ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 4, 1997 TAG: 9704040021
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-10 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
Or, why you might call the student body 'Fairfax County (way) south'
Here are some of the Hokie highlights and happenings that have occurred over the span of Virginia Tech's 125 years, courtesy of the Office of University Relations:
When Tech opened its doors in 1872 as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, none of its three faculty members was a professor of agriculture or mechanics.
During the 1870s two of VAMC's professors got into a fistfight over military training for students.
The university's unique colors, Chicago maroon and burnt orange, were adopted in 1896 because the gray-and-black-striped uniforms worn by athletic teams up to that point were inspiring jokes about prison convicts.
Virginia Tech has had four official names: Virginia Agricultural & Mechanic College (1872); Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute (1896); Virginia Polytechnic Institute or VPI (1944) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (1970).
Women were admitted to the college in 1921, and the first women graduated in 1923, although The Bugle, Tech's student yearbook, didn't publish pictures of coeds until 20 years later.
Radford University was Radford College, the Women's Division of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, from 1944 to 1964.
Four years of participation in Tech's Corps of Cadets was mandatory until 1923, when the requirement was reduced to two years. Membership in the corps became voluntary in 1964.
Among its alumni Tech has seven Medal of Honor winners. Only the military service academies at West Point and Annapolis have more.
Tech's was the nation's first college military corps to admit women in 1973. In recent years it has maintained the highest percentage of women members among military schools.
Virginia Tech is the only university in the United States to have a department of anaerobic microbiology. Within this department are stored 75,000 organisms, the world's largest collection of anaerobic bacteria.
During the past two years, Tech has a Rhodes Scholar-winning student (Mark Embree), a Nobel Prize-winning alumni (Robert C. Richardson), a Sugar Bowl-winning football team (1996) and a National Invitational Tournament-winning basketball team (1995).
Annual costs for an in-state undergraduate student (including tuition, fees, room and board) for 1996-97 is $7,851. For out-of-state undergrads the cost is $14,503.
34 percent of Tech's student body comes from Northern Virginia, the densely populated region known as "Nova."
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