After the Switch: Montgomery, Beckley, and WVU Tech

Two communities, one college, higher education, and the after effects of a real life trolley problem

The railroad tracks splitting down the center of Montgomery have traditionally divided the former boom town into the “school side” of the city and the “business side.” Courtesy photo/Antony-22 via Wikimedia Commons

In his early days as president of the West Virginia University Institute of Technology, Dr. T. Ramon Stuart has been using the term “communiversity.” What a great term for an important concept: Integrating his charged place of higher learning with the community. Not just the city of Beckley, in which Tech has now been nestled for over 5 years, but the larger southern West Virginia area.

A Welch native and WVU grad, Dr. Stuart no doubt has seen the stats on the 861 colleges that have closed down in the last 20 years, and knows personally the good parts and multiple challenges of the area Tech inhabits and serves. Tech aligning itself as not only a place to try and recruit students to come into the area but also pipeline graduates back into the area long term is sound, wise strategy for the school and the community.

Great term, “communiversity.” But also a term, through no fault of the recently arrived Dr. Stuart, that carries the recent, bitter history of how WVU Tech got to Beckley in the first place and the community it left behind.

The academic exercise is called the trolley problem. There is a trolley on tracks approaching a switch, with one person tied up on the side spur and five people tied up on the current track, so what does the person at the switch do? Throw the switch and kill the one to save the five in the Utilitarian version. Do nothing and let five die under the theory that actively killing the one is knowingly wrong and the five are SOL in the Deontological argument. Academics do love their big words for something as ethically sticky as deciding who dies and who doesn’t. The criticism is that, while a useful academic exercise, the trolley problem is a no-win scenario that is not realistic.

But it was very real to WVU Tech’s former home in Montgomery, West Virginia, a city with steel rails running right through its heart, on which steel wheels of train cars rumbled by with decreasing regularity since the first school that would evolve into Tech opened there in 1895. The rails and parallel 2nd Avenue divided the “school side” nestled into the hill from the…