Old Dominion University - Troubador Yearbook (Norfolk, VA)

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Money is very scarce in an urban area and universities in urban areas are usually new universities. The trend a few years ago was still towards comprehensive universities, like VPI and UVa. They seem to get a lot of money, as we know. The newer universities are not as well established. Also, you have a large commuter problem with an urban university. Wayne State University Just did a very comprehensive study on the commuter problem; 1 think Old Dominion will probably have to do one on this also . . . You also have an inner city problem. A lot of times universities are located in the inner city area. As the university expands, it often creates the conditions that it’s trying to solve. You have to watch out for that. Also you have less room to expand because there's a scarcity of land in urban areas. It’s not as bad in Norfolk as in some places, like VCU, which has a terrific expansion problem . . .Also you have to make sure the university is not going to add to the environmental pollution in the area . . . Another problem would be admissions. Once you’ve made the choice and you’ve made the curriculum changes, you have to get away from a very traditional structure in admission, where you Just depend on, say, your SATs and your standing in your class. You are going to have to draw people whose overall standing was not that excellent, but that in a specialized area were excellent students. It’s going to be several years from now until we make the change. We shouldn’t change the admissions structure until we’ve made the choice and made the other changes. But I think we might m the future. It’s not dropping the standards, really. I’m against that. I’m against Louis Mayhew’s suggestion that we have open admissions. But sometimes a very outstanding student in one area is not outstanding at all in another area. So I’m saying we don’t necessarily have to look for somebody that’s outstanding in all the areas. I don’tthinkanopenadmisslonspolicy is going to help matters at all. There’s quite a few people in college who shouldn’t be there in the first place. They are there because they’ve been forced to. We’ve got to put more emphasis in high school on vocational training and the University can help in this also. With parking, we’re making progress, however slow it is. The money problem ties in with this. It costs so much to develop parking lots in the first place. Now the way it happened here is a good way to show interaction between the community and the university. Norfolk usually holds the land for us. They buy it from whoever owns it and hold it for us until we’re able to buy it. But the state is not providing the money to buy these lands. We have to do it by bond issues. Take the parking lot behind the Student Center: It’s costing well over seven hundred thousand dollars to develop that parkinglot. Parking, Ithink, will improve this year significantly. It’s not going to be the big problem at the end of this year that it was at the beginning of the year, especially when that new parking lot is through. But I can’t say, I don’t think anybody can say realistically, that we're going to solve completely the parking problem, in the next five years. The university’s going to grow southward and what we’re really going to need to do is to come up with a master plan. . . we can’t expand anymore, no new buildings and new parking lots, until we come out with a new master plan. So that’s what they’re doing now, and I think it's going to have to include parking. We’ve never done that in the past. Parkmgdevelop-ment has been very helter-skelter. As the President said, lt’stime we stopped building the buildings around parking lots, and build the parking lots a round the buildings... . There’s got to be a lot of interaction between the community and the university. It’s not Just a one-way street; the university can’t provide all the services. I think that the community is going to have to step into areas where the university cannot function. A lot of universities and communities tie in services. They have, for example, a computer center which is used by the community and the university. Now I can’t say whether that would work here, but it is the type of thing I mean. A lot of things are getting very expensive nowadays, so it would be advantageous to have one center which provides information or provides a service for both the university and the community. It’s a Joint effort. For Old Dominion University the community can provide support. They have to help provide the money. Now the city itself won’t do this, but they have to push in the state legislature, where the money comes from. In community action projects, the city has to work along with the university . . . Take for example, one of the major problems we have is parking. The community helps us a great deal with parking. It’s shared resources, that’s the key word here.

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 Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Bad” George Orwell’s phrase in Animal Farm can be adapted to describe ODlPs current transportation problems. The automobile represents the source of many problems: parking, pollution, traffic. The bicycle represents the answer to these problems. Bicycles appear ! with increasing frequency on campus .... will they ever replace the enemy—the car?