EDITOR’S NOTE: LTTEs regarding WVU Academic Transformation
From now until Aug. 31, we will open letters to the editor to WVU alumni and current and former staff and faculty, including those who live out of state, for any who would like to comment on WVU’s Academic Transformation. EMAIL submissions to opinion@dominionpost.com. MAIL submissions to: The Dominion Post, 1251 Earl L. Core Road, Morgantown, WV 26505. INCLUDE your name, hometown and phone number for confirmation. Letters should not exceed 300 words. Out-of-state alumni should include their graduation year and degree. Staff/faculty should include their position and years of service.
Cutting landscape will hurt local industry
As a graduates of the WVU Landscape Architecture and Agriculture programs, we are writing because West Virginia University is in the news for all of the wrong reasons.
We — along with our colleagues in the nursery and landscape industry — encourage WVU leaders to wisely consider any program and staffing cutbacks that could hurt students, faculty and the state’s progress.
The money saved by eliminating the B.S. and M.A. degrees in Landscape Architecture and reducing staff in Soil and Plant Sciences from 21 to 10 people would hurt an industry that is growing throughout the Mountain State.
It won’t only affect the WVU Landscape Architecture faculty and students — the damage is much broader. The LA program, faculty and students provide countless hours of outreach work to many communities in the state of West Virginia.
For these communities to pay the expense for design development, consulting on management of extraction sites and re-establishing the environment around such sites would be cost prohibitive without the help of the LA program.
This is also sending the wrong message to in-state industry partners who will incur decreases in efficiency and increases in costs by not being able to hire WVU LA graduates.
The alumni of the program are very much against this, as they understand the impact this will have locally and nationally.
By letter, the West Virginia Nursery & Landscape Association (WVNLA) registered its “strong disapproval” with WVU leadership, and we hope the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in Landscape Architecture and staff reductions in Plant and Soil Sciences will be revisited.
WVNLA has been and will continue to be a partner with WVU in scholarships and industry collaboration.
Michael R. Biafore
B.S. in Landscape Architecture (1988)
Patrick B. Biafore
B.S. in Agriculture (1992)
Morgantown
‘First they came for the languages programs …’
It is important to remember that the budget cuts at WVU are part of budget cuts to every higher education program and many state agencies in West Virginia.
The funding of programs that expand the world or question assumptions has long been in decline in West Virginia as they are viewed as useless or suspicious by the West Virginia Legislature. This is the core part of the current budget crisis.
No one should think that their program or ambition, however innocuous it appears, will escape. Paraphrasing Pastor Martin Niemoller, “First they came for the language programs and I said nothing, because I was not part of the language program.”
Ultimately, without current protest, future steps will include monitoring textbooks and syllabi in all history programs and the biological sciences.
And there will be no one left to defend any program that offers an enlarged view of the world and ideas — because the students interested in the world will have left West Virginia and joined it.
Marie Tyler-McGraw
B.S. Education (1960)
M.A. History (1964)
Shepherdstown
LA program changed a single mom’s life
I am shocked that WVU administrators have decided to discontinue both the bachelor’s and master’s programs in Landscape Architecture (LA) and Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources (RPTR). Please reconsider! Our state needs these programs of study.
Here’s some of my story, and why WVU is so integral in my positive life-changing experience:
I came to Morgantown in 1982 to go to college at WVU. I was a 27-year-old single mom on welfare. However, I excelled and got my B.S. in landscape architecture in 1987 and M.S. in recreation, parks and tourism resources in 1993.
My 22-year career out of college was with the National Park Service (NPS), and I retired in 2017. I was an outdoor recreation planner for the Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Program (NPS-RTCA). My office was at WVU in the RPTR office suite, via cooperative agreements between NPS and WVU.
In those 22 years, I worked on 76 community-based projects in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. These included rail-trail planning, watershed planning and planning for all types of trails, including water trails.
These diverse projects required me to assist local groups with organizational development, public involvement, fundraising and grant-writing, public relations, marketing and promotion, and vision and concept plans.
While I was an undergrad, I also served on numerous boards of directors, usually as an officer. These include Mountain Peoples Market, Coopers Rock Foundation and North Bend Rails-to-Trails Foundation. I also served as president or vice president on founding boards of Monongahela River Trails Conservancy, Dunkard Creek Watershed Association and Core Community Center.
I gave back to my community.
Additionally, in the 1990s, my husband got his art degree at WVU, then was hired to run the sculpture studios as academic lab manager. His positive impact on the students was immense.
Please do everything possible to keep the LA, RPTR and creative arts programs, active and alive.
Margaret “Peggy” Pings
Morgantown
