By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern

Teresa Williams’ eight years on Western Carolina University’s Board of Trustees has come to a close, and at her final meeting, board members thanked her for her contributions to the university.

A pair of Western Carolina University fraternity brothers are facing assault charges after student Zach Denson left an off-campus party this spring with a broken nose, concussion and spinal injury.

By Katie Reeder • SMN Intern 

Some opponents of North Carolina’s new voting law claim it negatively impacts college students because of provisions that cut the early voting period and do not allow students to use their campus photo identification cards as a valid form of identification to vote. Students at Western Carolina University were asked their thoughts on the new law.

Of all the constructions on Western Carolina University’s campus, the distinctly non-glamorous Natural Sciences Building might have seemed like an odd place to host a visit from Gov. Pat McCrory. In the classroom where McCrory sat with a panel of university representatives and state administrators, a tile hung loosely from the ceiling and the hum of the HVAC system reverberated through the concrete walls, which weren’t quite expansive enough to comfortably contain the assembly of officials and media representatives gathered there.

Scientific work by professors and students at Western Carolina University is earning recognition and winning research money. The Cullowhee campus, already recognized for its outdoor opportunities, is making an impact on several environmental fronts. Here are three recent examples of that work.

The Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity will be absent from Western Carolina University’s roster of Greek life opportunities until 2020, following a February incident in which a PKA pledge claimed to be waterboarded by his fraternity brothers.

Tourism is a huge topic with a major impact on Western North Carolina’s economy.

Western Carolina University will host the second annual Tourism Conference next week to focus on one major aspect of the tourism industry — festivals and events.

It was a century ago that Beverly Kiohawiton Cook’s relative was taken from his family and shipped off to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Those years at school, days of travel away from family and forbidden to use native dress and speech, were traumatic.

A writer looking at a blank page is a like a painter staring at a fresh canvas, a sculptor facing a block of clay or a woodworker holding a chunk of wood. The desire to grab words from thin air and construct them into sentences, notions and ideas comes from an internal fire to describe human emotion and situation. It is a calling, one that picks its creators when the time and place is prime. Writers are messengers, connecting the unknown cosmos to an everyday modern reality.

Western Carolina University has held steady on its rate of tenured and tenure-track professors over the last decade, keeping numbers of permanent faculty that far outstrip the national average.