Biography|John Chambers — The Alumni Center Where WVU Put His Name on the Business College

The degrees came from Morgantown in 1971 and 1974.

The name on the college came back in 2018.

On 9 November 2018, West Virginia University announced that its College of Business and Economics would be renamed the John Chambers College of Business and Economics.

The announcement ran at the Erickson Alumni Center, 1 Alumni Drive, on the Evansdale campus. WVU Today dated the gift and the renaming to that Friday. The Dominion Post photographed Chambers on the stage with President Gordon Gee the same evening.

The college itself is older than the name. The state board created the College of Commerce on 10 November 1951. It became the College of Business and Economics in 1971, the year Chambers took his undergraduate business degrees.

The 2018 agreement was framed as time, talent, and treasure for a campus start-up engine later called Vantage Ventures, plus an AI management center. The university did not publish a single headline dollar figure in the renaming release.

Reynolds Hall, the present teaching home of the Chambers College at 83 Beechurst Avenue, opened on 26 August 2022. That building is a later pin. This one is the room where the name was spoken.

The Erickson opened in October 2008 as the alumni association's house. A visitor can walk in during posted weekday hours. It is a public campus building, not a private office.

Chambers by then had left Cisco's executive chair. He was running JC2 Ventures and lending the university a West Virginia-born network that the 1971 catalog could not have predicted.

Photo: Jérémy Barande / École polytechnique, John Chambers, 18 October 2016, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons