Lawrence Messina of the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety joins Beth Vorhees by phone to discuss the extreme cold and what’s being done to keep residents safe, could fracking solve abandoned mine water problems, and West Virginia University’s basketball teams begin their second year in the Big 12.
Tag: WVU
WVU Basketball Hoping for Big Things in Second Big 12 Season
West Virginia’s men’s team is coming off of a season last year where they only won 13 games. It was the worst season in a decade for the program, and one of Coach Bob Huggins’ worst as a head coach.
One problem the team endured was an exhaustive travel schedule, traveling more than 30,000 air miles, since many of the Big 12 schools are in Texas. Huggins says an adjusted travel schedule this year, which allows for the team to stay in that state for two games instead of flying back and forth, has helped.
West Virginia’s women’s team is performing better than last year. Last year, they finished with 17 wins and 14 losses. This year, the women’s team is red hot, as they have won 13 games in a row.
WVU Board Names 20 Person Presidential Search Panel
West Virginia University’s Board of Governors has approved a 20-member committee to search for the university’s next president.
The board’s chairman, James W. Dailey II, on Monday was named chair and non-voting member of the committee. WVU interim President E. Gordon Gee will serve as an adviser and non-voting member.
Other members of the search panel include members of the Board of Governors, the Faculty Senate, the Student Government Association and the alumni association, among others. They were announced Monday by the Board of Governors.
WVU is seeking a successor to Jim Clements, who left Morgantown for Clemson University.
The board set a goal of the fall 2014 semester to have a new president in place.
WVU Interim President Shares Priorities
E. Gordon Gee started his lengthy career as a university president in 1981, at the age of 36. Now more than 30 years later, he’s going to end his career as a president at the same school where it all began.
Gee is the interim president at WVU. He will succeed James Clements, who is leaving the university in a few weeks to take on the presidency at the University of Clemson.
Gee says his top priority is to keep the university moving forward.
“I want to understand what the problems are, every institution has problems,” Gee said.
“I think it’s very important for the people of this state to know that the president cares about who they are. There are 55 counties. I’m not sure if I can make it to all 55, but I want to try to be as present as I can.”
Gee met with the press and was asked how he will want to be remembered when he leaves WVU a second time.
“He came, he cared, and that he made a difference,” Gee replied.
Gee’s salary will be $450,000 annually. WVU wants to hire a new full-time president next June.
How To: Portable Iron Pour with 'Sputnik' the Iron Furnace
“Anybody who wants to carve a mold, we have some right here,” WVU sculpture area coordinator Dylan Collins said to a crowd who gathered. “It’s going to be just like a cooking show! You see your ingredients there, art will get made here. So don’t be shy! And, Welcome! Let me know what you need!”
Credit Justin Steiner
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It was a cool day—downright cold in the shade when the wind blew, but the iron furnace, pet-named Sputnik, fired up pretty quickly and was soon melting iron. The event lasted well into the darker hours, with pour teams pouring some 1,500 lbs of iron.
“This kind of started with myself and my friend Jeremy Entwistle, the sculpture program coordinator at Fairmont State University,” Collins explains. “We’ve been working collaboratively for the last year, going to cast iron conferences, getting our students together to work collaboratively together casting in iron, and we thought it would be a great idea to make a furnace where we could get a lot of metal out.”
Entwistle already has a furnace at Fairmont State but it doesn’t have as much capacity as Sputnik. So the idea was to create a larger furnace that would also be portable and go on the road for various iron casting events in the region.
They set to work, and the beauty of getting sculptors to build, well … anything, is that they consider beauty while designing. And Sputnik is certainly a fun thing to look at!
**video courtesy of WVU alumna, Emily Walley
“It looks like a machine that has landed from another planet,” Collins said. Thus the spacecraft-based nickname.
Graduate sculpture student Megan Gainer said many sand molds were in the works for weeks leading up to the iron pour. She said invitations to collaborate were also sent out to other schools and community members.
“And we’ve invited a couple other universities, I believe there’s Shepherdstown, Fairmont, and even Virginia Tech here,” Gainer said, “as well as a couple other people from the community, and later today there will be a couple people from the Tamarak Foundation coming to see what we’re doing.”
Local businesses, including Construction Supply Company (CSC), 3 Rivers Iron and Metal, and Jack’s Recycling, contributed to the WVU Iron Pour event by donating materials and supplies.
The Iron Pouring Process:
- Heat furnace with coke to get it up to temperature. (Coke is coal that has been cooked in an anaerobic environment.)
- Once up to temperature, begin filling it with charges. (Charges are buckets of premeasured broken up iron, and more coke.)
- Repeat. Continue to feed the furnace and the well inside starts to build up molten metal.
- Tap out the little bot that keeps the metal held back, and let ‘er flow down a trough into ladles (high temperature cups)
- Pour teams distribute hot metal into premade resin-bonded sand molds.
Collins says the sand molds are the handiwork of students, faculty, alumni, and members of the public. He says and that the object of the day is not only to make art, but also to celebrate history.
“We’ve kind of merged the past and the present,” Collins said. “We’re bringing together these two different eras and helping people engage with this really rich industrial history which is a real mark of the culture here.”
Collins hopes to be able to take Sputnik around the region, celebrating history and art, beginning with a trip to Fairmont State in the near future.
Festival of Ideas lecture to focus on WVU’s struggle to self govern
As part of Mountaineer Week at West Virginia University, WVU’s Festival of Ideas lecture series will host the author of a new book about WVU’s history over the last six decades.
Ronald Lewis is Professor Emeritus of history at WVU and the author of the new book, “Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II.” In the book, Lewis focuses on three significant factors that influenced the university and others like it across the nation:
- Growth
- Diversification
- Commercialization
“These are actually transformative periods of higher education,” said Lewis. “Where after them, higher education is no longer the same than the period before.”
In his book, Lewis explains that federal programs after World War II, such as the GI Bill, allowed millions of people to attend college and led to WVU’s expansion.
The expansion forced WVU and other schools across the nation to expand facilities, create programs and hire more faculty. But Lewis says the usual pipeline of middle class white males who went to college dried up in the 1960’s and diversification of WVU’s student body came into play.
“I mean the United States was transformed by the civil rights movement,” Lewis said. “…the university has changed but I think it is because the country has changed profoundly.”
This expansion and diversification happened so dramatically that it revolutionized WVU’s infrastructure and ideology. Lewis also explains how one trend led to another, and that’s where we come to his third theme: commercialization. As public funding for public institutions, including WVU, has decreased in recent years, universities are looking at other sources for revenue, including grants, tuition and fundraising. Lewis also says this time period has universities thinking more like a business.
“It’s not really a business even though it kind of has to run like one. We don’t manufacture things, we generate knowledge and technology through research so that’s why we have to find a way for it to work for us,” said Lewis.
But according to Lewis, there is a fourth influential factor to WVU’s aspirations to be a great university. The struggle for self-governance is the focus of Lewis’s Festival of Ideas lecture Tuesday, Nov. 5.
“Self-governance is recognized by most higher education experts as one of the key ingredients in becoming a great university, that distinguishes a great university,” Lewis said.
According to Lewis, WVU struggled to govern itself in the 1970’s when the Board of Regents in Charleston controlled some of the university’s operations. Lewis will discuss more past and present-day issues that impact WVU’s quest to be among the great universities in the country at the Festival of Ideas lecture in the Mountainlair Ballrooms at 7:30 p.m.
Diane Jeanty is a Journalism Student at West Virginia University.