In 1872, with federal funds provided by the
Morrill Act of 1862, the Reconstruction-era
Virginia General Assembly purchased the facilities of
Preston and Olin Institute, a small
Methodist school for boys in Southwest Virginia's rural
Montgomery County. That same year, of the adjoining
Solitude Farm including the house and several farm buildings on the estate were acquired for $21,250 from Robert Taylor Preston, a son of
Governor of Virginia,
James Patton Preston. The commonwealth incorporated a new institution on the site, a state-supported
land-grant military institute named Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College. Virginia Tech's first student,
Addison "Add" Caldwell registered on October 1, 1872, after hiking over 25 miles from his home in
Craig County, Virginia. A statue, located in the Upper Quad of campus commemorates Add's journey to enroll. First-year cadets and their training cadre re-enact Addison Caldwell's journey every year in the Caldwell March. They complete the first half of the 26-mile march in the fall and the second half in the spring. The first five presidents of Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College served in the
Confederate States Army or the
Confederate government during the
Civil War as did many of its early professors including the first
Commandant,
James H. Lane, a
VMI graduate and former
Confederate General who taught
civil engineering and commerce at the college and is the namesake of Lane Hall, one of the oldest buildings on campus, built in 1888. Its third president,
Thomas Nelson Conrad, was a notorious Confederate spy who ran a covert intelligence gathering operation from a home in the heart of
Washington, D.C. Its sixth president,
Paul Brandon Barringer, was a son of Confederate General
Rufus Barringer and a nephew of Confederate Generals
Stonewall Jackson and
Daniel Harvey Hill. In a nod to this southern heritage the
Confederate Battle Flag was traditionally waved by cheerleaders at Virginia Tech
football games and the
Highty-Tighties played
Dixie as a
fight song when the
Hokies scored a touchdown. A large Confederate flag also hung inside
Cassell Coliseum where Virginia Tech
basketball games are played. Since 1963,
"Skipper", a replica of a Civil War cannon has been fired at football games by members of the Corps of Cadets when the team scores. The Confederate Flag was also prominently featured on all Virginia Tech
class rings. The display of the Confederate flag at athletic events ended in the late 1960s after Marguerite Harper, a black woman attending Virginia Tech on a
Rockefeller Scholarship for culturally disadvantaged students, was elected to the student senate during her sophomore year and made a successful resolution to end the practice. Following the resolution there was a large demonstration in opposition to the removal of the Confederate flag. The campus was covered in Confederate flags and "Dixie" was blasting from dormitory windows. Harper and her white roommate received hate mail and threatening phone calls, but the resolution stood, and the display of the rebel flag ended in 1969. The Confederate flag on Virginia Tech class rings became optional in 1972 and could be omitted at the student's request; it has since been removed from class ring designs entirely. Under the leadership of seventh president
Joseph Dupuy Eggleston, who held the position from 1913 to 1919, the university established a
Reserve Officer Training Corps to support national efforts during
World War I. Early on the morning of March 13, 1917, physics professor Charles E. Vawter, Jr. (son of Charles E. Vawter, who had served on the VPI board of visitors from 1886 to 1900), shot Stockton Heth, Jr., a scion of one of Montgomery County's wealthiest families, in his campus home on faculty row. Heth, who lived at
Whitethorne, an
antebellum mansion on a 1,500-acre estate near Blacksburg, later died of his wounds in a Roanoke hospital. Due to the Heth family's wealth and political connections, Vawter's position as head of the VPI physics department, and the scandalous extramarital affair that led to the shooting, the resulting murder trial was one of the most sensational in Virginia history. Vawter was later acquitted and left the school. Eggleston attempted to suppress news of the affair in the media with considerable success.
