Forty years ago this month, I moved to Morgantown to attend West Virginia University. It was one of the most exhilarating and terrifying experiences of my life.
This was my first time living away from home, and while I was looking forward to being out from under my parents’ wings, I was not prepared for the feelings of isolation.
That’s right, isolation. There were probably 24,000 students at WVU that fall of 1974 and I knew maybe a half dozen of them. I recall walking through the downtown campus, watching all these fellow students renew acquaintances and I didn’t know anybody.
Additionally, I was living in a house in Star City with a couple of guys, so there was no built in social structure that accompanies residence hall life.
There were all these people, yet it seemed difficult to form the kind of friendships I had left behind in Charles Town. Once, while whining to my mother on the phone, she told me that it was okay to give up on WVU and come home. That actually helped me begin to turn the corner. I could go home, but why not give it a little more time and see what happens?
After awhile, the University opened up to me, and I began to experience the opportunities that accompany the institution. WVU was its own community and I was one of its citizens. My education, entertainment, social life, practical training, successes and failures, all took place on campus.
The Daily Athenaeum student newspaper was a place to practice reporting and meet other students with similar interests. Another aspiring young reporter, Sam Bruner, became my roommate for the next two years.
Sam was a streetwise Jewish kid from Philly, while I was hayseed Christian from rural West Virginia. An odd couple for sure, but we became good friends and remain in touch four decades later.
Like many university students, I lived it up, but I also began the process of figuring out how to live. Life on your own means taking responsibility. Hard work produces rewards. Lasting friendships can be found in unlikely places. You learn more from the challenge than the outcome.
I’m not on campus much anymore, even though I live and work in Morgantown, but I remain connected to West Virginia University. I can’t tell you much about 1983 to ’86 or 1995 to ’98, but 1974 to 1977 (I spent my freshman year at Shepherd College) are imprinted on my mind and my heart.
The University changes constantly; administrators and faculty come and go, the sports teams have good seasons and bad, new buildings are erected and old ones are torn down. Yet the University also remains unchanged; it is, as Benjamin Disraeli described the mission of a university, “a place of light, of liberty and of learning.”
One reason I love this time of year is the renewal that accompanies the fall semester at WVU. Yes, I’ll grouse about the traffic, the parking, the crowds, but I need to remember who I was 40 years ago and what the University has meant to me and tens of thousands of alumni.
So, WVU freshman, welcome to Morgantown. If you get homesick, hang in there. Soon you will be riding the wave of this great institution and it will take you to new heights.