Welcome back, Mountaineers!

I had a student the other day ask me how much her degree in Biology from WVU was going to be valued in the workplace, due to the school's reputation as a beer-soaked cesspool of academic mediocrity (her words).

I told her that many departments at West Virginia University are solid and carry good academic credentials, and the mere fact that many students who should have never left home come there to sow their oats (trashing Morgantown in the process, but local authorities don't mind as long as the students buy enough beer and condoms for the merchant base to thrive) only affects perceptions, not reality...and there are those who see beyond that.

She seemed content with that answer. I know many people who did get degrees at WVU and were not hampered by it. Yes, when a stranger sees you have WVU on your resume, at least until lately, there were only a handful of references they could think of: burning sofas, drunken partying, Jerry West and Kevin Pittsnogle.

It is difficult with the sensational and sports-dominated media to get attention for a good English Department, but this is just reality for many, many schools. Quick, tell me something about Oregon State or Texas Tech or Radford College aside from if they have a good team in some sport or the other, or have recently had a sensationalized story in the media about partying, vandalism or rape?

Media is all about what sells papers, not what bolsters excellence. Who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year? Okay, who won the SuperBowl? What actor recently got arrested for DUI? And we wonder why we live in a graceless age.

Accept the fact that there are some fantastic students, some good people, sitting out there, getting ready to take on the world. The people who bust their asses in the classroom, who don't get arrested, who don't burn furniture to celebrate a sports victory that says nothing about their excellence or quality as a person, they aren't newsworthy.

But they're the ones who will be healing your children, building your cities, inventing great things and making our lives easier, better and more productive when the party animals are burned out bystanders living in a trailer, complaining about how life gave them short shrift.

The real Mountaineers of old blazed trails, opened up the West for the masses, explored wilderness and protected settlers from harm. And the real Mountaineers of today aren't found in a bar, playing beer pong and watching a football game. They're blazing trails in the classroom, opening their minds to receive knowledge to impart to a new generation of open minds, exploring truths most of us don't know and can't understand, and protecting us from the ravages of our own destructive tendencies against our bodies, our culture and our environment.

Let's goooooooooooooo, Mountaineers.