Cover story
The Week Porter Stopped Being the Millwrights — In June, a Facilities crew surveying Founders Hall ahead of next summer’s renovation found two plywood ballot boxes in a storage room off the high bay, still holding the tally sheets from March 1994. Senior writer Joel Hagberg tracked down the student body president, the editor of the campus paper, the athletics director, the student inside the Millwright costume, and a mechanical engineering sophomore named Elaine Vandehey to piece together how Porter came to be named after a kind of ship it has never built.
In this issue
| Page | Story | By |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | From the Chancellor | Dr. Elaine Vandehey |
| 6 | Letters | Readers |
| 9 | Campus Notes | Staff |
| 18 | The Week Porter Stopped Being the Millwrights | Joel Hagberg |
| 28 | Thirty-Eight Years in the High Bay | Marcus Bye |
| 36 | The Keys to Everything | Rachel Thorsgaard ’09 |
| 42 | Three Diplomas, One Dining Room Wall | Nadia Rahimi |
| 48 | Ironclads | Staff |
| 51 | Class Notes | Edited by Marcus Bye |
| 62 | In Memoriam |
From the Chancellor
An excerpt from Dr. Elaine Vandehey’s letter. The full text is on page 4 of the print edition.
“I was a sophomore in March 1994, and I remember the vote mostly because I cast my ballot on the way out of a Statics exam I was fairly sure I had failed. (I had not. Barely.) What I did not appreciate at nineteen was that the students running that election were doing something the university still asks of every student: taking a real problem, testing a few solutions in public, and living with the result.
This fall we enrolled 8,412 students, the most in nine years, and every one of them will finish an internship, co-op or clinical before they graduate. That requirement is the Millwright part of us, and it is not going anywhere. The Ironclad part of us is the willingness to change the name on the jersey when the old one stops making sense. We need both. Come home for Millrace Week, walk the Riverfront Trail, and tell a student what you voted for in 1994. I still will not tell you what I voted for.”
— Dr. Elaine Vandehey ’96, Chancellor
More from the chancellor’s office is on the Office of the Chancellor page.
Campus Notes
- A nine-year high. Fall enrollment reached 8,412, up 6.1 percent, led by Nursing’s largest class ever (118) and a second straight record in Cybersecurity. The full story.
- Founders Hall, one wing at a time. The $15 million renovation of the 1912 building starts next summer and runs three summers so no fall or spring classes are displaced. The original machine-shop floor stays. Details.
- A second nursing cohort. Beginning in spring 2027, Nursing will admit a second, smaller cohort of 40 each spring, sized to what clinical partners can absorb. More.
- Five hundred and counting. The First-Generation Student Center, open since 2021, has now enrolled 500 students in its mentoring program. About 28 percent of each entering class is first-generation. About the center.
- Eleven teams in the Hub. The fall cohort of the Student Venture Incubator moved into the Forge Innovation Hub, Founders Hall 140–150, in September: eleven teams, including a nursing-student scheduling tool for rural clinics and a dairy-equipment sensor built by two junior mechanical engineers.
- A new packaging lab. A regional manufacturer donated $380,000 in compression, drop, vibration and climate-testing equipment to Packaging Technology. Read more.
Ironclads
- Volleyball, ranked. The Ironclads opened the season No. 4 in the conference preseason poll, the program’s first preseason ranking, with four starters back from a 22–9 team. Story.
- Last lap in the old conference. 2026–27 is the final season before the move to a nearer conference in 2027–28, which cuts the median road trip from about 240 miles to about 130. Story.
- The Forge Bowl. The annual game against Chippewa Valley State routinely draws more than 4,000 fans. Tickets and history on the Forge Bowl page.
- The 1994 men’s basketball team, Porter’s only Sweet Sixteen squad, played its second-round game the same weekend as the name vote. That is not a coincidence, according to this issue’s cover story. Hall of Fame citation.
Class Notes and In Memoriam
This issue carries 31 class notes, from a 1961 Industrial Arts graduate who still restores tractors in Little Cedar to a 2026 manufacturing engineering graduate who still keeps his First Forge disc on his desk. In Memoriam remembers seven members of the Porter community, including Arne Kjos, who taught in the Founders Hall machine shop from 1952 to 1988. Read them on the Class Notes page, and send your own by January 15 for the spring issue.
A request from Facilities. Key No. 214 on Duane Kolsrud’s ring is stamped “WPI 41” and opens nothing anyone can find. If you know what it opens, read the story and write to us.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. This issue of Porter Falls Magazine, its table of contents, its chancellor’s letter and its campus notes are invented; there is no print edition, no mailing date and no page 4.