VCU will mark 40th anniversary this week

BY KARIN KAPSIDELIS
Media General News Service

Published: October 21, 2008

In a vacant storefront on Main Street, Virginia Commonwealth University senior Elizabeth Friske is helping Fan District residents create windows into their community.

Their three-sided re-creation of a Fan home will showcase six windows that reflect different neighborhood views — actually, photos that Friske has taken of churches, cafés and galleries.

The model will be set up inside a tent for the Monroe Park Festival on Saturday as the Fan District helps VCU commemorate its 40th anniversary.

“Partnership — that’s the theme,” said Jim Vigeant, the Fan District Association’s liaison with VCU.

That partnership will be celebrated as VCU transforms Monroe Park into a collection of villages for a festival that pays tribute to the neighborhoods surrounding the campus as well as the university’s own history and growth.

VCU was born in 1968, conceived by a legislative commission as “a true urban university” that would work in close partnership with the communities around it.

The university had a jump-start on that mission — the school grew out of the merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia.

VCU plans a week of activities celebrating its “Fortieth and Forward” anniversary.

Historical markers will be dedicated on the MCV campus.

A university celebration at the Siegel Center will honor “40 Acts of Caring,” university projects that “give credence to our legacy as a community partner,” said Cathy Howard, vice provost for community engagement and chairwoman of the festival committee.

In addition, two sculptures will be presented on the Monroe Park campus that are visual symbols of both the university’s past and future.

A sculpture installed near the Anderson Gallery, called “Truth and Beauty,” is by Lester Van Winkle, professor emeritus from the School of the Arts.

It’s a pair of oversized desks that look like old-fashioned, wooden winged desks. The desks, which are actually bronze and stainless steel, face a large easel with a sketch of Henry H. Hibbs, who was provost of Richmond Professional Institute.

Another sculpture on Franklin Street documents the history of RPI. “Tableith” is a triple spiral of discs by Charles Ponticello, who has a master’s degree in fine arts from VCU’s top-ranked sculpture department.

Ponticello will make a formal presentation of the sculpture Saturday at 11:30 a.m. at the VCU Scott House, just before the start of the Monroe Park Festival.

Ponticello’s sculpture grew out of an effort by RPI alumni to make sure VCU’s roots would not be forgotten.

“We wanted to leave something behind,” said Bob Lindholm, chairman of the RPI alumni planning committee.

“Tableith” describes how RPI “was built stone by stone,” he said. It gives current students “a feel for how VCU started and how it grew.”

But the sculpture is only the start of what he describes as “rather ambitious plans for a group of old people with great memories from the school.”

“And, by the way, we’re a finite group,” he added.

Thus the urgency to raise about $60,000 for a memorial terrace around the sculpture that will be built of cobblestones salvaged from a nearby alley.

The committee also wants to endow a scholarship in the name of RPI and hopes to re-create Hibbs’ office in its original location.

“We were a different kind of school,” said Lindholm, who graduated in 1950 when RPI was a division of the College of William and Mary.

When the new university was formed, Lindholm said, he received “a second parchment with VCU’s name on it. So I’ve got two degrees.”

In its 40 years, VCU has grown into the state’s largest university, with more than 32,000 students and a campus in Qatar.

But there have been growing pains over the years as neighborhoods have pushed back against university expansion.

Oregon Hill is participating in the Monroe Park Festival, even though its neighborhood association has requested a state probe of VCU encroachment in the community.

Such issues have come up during the anniversary planning, said Ron Brown, VCU’s community development coordinator, who has been working with neighborhood groups in planning for the Monroe Park Festival.

“It’s the kind of thing we cannot ignore,” he said. “We acknowledge it and we move on.”

The planning with communities for Saturday’s celebration has been a healing process, he said. Ten VCU students, including Friske, were selected by their deans to help neighborhoods with their exhibits for the festival, he said. Five more have volunteered to help.

“It’s healing some of this ‘us and them,’ ” he said.

But for VCU, the timing of the celebration has been unfortunate.

Today, the state’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission is scheduled to release the results of its investigation into the improper awarding of a bachelor’s degree last year to Rodney Monroe, then Richmond’s police chief.

The university’s internal investigation into how Monroe received that degree was released just days before July 1, the day the General Assembly had designated as VCU Day in Virginia to commemorate the anniversary.

Still, the controversy is not likely to overshadow anniversary events.

“Actually, I haven’t paid much attention to it,” said Friske, a fashion merchandising major from Virginia Beach.

Karin Kapsidelis is a staff writer at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.