Old Dominion University - Troubador Yearbook (Norfolk, VA)

Page 12 text:

esident James L. Bugg, Jr.: We li e or v e die by the suppor get in Richmond. I was reading a pamphlet that came out from the Office of Education last summer which Indicates that up to this point, nobody knows what an urban Institution is. The first thing that It is is a university, and that's the important thing. A university has a very definite meaning and a very definite connotation. It means that there is a basic concern not only for good teaching, but a real concern for the discovery of knowledge. There is a certain aspect to a university that is important. The first thing to be said is that Old Dominion is becoming and must become a university and that the urban is taken within this context. The metropolitan area is a vast laboratory which Old Dominion could use much more than it has done in the past, through a kind of practically oriented courses and through the use of student apprentices. Old Dominion is a part of the metropolitan area and it has certain responsibilities to meet the professional needs of the city, particularly in supplying and training professional kinds of people. I’m not certain myself whether an urban university is a separate animal. I know well enough what a university is. The basic thing that a university gives to a community is an educational institution that has not only a basic liberal arts and science course, but a group of professional schools that on the faculty there is a body of expertise that is available to the community. That makes a tremendous difference. There are certain specific needs that Old Dominion University, because it is located where it is and because it has been given the mission that it has by the State Council, has to meet. And these become priorities for us. We live or die by the support we get in Richmond. What kind of support is going to depend to a considerable degree on how much the community supports us. There is both a public relations kind of support and specifically a financial support that a community could give to an institution. Adequate financial support is a basic problem. Old Dominion cannot be supported at the rate it is being supported which is, let’s say, one half to two-thirds of what the other universities in the state are being supported, and hope to progress very far. But over and beyond this, I’d say that our biggest problem is probably one of shifting from what is essentially a college psychology to a university psychology. This is not easy. It means thinking in terms of the institution as more than simply a teaching institution, though it’s that too. If there’s a third problem, it is a problem of what I suppose I’d call pride in the institution. A non-resident operation,which Old Dominion is, always has a hard time getting the kind of loyalty that a resident institution has, because students don’t live on the campus twenty-four hours a day; they come and go and they’ve got other competing loyalties. To have the kind of confidence and pride and belief in the operation is important and it’s something that needs to be worked on here. This is probably also true of the faculty, the administration, and the staff. I