When the VCU men’s basketball team reached the Final Four in 2011, all of Richmond united to cheer on the team. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
A new history of Virginia Commonwealth University, “Fulfilling the Promise,” co-authored by a legendary former president, Eugene P. Trani, charts (from 1968-2009) not only the ebb and flow of VCU but also the city of Richmond, whose paths have been inextricably intertwined through good times and bad.
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, a former Richmond mayor, cites VCU’s progress in a foreword to the book as one of three trends that have led to what he called “a powerful transformation in Richmond during the last decades.”
Kaine moved to Richmond in 1984 and in a few paragraphs lays out the differences between the city then and the city now. “We used to make top 10 lists only for tragedies like our homicide and violent crime rates. Now, Richmond is celebrated often for its achievements, quality of life, natural beauty and cultural vibe,” Kaine says.
John Kneebone, emeritus associate professor of history at VCU and co-author of the university history with Trani, says VCU is also part of the story of the rise and fall of urban universities and the rise and fall of American cities.
VCU formed in 1968 with the merger of the Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia. “And almost right away cities started falling apart, people moving to the suburbs, terrible political conflict,” Kneebone says. “For a while, it looked like neither urban universities or cities were going to make it.”
From the beginning, the state mandated VCU to be an urban public university, a far different animal from the rural academies that peppered most of the state.
“Leaders of higher education and the general public both long believed that schools in rural locations with bucolic residential campuses better served the character building they perceived as the center of normal college life,” Kneebone writes in an introduction to the history.
VCU was a departure from the norm — and by the standards of some Richmonders — a radical departure. It was a melting pot for different races and points of view, and Black students, who had been sidelined in most predominantly white state universities, almost immediately pressed for equal rights and representation.
Shifts were occurring in the city as well, Kneebone and Trani write. In the mid-70s, a Black majority was elected to Richmond City Council, releasing the iron grip that white interests had held after years of suppressing Black voters.
Image courtesy University of Virginia Press
Richmond Professional Institute had long been known as an outpost of counterculture in Richmond, and its merger with MCV, a traditionalist institution with a better reputation, did nothing to change that.
“Both reality and image widened the separation in the eyes of the public between VCU, the hippie school at the Academic Campus, and MCV, the white-jacketed medical school,” the authors say.
Kneebone and Trani look at VCU through the tenure of its first four presidents, each of whom — including Trani — slid into controversy or had it thrust upon them before they left office.
If there has been one steadying influence at VCU through the first 40 years “Fulfilling the Promise” examines, it has been the importance of basketball. When the VCU’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four in 2011, all of Richmond turned out for the team.
And Trani, who had retired by then, says it also helped mend lingering discontent about the VCU-MCV merger on the MCV side of campus, as medical campus physicians began wearing VCU T-shirts under their surgical gowns to show their support.
To date, Trani has been the longest-serving VCU president, nearly two decades beginning in 1990 and ending in 2009. He currently is president emeritus and a university distinguished professor. His most recent classroom assignment has been serving as a teacher in the university’s Honors College.
When Trani came aboard as president in 1990, a master plan called for VCU’s expansion into Oregon Hill.
He quickly scrapped that plan and began a long and fruitful effort to go north toward nearby Broad Street, which at the beginning of his tenure was, as Kneebone describes it in a recent interview, “run down with beat-up garages and porno shops.”
Dr. Eugene P. Trani served as VCU’s president from 1990-2009. (Photo courtesy Eugene Trani)
Trani became a powerful college president whose reach extended into the highest ranks of Richmond’s business life, at one time holding the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce and at another time the presidency of Richmond Renaissance (now Venture Richmond), a private-public partnership focused on downtown economic development.
In an interview, Trani says the creation of the engineering school, the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park and the development of life sciences at VCU, along with the establishment of a health system authority that largely freed the medical campus from state control and enabled it to shape its own destiny, have been huge engines for VCU’s development.
“I believe the creation of the health system authority was the thing that saved our medical center and its clinical operations and also helped save downtown Richmond, so we could remain a vibrant university with two campuses,” Trani says.
VCU’s development largely filled in gaps left when Richmond’s commercial core collapsed with the closing of the city’s two largest department stores, Miller & Rhoads (1885-1990) and Thalhimers (1842-1992), and the failure of an early effort at urban renewal, the 6th Street Marketplace (1985-2003).
During Trani’s presidency, VCU grew from 21,000 students to more than 31,000, becoming for a time the largest college in Virginia, with a university investment of more with $2.1 billion in Richmond during his tenure.
Today, VCU has continued its expansion in the city of Richmond.
One of the upcoming projects will be a $124 million facility dedicated to science, technology, engineering and math on the site of the old Franklin Street Gym. It is scheduled for completion in 2022. A $100.6 million engineering research building is also under construction at Belvidere and Cary streets. On the medical campus, VCU is building a 500,000-square-foot inpatient tower, set to open in early 2023, at its Children’s Hospital of Richmond.
All of that will likely be detailed someday in yet another history of VCU.
