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Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, popularly known as Virginia Tech (VT), is a public land grant university with the main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia with other research and educational centers throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia. Founded in 1872 as an agricultural and mechanical land-grant college, Virginia Tech is a research university with the largest full-time student population in Virginia and one of the few public universities in the country that maintains a corps of cadets.
In 1872, the Virginia General Assembly purchased the facilities of Preston and Olin Institute, a small Methodist school in rural Montgomery County with federal funds provided by the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. The Commonwealth incorporated a new institution on that site, a state-supported land grant military institute called the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College.
VPI President T. Marshall Hahn, whose tenure ran from 1962 to 1974, was responsible for many of the successes that have shaped the modern institution of Virginia Tech. His presidential agenda involved transitioning the school into a major research university. To achieve this, the student body was increased by roughly 1,000 additional students per year, new dormitories and academic buildings were constructed, faculty were added (In 1966, for instance, the faculty added more than 100 new professors) and research budgets were increased. During the Hahn Presidency Virginia Tech dropped the two-year Corps training requirement for its male students and allowed women to join the Corps. It was the first school in the nation to open its corps of cadets to women.
One of Hahn's more controversial missions was only partially achieved. He had visions of renaming the school from VPI to Virginia State University, reflecting the status it had achieved as a full-fledged research university. As part of this move, VPI would have taken over control of the state's other land-grant institution, a historically black college in Ettrick, Virginia, south of Richmond, then called Virginia State College. This plan failed to take root, and as a compromise, VPI added "and State University" to its name in 1970, yielding the current formal name of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In the late 1970s, the shorthand name "Virginia Tech" was adopted as the proper identification of the university's athletic teams over the acronym "V.P.I." and the media were requested to use "Virginia Tech" in their reporting of sport scores. In the early 1990s, the school authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to the full VPI&SU name. Many school documents today use the shorter name, though diplomas and transcripts still spell out the formal name. Similarly, the abbreviation VT is far more common today than VPI or VPI&SU, and appears everywhere, from athletic uniforms, to the university's Internet domain name vt.edu.
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'''The Early Years
'''Highlights of 2011-2019'''From chapter’s History Report: Scholarship, group honors/awards, traditions, special events, changes on campus or within chapter, overall nature of the chapter, chapter goals, challenges and how they were overcome, etc.: In 2012, Virginia Tech has: • Eight colleges and graduate school • 65 bachelor's degree programs • 150 master's and doctoral degree programs • 30,000+ full-time students • 16:1 student-faculty ratio • Main campus includes more than 125 buildings, 2,600 acres, and an airport • Computing and communications complex for worldwide information access • Ranked 44th in university research in the United States • Has adjacent corporate research center Virginia Tech has approximately 25,000 students, 17% of which belong to the Greek system. There are 16 active sororities on campus, 12 of which participate in formal recruitment. Of the female population, approximately 13.4% are involved in Greek sororities. There are more than 30 fraternities.
