future. They had an education. Most of them were kids, which is the unfortunate thing.”
The official death toll in Gaza currently stands just above 40,000. But an analysis published in the medical journal The Lancet over the summer estimated the real death toll could be closer to 186,000. That is the number Ibraheem and his fellow students have used as the basis for the display. Ibraheem said the number is likely higher now, months after the publication.
“I don’t know how you could really put in your head that all of these flags are 100 lives lost, and you don’t feel something,” Ibraheem said. “At the end of the day, I just want people to really understand that these numbers are people. They’re not just numbers. And I want people to start critically thinking about everything, critically thinking about what our government is doing, what Israel is doing, and what effects these have on actual lives, people that are like me and you, people that are mostly children. That’s what I want out of this.”
Ibraheem says due to a university rule requiring such displays be taken down by 9 p.m. each day, the flags will move around campus throughout the week.
“The whole point is not to upset people. It’s to follow the rules and make an impact, and that’s it,” he said. “We actually took that cleaning up, setting up, to our advantage, and we’re going to be moving around campus.”
People walk to and from WVU’s Health Sciences building past a display of red flags Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Wednesday morning, the flag display is set up by the main walking path between the WVU Health Sciences building and the main parking garage and PRT station. Thomas Smith brought a friend to WVU’s medical campus for a procedure and discovered the display while waiting. He was at a loss for words, but said the toll the display represents is crazy.
“I just think everybody needs to start getting along together,” Smith said. “I mean, it’s ridiculous how people want to judge somebody by their color or their religion and all that. It’s just ridiculous. You need to get to know people better, and then go from that.”
Tony DeMino is a vendor who was making a delivery to WVU when he stopped to look at the display. He said what the flags represent is a shame.
“All of this is ridiculous. You shouldn’t be killing Jews. They shouldn’t be killing Palestinians,” DeMino said. “This is all so unnecessary, but it was started by the Palestinians. I mean, that’s a fact.”
Ibraheem said that perspective fails to see the historical context of the current conflict.
“People like to say it started Oct. 7,” he said. “Well, why don’t you look at the past 57 or even 75 years of Israel’s torment on the Palestinian people and even the Lebanese people. It’s just something to keep in mind that people say this started Oct. 7 when, no, it really didn’t.”
The flags will next move to the Evansdale section of WVU’s Morgantown campus for the remainder of the week.
Each red flag in the display is meant to represent 100 deaths. Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee gave his last state of the university address to the university’s Faculty Assembly Monday.
West Virginia University President E. Gordon Gee gave his last state of the university address to the university’s Faculty Assembly Monday.
“Today, after more than a decade as president, I have come to address the state of West Virginia University for a final time,” Gee said to open.
Gee’s contract ends June 30, 2025 after he spent 11 years in the position. He previously served as WVU’s president in the 1980s.
Gee said the end of his second tenure had him reflecting more about the future of WVU than its past.
“My purpose has been to make things better for West Virginians and to build a university with the strength and power to succeed long after I am gone,” he said. “This is just the beginning. West Virginia University is built to last. And we will continue to grow and prosper as we create endless possibilities for our students and the citizens of West Virginia.”
Gee focused on improvements at the university during his tenure, including an improved freshman retention rate, as well as national and international awards received by faculty and students.
“Through the difficult but necessary process of Academic Transformation, we have better aligned complementary programs to serve students today and well into the future in new units: the College of Applied Human Sciences, the College of Creative Arts and Media and the Division for Land-Grant Engagement,” Gee said.
WVU is actively engaged in a national search for Gee’s replacement, and recently held listening sessions across its campuses for community input on the process.
The archivist is the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration. Although Shogan is the 11th person to hold the position, she is the first woman to do so.
On the 6th floor of the Downtown Library on West Virginia University’s Morgantown campus, the West Virginia and Regional History Center preserves and provides access to the records that document history and culture in the Mountain State.
There are books, of course, but also photographs, newspapers and genealogies.