College reorganizations During Thomas Nelson Conrad's tenure as president, the college switched from semesters to the quarter system, which remained in place until the late 1980s. Under the 1891–1907 presidency of
John McLaren McBryde, the school organized its academic programs into a traditional four-year college and a graduate department was founded. The evolution of the school's programs led to a name change in 1896 to
Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College and Polytechnic Institute. The "Agricultural and Mechanical College" portion of the name was popularly omitted almost immediately; in 1944, the name was officially changed to
Virginia Polytechnic Institute (
VPI). VPI admitted its first female students in 1921 as civilian
day students; they did not live on campus. In 1923, VPI changed a policy of compulsory participation in the Corps of Cadets from four years to two years. In 1931, VPI began teaching classes at the Norfolk Division of the
College of William and Mary (now
Old Dominion University). This program eventually developed into a two-year engineering program that allowed students to transfer to VPI for their final two years of degree work. The first women's dormitory at VPI, Hillcrest Hall, was built in 1940. In 1943, VPI merged with Radford State Teachers College in nearby
Radford, which became VPI's women's division; the merger was dissolved in 1964. Today,
Radford University is a co-educational research university that enrolls nearly 10,000 students and offers more than 150 undergraduate and graduate programs.
Post–World War II In 1953, under the leadership of President
Walter Stephenson Newman, VPI became the first historically white, four-year public institution among the 11 states in the former Confederacy to admit a black undergraduate. Three more black students were admitted in 1954. At the time Virginia still enforced
Jim Crow laws and largely practiced
racial segregation in public and private education, churches, neighborhoods, restaurants, and movie theaters and these first black students at VPI were not allowed to live in residence halls or eat in the dining halls on campus. Instead, they boarded with African American families in Blacksburg. In 1958, Charlie L. Yates made history as the first African American to graduate from VPI. Yates earned a bachelor's degree in
mechanical engineering, with honors, and was hailed as the first African American "to be graduated from any major Southern engineering institute," according to news reports at the time. VPI President
T. Marshall Hahn, whose tenure ran from 1962 to 1974, was responsible for many of the programs and policies that transformed VPI from a small, historically white, predominately male, military institute with a primary focus on undergraduate teaching into a major co-educational research university. The student body that had been approximately 5,682 in 1962 increased by roughly 1,000 students each year, new dormitories and academic buildings were constructed, faculty members were added – in 1966, for instance, more than 100 new professors joined the faculty – and research budgets were increased. the requirement for male students to participate in the Corps of Cadets for two years was dropped in 1964. Beginning in the fall of 1973, women could participate in the Corps, making Virginia Tech among the nation's first senior military colleges to integrate women. In 1970, the state legislature allowed VPI university status and gave it the present legal name, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. In the early 1990s, university administration authorized the official use of Virginia Tech as equivalent to the full legal name, officially adopting a nickname dating to the 1910s. "Virginia Tech" has been used as the first-reference name for the school's athletic teams since the 1970s. However, diplomas and transcripts still spell out the formal name. Similarly, the abbreviation "VT" is far more common today than either VPI or VPI&SU.
Vietnam War era During the
Vietnam War, students on college campuses across the nation protested
the draft and U.S. involvement in the conflict. Despite its long history as a
military school, Virginia Tech was no exception. Most protests at Virginia Tech were small sit-ins and teach-ins, but In mid-April 1970 a group of anti-war protesters including students and faculty members disrupted a Corps of Cadets drill on campus. The Virginia Tech administration under Hahn took swift action. The students involved were suspended and the faculty members involved were fired from the university and the administration went to court and obtained an injunction to prevent them from repeating the act. This succeeded in calming tensions on campus, but only for a few weeks. Tensions on campus reached the boiling point several days following the
Kent State Shootings when on May 12, 1970, a large mob including students and a number of non-student anti-war protesters enraged by the Kent State incident and angered by the administration's disciplinary actions in response to a number of recent infractions by protesters including; vandalism of university property, a series of potentially dangerous fires set on campus, breaking and entering into a university building, and a sit-in in Cowgill Hill, seized Williams Hall and barricaded themselves inside. The administration responded quickly calling in law enforcement and early the following morning
Virginia State Police forced their way into Williams Hall and began rounding up the protesters. Once inside the building, the police discovered materials that could have potentially been used for a
