THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 2, 1995 TAG: 9509300019
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 41 lines
``ODU: assessment at 65'' (editorial, Sept. 15) correctly highlights a few of the university's achievements. However, when I think of Old Dominion, a school I witnessed grow from a division of William and Mary, then to ODC, up to the present university, my heart breaks for the vast number of missed opportunities for ODU to become a nationally known landmark of higher learning.
U.S. News & World Report recently ranked ODU among the magazine's lowest level, ``fourth tier'' (fourth-rate), colleges, a full category below Virginia Commonwealth.
ODU has suffered under the poor leadership of too many carpetbaggers, who have bowed to feminists, homosexuals and minority groups, joining with them to forward their leftward social-engineering goals. Monies that should have been spent on research and expanding the Oceanography school into a first-rate program were instead spent in support of a clearly unpopular set of social agendas. The recalcitrant administrators have also worked to weaken the fraternity and sorority system which, if supported, would serve to build a lifelong respect among the students for both our Southern and national heritage.
In the 1970s, ODU received a windfall in the form of a fully completed football stadium, which was passed into the university's care for the price of one dollar. Any administrator in touch with the interests of the local population would have quickly parlayed this event into a football program, which could have resulted in ODU's admission into the Atlantic Coast Conference and mammoth national exposure. Instead, the carpetbaggers embraced the more gender-neutral, less ``warlike'' sports of field hockey and soccer.
ISRAEL LIPPINCOTT
Hampton, Sept. 15, 1995 by CNB