West Virginia University: The Mountaineers

West Virginia University was born out of a political compromise and a senator's real estate deal. When the state legislature voted in eighteen sixty-seven to establish a land-grant university under the terms of the Morrill Act, which Abraham Lincoln had signed five years earlier to fund agricultural and engineering education across the country, the town of Morgantown won the site largely because a state senator offered the buildings and grounds of the old Monongalia Academy as a donation. Classes began in September of eighteen sixty-seven with one hundred twenty-four students, though nearly all of them were at what we would call high school level today. The university's ambitions vastly exceeded its early resources.

For decades West Virginia University struggled with poor faculty pay, legislative indifference from southern lawmakers who felt Morgantown was too far north to serve most West Virginians, and the chronic difficulty of building a serious research university in an extraction-economy state. What changed the university's national profile was not an academic breakthrough but a basketball player. Jerry West, born in Cabin Creek, West Virginia, enrolled at W-V-U in nineteen fifty-seven and proceeded to rewrite the record book. He led the Mountaineers to the N-C-A-A championship game in nineteen fifty-nine, won the tournament's Most Outstanding Player award, and as of two thousand eleven held a dozen program records, including all-time leading scorer and rebounder. His jersey number was the first ever retired by the men's basketball program. His silhouette dribbling a basketball became the logo of the National Basketball Association, one of the most recognized symbols in American sports.

West Virginia University today enrolls roughly twenty-six thousand students and is the flagship institution of a state shaped for more than a century by coal, timber, and natural gas. It sits on a steep hillside above the Monongahela River, connected to its medical campus by the Personal Rapid Transit system, one of only a handful of such automated people-mover systems operating on any college campus in the world.