Historicizing Heritage

“West Virginia saw the largest out migration percentages of any state from 2010-2020. To compensate and correct for this trend, state leadership has invested heavily in tourism campaigns that present West Virginia as a kind of nature preserve, a site so grandly picturesque that coming here is almost like being in heaven.

The language is forward-looking, but conceptually it relies on the image of a mythical past, in which West Virginia is stuck in time and place as a perfectly preserved, more-than-Eden.

West Virginia University, meanwhile, relies on a similar understanding and preservation of West Virginia’s extra-Edenic past in order to make coherent its present identity and its future ambitions as an institution. Branding language is tethered to imagery that calls up a mythified past - the pioneering mountaineer, ruggedly blazing a path through uncultivated and unpeopled wilderness (Let’s Go!), leading the way through a no-man’s land (Mountaineer Go First!).

This is WVU having the past and eating it too. It carves a rustic frame around every innovation. It backs up every commitment to progress with some retrogressive claim, like for example that such commitment to first-going is 'in our blood' and 'in our nature.' This is typical of how the premodern past enters modern discourse, as a time to be rejected (for its vaguely understood ugliness or unsophistication) and yet embraced (for being the source of the pioneering spirit that is still somehow an institutional shorthand for how the world gets bettered). Going first is presented without apology or irony as heroic, rather than destructive, greedy, violent or reckless.”