“The records that we have hold the stories of the people of West Virginia, and they reflect the people that live here,” said Lori Hostuttler, director of the West Virginia and Regional History Center at WVU Libraries. “Through access and preserving those they really help us to examine the past so that we can be proactive in the present and plan for the future.”
Hostuttler said the records cover all aspects of history and culture in the state, and that for every national event that is taught in history classes, West Virginians participated.
“Something that I say to folks a lot of the times is that there’s really no national history without local history,” she said.
Which is why Hostuttler said it was an honor to have Colleen Shogan, the archivist of the United States, visit WVU’s campus last week.
Shogan has many personal connections to the state, including several family members who are WVU alumni, but she came to view the university’s extensive regional and national record collections, as well as to meet with students and give a public talk.
She said WVU is an example of the National Archives’ more than 13 billion physical records not being restricted to a few buildings in Washington, D.C.
“The records are really the property of the American people, so my job is to figure out ways in which we can provide as much access as possible of those records to as many Americans as want to see them and want to interact with them,” Shogan said.
The archivist is the head and chief administrator of the National Archives and Records Administration. Although Shogan is the 11th person to hold the position, she is the first woman to do so.
“In some ways I kind of wonder what took so long,” she said to laughter. “I’m happy I’m here, for sure, and I’m very honored by it. But it’s almost kind of crazy to me that it took so long.”
Analysis from the AFL-CIO and the Society of American Archivists shows that women represent more than 80 percent of librarians and more than 70 percent of archivists in the United States. Shogan said women – and women of color – are increasingly in leadership roles across the country.
“When I travel around, I see that that demographic of leadership is changing,” she said. “That’s really heartening to me, because that matters when you have people that are working in this field, and they can see that there’s a pathway for advancement.”
U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Dr. Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States, visit West Virginia University (WVU) in Morgantown, W.Va. on Wednesday, October 2, 2024.
Courtesy of Sen. Shelley Moore Capito
Shogan plans to display the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution – recognizing womens’ right to vote – in the National Archives’ rotunda, as well as the Emancipation Proclamation alongside other founding documents such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
A big focus of her talk at WVU was on the importance of archives and records to the nation’s democracy. Shogan said the National Archives exist so that all Americans have access to understanding something about our past.
“But we also like to say at the National Archives, we do it to preserve democracy, because records provide accountability and they provide transparency about decisions that have been made by federal agencies, by your government, by presidents, by members of Congress, by Supreme Court justices or judges,” she said. “Those are all records and without accountability, without transparency, you cannot have a strong democracy that is a fundamental component, a key component, of any democracy. So we like to say at the National Archives, we are not just a nice thing to have to appreciate history. We are a necessity.”
After the talk, Shogan told WVPB that in an increasingly polarized country, access not only to archives and records but also public servants is crucial to combat misinformation and distrust.
“If you’re going to be a public servant, you can’t just be in the corner and not be willing to interact with the public, answer questions from the media. You need to be out there explaining some of these challenging decisions that we have to make when you’re in a position like I am running a federal agency like the National Archives,” she said. “So I welcome that dialog. I welcome that exchange. And we also take a lot of pride at the National Archives, doing our work in a nonpartisan fashion. Our goal is to share the records with as many Americans as possible, and then allow Americans to make their own judgments and their own choices and decisions based upon those records.”
Political science graduate student Chloe Hernandez said it’s personally motivating to see a woman in such a prominent position.
“Most of my professors are men. Most of the people I work with in D.C. are men,” she said. “Seeing another woman is just so inspiring, because it kind of puts a different perspective in that we are all capable of doing this, and the sky’s the limit. Just work hard and you’ll achieve your goals.”
Hernandez said the message of access for all also resonated with her, and she is now motivated to look up her father’s military records.
“More students should take time to look at the National Archives,” she said. “Not in the sense of like, ‘Oh, it’s the school field trip,’ but more so just learning about our history and specific history for each person.”
The National Archives are gearing up for the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026. That includes more travel around the country by Shogan and more importantly, more access to the nation’s founding documents for all Americans.
