Measured out with coffee spoons: VCU

VCU is in the Final Four. Virginia Commonwealth University made it to the Final Four of the NCAA Division I Basketball Championship. The Richmond, Virginia, school plays Butler, another Cinderella story, on Saturday. The winner of that game goes on to play the winner of the match up between the University of Kentucky and the University of Connecticut for the national title. What a dream come true!

VCU grew out of the 1968 merger between Richmond Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Medical College of Virginia (MCV). I went there for my senior year of college, and my B.A. degree in English was conferred by VCU. The school is extremely highly ranked in art and design, a legacy from its days as RPI, and its professors engage in a very high level in quantity and quality of research, according to the Carnegie Report. I had almost all good professors there, but some were outstanding. I studied two semesters of the history of the Renaissance and the Reformation under a truly gifted teacher, Dr. William Blake, and two semesters of formal logic in the philosophy department with another exceptional professor, whose name I have lost. But I learned a great deal, and what I learned has stayed with me all these years. I also studied the history of the English language and the teaching of reading and remedial reading, and that's what got me a job upon graduation. The physics class I took was for pure pleasure.

Grace Street, long ago, and one of my favorites

VCU offers degrees from its College of Humanities and Sciences, which contains University College, the School of the Arts, the school of Government and Public Affairs, School of Mass Communications, and School of World Studies. The Monroe Park Campus also has a School of Education. MCV is a very good medical school, and the hospital is a Level I trauma center. There is s school of Allied Health Professions, which offers programs in many therapies. MCV also has Schools of Nursing, Dentistry, Engineering, and Pharmacy. There is a School of Social Work and a School of Business. All in all there are over 211 programs offered to students at VCU, and all of quality. The University awards Bachelor, Masters, and Doctoral degrees.

VCU men's basketball is very popular. The Rams have won seven conference championships, most recently in 2009. The Rams have the 11th highest home court winning percentage in Division I basketball with a winning percentage of .846. Shaka Smart has coached the Rams since their previous coach Anthony Grant went to coach the Alabama Crimson Tide. The tennis team is popular and successful, and there is also women's basketball. And I am told that the school will finally get a football team this fall!

VCU Campus

Monroe Towers

The campus of VCU can be enchanting, and it breathes history. It is located in Richmond, Virginia, right in the city, in the Fan district, which is a late Victorian, early twentieth century residential neighborhood. Many administrative and faculty offices were in old Victorian mansions with beautiful woodwork, stunning staircases, and so much "ambience." The Fan is called that because its streets begin on Belvidere at Monroe Park and then fan out to the west toward the Boulevard. It is filled with cafes, parks, and tree-lined avenues. Development of the Fan, an eighty-five block area, followed the tracks of the nation's first electric streetcar, which began running in Richmond in 1888. The architecture is of great variety, including Richardson Romanesque, Queen Anne, Italianate, Colonial Revival, Tudor, even Arts and Crafts, and more.

Franklin Street West

A residential neighborhood

Fascinating architecture

Homes in the Fan

More homes in the Fan

Part of Richmond's Monument Avenue, including at least three monuments, falls inside the Fan, adding to the sense of history.

One of the Confederate Monuments on Monument Avenue

The Fan was a bit of a bohemian village, a hippie village, when I was there and before, an artsy place, and most students that I knew were either apolitical or left-leaning. There was much fun, much indulgence, and I have many wonderful memories of time spent outside of class. I met many wonderful people. The year I was a student at VCU, students ran for student government, as they always do, but upon election their first major act was to dissolve student government. It was kooky like that.

The Village

My friends and I spent a lot of time at a restaurant and bar called the Village, just a block off campus. There was a poet who was in there all the time, sitting in a booth at the back, drinking and writing. The Village decorated for Christmas that year by hanging its Christmas tree upside down from the ceiling and then leaving it up all year. I loved the silliness of that. It was educational, too. The Ladies Room at the Village was the first Ladies Room I had ever been in where the wall were written upon just as obscenely as in any men's room. The Fan is just full of small independent restaurants and bars.

The Village

Beautiful homes in the Fan

Sometimes I rode my bike to the Floyd Avenue Post Office and to campus from my apartment just across the Boulevard from the Fan on Patterson Avenue near another hangout called Ciacco's, just around the corner from me on Kensington and something. I have wonderful memories of that place, too. I was running from a broken heart and needed the lightheartedness of that year, needed it very badly, as much as I needed my degree.

I was a work study student, and my job was to tutor English in the University's Special Services Program. This was a program that allowed the school to admit a number of underprepared students each year and then provide special services to them for their first two years. The students then made it on their own in their junior and senior years. I loved my students and was intellectually intrigued with their educational problems. That work study job started me in a professional direction that would last throughout my work life.

VCU now has over 30,000 students and the third largest research library in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It's amazing to me that they are in the Final Four, and it's fun. Just fun. I hope they win they whole thing!!