Virginia Tech - History

History

In 1872, the Virginia General Assembly purchased the facilities of Preston and Olin Institute, a small Methodist school in rural Montgomery County with federal funds provided by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. The Commonwealth incorporated a new institution on that site, a state-supported land grant military institute called the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Under the 1891–1907 presidency of John M. McBryde, the school organized its academic programs into a traditional four-year college. The evolution of the school's programs led to an 1896 name change to Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The "Agricultural and Mechanical College" portion of the name was popularly omitted almost immediately, and the name was officially changed to Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1944. During those years, there was a short-lived merger with Radford College which at the time was a women's college. In 1923, VPI changed a policy of four-year compulsory participation in the Corps of Cadets to two years. In 1931, VPI began teaching classes at the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary. This program eventually developed into a two-year engineering program after which students could transfer to VPI for their third and fourth year.

VPI President T. Marshall Hahn, whose tenure ran from 1962 to 1974, was responsible for many of the successes that have shaped the modern institution of Virginia Tech. His presidential agenda involved transitioning the school into a major research university. To achieve this, the student body was increased by roughly 1,000 additional students per year, new dormitories and academic buildings were constructed, faculty were added (In 1966, for instance, the faculty added over 100 new professors) and research budgets were increased. During the Hahn Presidency the University saw its first Rhodes Scholar in W.W. Lewis, class of 1963. Hahn also ended the affiliation with Radford University, dropped the two-year Corps training requirement for its male students and allowed women to join the Corps. Virginia Tech was the first school in the nation to open its corps of cadets 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 research university. As part of this move, VPI 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 plan failed to take root, and as a compromise, VPI added "and State University" to its name in 1970, yielding the current formal name of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In the late 1970s, the shorthand name "Virginia Tech" was adopted as the proper identification of the university's athletic teams over the acronym "V.P.I." and the media were requested to use "Virginia Tech" in their reporting of sport scores. In the early 1990s, the school authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to the full VPI&SU name. Many school documents today use the shorter name, though diplomas and transcripts still spell out the formal name. Similarly, the abbreviation VT is far more common today than VPI or VPI&SU, and appears everywhere, from athletic uniforms, to the university's Internet domain name vt.edu.

On April 16, 2007, the Virginia Tech massacre occurred on campus. 32 people were shot dead before the gunman killed himself, making it the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history.