WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS - Why is the West Virginia University Institute of Technology leaving Montgomery after 120 years?
It all comes down to a willingness to say "no," WVU President Gordon Gee said on Friday.
"The most important word is no," Gee told members of the state Chamber of Commerce gathered at The Greenbrier resort. "We're going to close a campus, not a school, but a campus in Montgomery. That was hard. In order to do that we had to say no, no we cannot be incremental."
WVU Tech would require $45 million in aid to stay in Montgomery, school officials have said, and the campus has more than twice that much in deferred maintenance costs. It will move to the Beckley campus of the former Mountain State University, which WVU bought for $8 million late last year.
"No is a powerful word," Gee said. "At the University if someone gave me $50 million to build a school of massage I'd say no."
In a joke-filled 30-minute speech, Gee said West Virginia needs to do a better job of encouraging risk taking and new ideas. The former president of Ohio State University, Gee noted in passing that he thinks Ohio Gov. John Kasich would be a good president.
He said WVU needs to be the "Goldilocks" of universities, just the right size.
At 33,000 students, WVU is big enough to be a major research institution, but still small enough that people can find each other, Gee said.
When he ran 65,000-student Ohio State, Gee said he felt like the mayor of a city. (WVU's much smaller enrollment would still make it the third largest city in West Virginia.)
But when Gee ran 8,000-student Brown University, he "felt like an antelope in a telephone booth" and said it was too small to make any changes.
Gee talked about WVU as a hub of big ideas that can be a driving force for the state.
"We have to create ideas in order to create jobs and create opportunity," Gee said. "Big ideas and big changes start at home."
He said West Virginia needs to be willing to work with its neighboring states - "the boundaries of our state must not be the boundaries of our mind," he said -- but also has to move beyond regional interests and boundaries within the state.
He cited Nashville, Tennessee, which, more than 50 years ago, consolidated its city and county government into one regional government.
"These are the kinds of things we have to think about," Gee said, "consolidating government structures for K-12 and for higher education and for state and local government."
Gee talked about plans for WVU students to do 1 million hours of service to the state. He talked about plans for the university to help in redeveloping Weirton and the West Side of Charleston, areas plagued with job losses and low incomes.
He said the recent fire in Harpers Ferry has left citizens there with "no idea how to rebuild that city.
"We said, 'we're going to come and do it,'" Gee said. "We can make a diference as an institution."
Gee said that West Virginia's universities (particularly WVU and Marshall) are neither big nor powerful enough to be competing with each other and need to drop that idea.
"Our biggest idea," Gee said, "is learning the importance of questioning how things are done in West Virginia."
Reach David Gutman at david.gutman@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5119 or follow @davidlgutman on Twitter.