Old Dominion University - Troubador Yearbook (Norfolk, VA)

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Our problem is not so much the number of dollars it costs us to acquire land as It is the question of the displacement of people which is a second urban problem which affects Old Dominion. We are trying to work with the city now and to work hopefully in conjunction with city agencies that will let this problem be as easy as possible. We know, for example, that the area we’re due to move into, which is Lambert’s Point, is going to give people who live there a lot of problems. They’ve got to move...Certainly a problem that any urban campus has got to be concerned with is traffic: Traffic pattern, traffic Jams, and all that goes with it. And here Old Dominion is less fortunate than many urban institutions because many of them are built pretty much alongside a freeway, and we’re not...This is a problem that I don’t know fully the answer to. We already have problems and as the institution grows we’re going to have more problems in terms of simply getting here. Once you’re here you’ve got the problem of what you do with the cars. It’s obvious we’ve got a parking problem. We are trying to solve through a system of trying systematically to apply parking fees, which we are collecting, to the parking problem itself m terms of not only taking the lots we’ve got and making them permanent lots, but hopefully acquiring more property as we can get the funds to do this. Up to this point it’s been done on a pretty haphazard basis. The state appropriates money and we bought a lot and we made a parking lot out of it. But the state has dropped us now as a responsibility and pretty much put it on the institution. So we’re trying through setting up a parking fund and using it to maintain and to expand parking facilities and more or less keep up with our needs. Right now we have about half the number of spaces we need and until we get caught up we’re going to be in trouble on some kind of reasonable ratio basis. In terms of new programs, when Old Dominion was given the Vought campus, it was handed a priority in engineering, so that the Ph.D. program in Oceanography is almost equally as important, and hopefully we will have such a program in operation within a very few years. As a matter of fact, we intend tp ask the State Council to approve such a program, hopefully, sometime this year. Over and beyond this there is the broad context of urban studies. We are trying to find out now exactly what kinds of programs we set up. We’ll certainly have some programs in urban studies. What I’d like to see is a basic undergraduate program with a group of courses and with specialties which radiate from these. So a student, for example, could major in sociology, but he would be able to major in urban studies so therefore he would come out essentially in urban sociology. I»d like to see us, in education, move much mo.-e specifically in the direction of urban education than has been true here in the past. Beyond this I think I’d like to see us place some emphasis on the social sciences particularly which, I think are very critical in any program that has an urban emphasis to it. I’d like to see us start a Masters program in Sociology and in Political Science within the relatively near future. Mathematics we’ll go to Masters level work on, because this is needed in conjunction with the engineering program which we’ve already gotten approved.

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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

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Mayor Itoy B. Martin Old Dominion wouldn’t be what it is today if it hadn’t been for the city of Norfolk.” The role of an urton university, primarily. Is to give the educational services and fill the needs of the young people in the immediate area . . . Old Dominion's come a long way ... It has always been a very good school and today I think It Is recognized academically as having come ahead tremendously. If we can continue to encourage the state to put funds into it, there's no limit to what Old Dominion can mean, not only to Tidewater Virginia, but to the entire Commonwealth. . . Of course, Old Dominion wouldn't be what it Is today if if hadn’t been for the city of Norfolk. For years Norfolk would buy land for Old Dominion expansion and hold it until the state legislature would break loose with a few dollars to pay for the land. The city and the taxpayers of Norfolk have put untold thousands of dollars into Old Dominion and lost interest on money that the state has never recoupered. This was done because we felt that the university would mean so much to Norfolk and to all of Tidewater. The state appreciates Old Dominion more, but the demands for higher education by all of the universities and colleges that are supported by the state are greater; and for Old Dominion to get its share It is going to have to continue to fight for it. Per student allocation by the state to Old Dominion is so much smaller than, for example, from where I graduated, University of Virginia, that It is ridiculous. Especially when you see what Old Dominion is doing. . . So, I don’t think the state of Virginia is really being fair in its allocation of funds to Old Dominion. When Old Dominion was put in that location, no one could conceive that Norfolk and all of Tidewater would be what it is today. I don’t think it would ever have been considered to put it right there in the middle of an already pretty densely populated area without any real room for growth as far as a campus is concerned. . . But I think we’ve been fortunate in being able to, through the city’s participation and through redevelopment programs, acquire the land and expand the campus the way we have. . . From a traffic point of view, it certainly would have been more desirable to have Old Dominion more towards the center of the city rather than right on the western fringe of it, but we can’t have everything, and basically you’ve got a good facility there. . . The biggest problem I’ve heard from people out there as far as traffic is concerned is the lack of parking. And this is not a city problem; it’s one that belongs to the university, which I understand is providing more spaces now.