Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or Virginia Tech for short, is a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, in the New River Valley of western Virginia near the Appalachian Mountains. Virginia Tech is known for its programs in agriculture, engineering, and veterinary medicine.
Virginia Tech was originally founded in 1851 as a Methodist academy called the Olin and Preston Institute. After the passage of the Morrill Act, the institution became a state-supported land grant military institute called the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1872; the modern school considers this to be its founding date. Under the 1891-1907 presidency of John M. McBryde, the school reorganized its academic programs into a traditional four-year college setup (including the renaming of the mechanics department to engineering); this led to an 1896 name change to Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The "Agricultural and Mechanical College" section of the name was popularly omitted almost immediately, though the name was not officially changed to Virginia Polytechnic Institute until 1944 as part of a short-lived merger with what is now Radford University. VPI achieved full accreditation in 1923, and the requirement of participation in the para-military Corps of Cadets was dropped from four years to two that same year (for men only; women, when they began enrolling in the 1920s, were never required to join).
President T. Marshall Hahn (1962-74) was responsible for many of the changes that shaped the modern institution of Virginia Tech. The merger with Radford was dissolved in 1964, and in 1966, the school dropped the two-year Corps requirement for male students (in 1973, women were allowed to join the Corps; Tech was the first school in the nation to open its military wing to women). One of Hahn's more controversial missions was only partially achieved; he had visions of renaming the school from VPI to Virginia State University, reflecting the status it had achieved as a full-fledged public research university. As part of this move, Tech would have taken over control of the state's other land-grant institution, a historically black college in Ettrick, Virginia south of Richmond then called Virginia State College; this failed, and that school eventually became Virginia State University. As a compromise, the school added "and State University" to its name in 1970, yielding the current formal name of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The new acronym of VPISU was derisively spoken as Vippy-sue by students and Hahn detractors. In the early 1990s, the school quietly authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to VPISU; most school documents today use the VT name and initials, though diplomas still spell out the formal name.
Bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs are offered through the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, the College of Architecture & Urban Studies, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, the Pamplin College of Business, the College of Engineering, the College of Natural Resources, the College of Science, and the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences offers the only two-year associate's degree program on campus, in agricultural technology.
The Virginia Tech campus is located within Blacksburg; the central campus is roughly bordered by Prices Fork Road to the northwest, Duck Pond Drive to the west, Main Street to the east, and Southgate Drive to the south, though it has several thousand acres beyond the central campus. The university also has several commonwealth branch campus centers: Hampton Roads (Virginia Beach), Northern Virginia (Falls Church), Richmond, Roanoke, and the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center in Abingdon.
The school's sports teams are called the Hokies; the school's mascot is the Hokie Bird. They participate in the NCAA's Division I (I-A for football) and in the Atlantic Coast Conference, which the school joined in 2004 after leaving the Big East Conference.
According to the school handbook, the word "Hokie" was coined by O.M. Stull, a member of the Class of 1896, as part of a spirit yell now known as the Old Hokie. The word has no specific meaning and was used as an attention getter. Around 1908, Tech students began referring to student athletes as "Gobblers" because of the way they "gobbled" their ample servings of food. In 1913, a local boy serving as a clown mascot had a large turkey pull him in a cart at football games. From then on, fans and sportswriters associated the gobbler with Tech's athletic teams, and for many years the school's official name for its sports teams was the Fighting Gobblers; though the term Hokies was widely used, the official designation was only changed in the mid-1980s by then-football coach and athletic director Bill Dooley. A costumed Gobbler mascot (now the Hokie Bird) was introduced during games in 1962, and has been a symbol of school spirit ever since.
The Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, founded in 1978, is a separate institution on the same campus, paid for by the two US states of Virginia and Maryland and jointly operated by VT and the University of Maryland. VMRCVM and VT jointly operate an equine center in Leesburg, Virginia, and VMRCVM has a small operation on the University of Maryland's College Park, Maryland campus.
In 2003, a school of osteopathic medicine called the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine opened in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, an office park adjacent to and owned and operated by the university as a local business incubator. VCOM is incorporated as a private, non-profit institution with no state interest, but is very closely affiliated with Virginia Tech on an operational level.
In 2003, Virginia Tech created a supercomputer which ranked as the 3rd fastest in the world. The system was made from 1100 dual processor Power Macintosh G5s and cost US$5.2 million. The supercomputer, called System X, was disassembled shortly after it was ranked in order for it to be replaced with Apple's rack-based servers which consume both less space and power.History
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