PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — The new president of WVU Parkersburg says stepping into a permanent leadership role is a full circle moment for her as a graduate of the university.
Dr. Torie Jackson had served as interim president from July 2022 until she was named the permanent president in May.
Jackson received her associate and bachelor’s degrees in journalism at WVU Parkersburg before earning her doctoral degree in higher education administration and a master’s degree in organizational communication from West Virginia University.
She started out as a newspaper reporter for the News and Sentinel at the age of 18.
“I walked into the editor’s office and asked if I could be considered for employment. My first job was writing obituaries,” Jackson recalled.
Higher education was always the end goal, she said. Jackson has served WVU Parkersburg in a variety of leadership roles since 2004. She was the Chief Operating Officer, Executive Vice President for Institutional Advancement, President and CEO of the WVU at Parkersburg Foundation, and as an Associate Professor of Communication.
During her time as an associate professor, she helped lead WVU Parkersburg to offer four year degrees for communications students.
“At that point in time, it was still a two year degree, so we were able to create a whole new curriculum that made it a four year communication/media studies degree based on a lot of courses we already had, just packaging them differently and giving students an opportunity for that baccalaureate degree in the Mid-Ohio Valley,” she said.
Job security has been a big focus throughout Jackson’s career. She told MetroNews her father lost his job after a plant he worked at closed due to a strike. He also didn’t have his high school diploma.
“Because I knew what my family had gone through at that point in time, I wanted to make sure that I had an education that allows me to have more job possibilities,” she said.
Under Jackson’s leadership, the marketing division at WVU Parkersburg has won 23 national marketing awards in the past three years, the most of any college or university in West Virginia. Jackson said they were able to accomplish that by listening to communication interns about how to better market themselves.
“We were able to give a lot of assessment with them about what would appeal to a younger generation and make some changes to the way we did marketing based on input from our own students,” she said.
WVU Parkersburg, along with WVU, Marshall University and several other institutions in the state, are dealing with low student enrollment. Jackson said one of her top priorities will be on recruitment and retention.
“We need to make sure that we have degrees that meet the workforce needs, especially the community and technical colleges and that we’re able to bring students here to this location to train them to then go out and work a job in the Mid-Ohio Valley and beyond,” she said.
Before being named as permanent president, Jackson became interim president following the departure of Chris Gilmer, who left in July 2022 to become president of Potomac State College.