firebomb. The first few protesters were dragged out of the building; the rest left peacefully and were arrested and taken to the Montgomery County jail. The students involved in the seizure were suspended from Virginia Tech and given twenty-four hours to remove their belongings from campus after being released from jail. Several more anti-war protests occurred at Virginia Tech during the early 1970s, but none turned violent. Desperate for additional farmland for the support of teaching, research, and extension programs in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Tech acquired
Kentland Farm on December 31, 1986. Virginia Tech secretly traded about 250 acres of research orchards adjacent to a commercial area that would soon become
Christiansburg's main shopping district to a group of developers for the historic but long
fallow 1,785-acre Kentland property. The developers on the other end of the swap, one of whom was a former Tech athletics official, quickly sold 40 acres of the former university farmland for $2.7 million. News of the land swap, and especially the fact that it was done behind closed doors, with no input from College of Agriculture faculty sparked outrage. Also in 1986, Virginia Tech became embroiled in an athletic scandal sparked by allegations of illegal recruiting, the bitter departure of two athletic directors in less than a year and millions of dollars of debt run up by the university's sports program due to mismanagement of financial resources, million dollar coaching contracts, and lavish expense accounts for athletics officials that led to a rebuke from
Governor of Virginia,
Gerald Baliles in 1987. Baliles, the featured speaker at the Virginia Tech's 115th annual commencement exercises, scolded the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors for the scandal and warned other state-supported institutions in Virginia not to put athletics ahead of academics. Lavery developed a reorganization plan for the troubled Athletic Department, and
Frank Beamer was hired to replace
Bill Dooley as head football coach, but with negative publicity continuing to swirl within and around the university, he announced his resignation on October 16, 1987, effective December 31, 1987, to prevent polarization of the campus. He was succeeded as president by
James Douglas McComas who served until 1994. Due to the unpopularity of
US involvement in the Vietnam War enrollment in the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets spiraled downward through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In 1991 through the efforts of Henry Dekker (Class of 1944) The Corps of Cadets Alumni Inc. was created to save the corps, whose numbers had declined to only a few hundred students. In 1992 the alumni organization-initiated Corps Review, a newsletter that was expanded to a magazine in 2004 and targeted corps alumni. In the mid-1990s, the corps alumni organization set a goal of "1000 in 2000" and initiated a major campaign to push the number of cadets to 1,000 by the turn of the century. The goal was not reached, but membership in the corps did increase substantially by the end of the decade.
21st century The early decades of this century have seen expansion across the university's institutions in both physical and population sizes. In 2001, Virginia Tech acquired 326 acres of the
Heth Farm adjacent to campus, increasing the College Farm to over 3,000 acres. The
Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Research Institute was created with a strategic partnership with the
Carilion Clinic and the governor of Virginia. These years also brought about the rapid development of the university's professional schools of graduate education and business programs. Virginia Tech brought in over $500 million in research expenditures in 2014. The establishment of scholarships for cadets and a resurgence of national
patriotism after the
September 11 attacks helped the corps recruit new cadets, increasing the ranks to 1,127 by 2018—the largest corps the university has seen since the mid-1960s. The Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets is poised to increase enrollment to 1,400 in coming years.
2007 mass shooting On April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech student
Seung-Hui Cho fatally shot 32 faculty members and students and wounded 17 others in two locations on campus before killing himself. The massacre is the deadliest
mass shooting on an American college campus, surpassing the
University of Texas tower shooting in 1966. Although it was at the time the deadliest mass shooting committed by a lone gunman in U.S. history, it has since been surpassed by two shootings at
an Orlando nightclub and
an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. It is the second-deadliest school massacre in U.S. history, surpassed only by the
Bath School bombing in 1927 that killed 44.
Further growth Due to rapid growth of incoming freshmen classes, the university announced in 2019 that it would offer 1,559 incoming, in-state freshmen financial incentives to skip the 2019–20 school year in Blacksburg. Expecting a larger-than-planned class size, the university budgeted $3.3 million for the endeavor. Virginia Tech also waived the requirement that freshmen live on campus for the 2019–20 school year, leased an off-campus
Holiday Inn, and converted its on-campus hotel to house students. ==Organization and administration==