THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150027
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A22 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
The campus sign announcing today as Founders Day at Old Dominion University also heralds the school's 65th anniversary. The latter focus comes a decade ahead of what would customarily be the next biggie - the 75th. But the remembrance is useful.
For the 1930 opening of that two-year extension of the College of William & Mary - welcoming some 500 students to an abandoned elementary school on Norfolk's Hampton Boulevard - turned out to be the modest first chapter in the saga of what today is arguably the region's most important institution.
As progress has been constant, so has been the struggle to mold a viable center of higher education. President James V. Koch recently alluded to a current part of that struggle, five years of diminished state funding that have seen faculty salaries lag and faculty departures accelerate.
But neither this challenge nor difficulties earlier presidents faced have thwarted ODU's emergence as a public urban university with 16,500 students. In recent years, ODU has, among other things, opened graduate centers in Hampton, Virginia Beach and Portsmouth, the latter two in partnership with Norfolk State University; won national recognition of the Department of Oceanography; set the pace in restructuring for the 21st century; pioneered TELETECHNET, which delivers televised courses to community-college students across Virginia, and, just recently, signed a pact with NATO's Supreme Allied Command Atlantic to pursue greater global interchange, education and research.
As the school marks 65 years, it's fitting that the brick wall fronting the early campus is being extended another 6.5 blocks to embrace the past 30 years of expansion. This better links pre- and post-war buildings visually, measures the growth dramatically, symbolizes the maturing of an urban center of learning - and signals that as it continues its struggle, ODU merits and needs the whole region's people behind their school. by CNB