page_title: Virginia Tech
section_title: Post-World War II
hierarchical_section_title: Virginia Tech / History / Post-World War II
caption_attribution_description: English: Corps of Cadets drill on campus, Virginia Tech, very likely taken 1952.
context_page_description: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech and by the initials VT and VPI, is a public, land-grant, research university with its main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia. It also has educational facilities in six regions statewide and a study-abroad site in Riva San Vitale, Switzerland. Through its Corps of Cadets ROTC program, Virginia Tech is also designated as one of six senior military colleges in the United States.
  Virginia Tech offers 280 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to some 34,400 students and manages a research portfolio of $522 million, placing it 46th among universities in the U.S. for research expenditures and the only Virginia school listed among the top 50. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Virginia Tech is the state's second-largest public university by enrollment. The deadliest mass shooting on an American college campus occurred on campus in 2007, during which a student fatally shot 32 other students and faculty members and wounded 23 other people.
context_section_description: 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. During Hahn's tenure, not only did the university graduate its first Rhodes Scholar, W.W. Lewis, Class of 1963, the requirement for male students to participate in the Corps of Cadets for two years was dropped in 1964. Beginning in the fall 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; it 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.
caption: Corps of Cadets on campus ca 1952
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