Fulfilling the Promise: Virginia Commonwealth University and the City of Richmond, 1968-2009 - Hardcover

John T. Kneebone (author) & Eugene P. Trani (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813944821 ISBN 13: 9780813944821

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2020

Synopsis

Founded in Richmond in 1968, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) began with a mission to build a university to serve a city emerging from the era of urban crisis - desegregation, white flight, political conflict, and economic decline. The product of the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and the Richmond Professional Institute combined into one, state-mandated institution, the two were able to embrace their mission and work together productively.

In Fulfilling the Promise, John Kneebone and Eugene Trani tell the intriguing story of VCU and the context in which the university was forged and eventually thrived. Although VCU's history is necessarily unique, Kneebone and Trani show how the issues shaping it are common to many urban institutions, from engaging with two-party politics in Virginia and African American political leadership in Richmond, to fraught neighborhood relations, the complexities of providing public health care at an academic health center, and an increasingly diverse student body. As a result, Fulfilling the Promise offers far more than a stale institutional saga. Rather, this definitive history of one urban state university illuminates the past and future of American public higher education in the post-1960s era.

About this title

About the Author

John T. Kneebone, Emeritus Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University, is coeditor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Eugene P. Trani, President Emeritus and University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, is coauthor of The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: Harrison Salisbury and the New York Times, among other books.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813944821
• ISBN 13: 9780813944821
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432