On Friday, June 14, Western Carolina University’s Board of Trustees approved Chris Williams’ selection as its chief information officer. Williams, who comes to WCU after spending the last nine years as the IT director for Student Affairs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will begin his new position Monday, June 24. 

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to cut it up and use it for heat or timber, is it a waste of resources? Or, put another way, are humans the only reason that all other life on Earth was created?

The Catamount School, a laboratory school operating on the campus of Smoky Mountain High School, will relocate to the campus of Western Carolina University next school year after Jackson County Public Schools approved a relocation plan due to the need for more space at Smoky Mountain High School. 

The Western Carolina University School of Nursing in Cullowhee is the recipient of a $2 million contribution from the Bedford Falls Foundation-DAF (“Bedford Falls”) that will provide scholarship support to undergraduate nursing students and enable the hiring of additional faculty to guide them in their clinical experiences. 

Two projects will come to fruition this month that honor the lives of those who were victims of incarcerated labor in Western North Carolina during the Jim Crow era — a highway marker in Dillsboro, and an exhibit at the Mountain Heritage Center in Cullowhee.

For four decades, Western Carolina University has participated in a daylong effort of cleaning up a portion of Jackson County’s Tuckasegee River. 

An intoxicated Jackson County man who drove at a high rate of speed and careened into two other cars, killing the second vehicle’s driver and seriously injuring a passenger, will serve more than 14 years in prison, District Attorney Ashley Hornsby Welch said. 

Diversity within the Western Carolina University workforce has been inching up, with the latest report showing that the last year’s worth of staffing changes held steady the proportion of racial and ethnic minorities on the university’s payroll while strengthening the existing majority of female WCU employees and resulting in a sharp increase in the percentage of employees with a disability. 

A special stage production of “Fantasia on Mysterium: The Epic Immersive Theatrical Recital” will be held at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 25-27 at the Bardo Arts Center on the campus of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. 

Cullowhee-based Landmark Learning is now enrolling for a variety of wilderness medicine certification courses planned for the winter months.