Looking Back
In this special issue we are looking back into WVU's history as a way to help see who we are today, and where we might go tomorrow. In the pages of this magazine you will encounter a number of different WVUs from past eras and be reminded of the people who shaped and lived in them, who helped shape the WVU that exists today.
Many institutions are doing this kind of thing now that the new year 2000 is upon us, and a strange configuration of numerals reminds us we are leaving behind not just a year, a decade, or a century of history, but an entire millennium. It is the great paradox of our age: a calendar page turns and nothing has changed, yet everything has changed.
The advent of a new millennium is much the same for individuals as for institutions; we all feel the relentless passage of time and are moved to self-reflection. But there is a singular difference: although the lives of institutions such as WVU span many years, many centuries, each human life is finite and relatively short. We are alive for a period of time, experiencing all that the world has to offer, and then we are gone. While resurrection or reincarnation offers the promise of a new life after death, there is no reinvention of one's present corporeal existence.
In other words, we have one chance to get it right.
Precisely because we recognize our temporary status, human beings spend much time reflecting on our personal, often private pasts as a way to get a bearing on the present and, possibly, a heading into the future. This act is fraught with pain and also with joy. We ache with nostalgic remembrances of pleasant times in our lives—childhood discoveries, wedding days, the births of our children—and we ponder the important goals and relationships left unmet, unexplored, abandoned. The question we all ask, and that we never will be able to answer: What if?
The day before I wrote this essay, someone I have known for a couple of years asked me how things were going, if I was happy in my work. Work being the main focus of my existence, what with the need to have food and shelter and all, I recognized that the question actually being posed was: Are you happy in your life? Which leads me back to the eternal human dilemma:
What if? What if I had stayed in my hometown down South, married some girl from high school, and worked in a store or a factory or somewhere for the past 20-some years instead of going to college and becoming a professional? What if I had stayed on the executive track at the college in upstate New York ten years ago instead of leaving to pursue other interests? All of us can pose similar questions of ourselves, with no hope of ever answering them.
Time will tell if we have made good decisions in our lives. All I can do, all any of us can do, is try to get it right.
—T.S.C.
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