Talk:Virginia Commonwealth University
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[edit] problem with images being of unknown origin
Many of the images are in danger of being deleted, as they were uploaded without clear documentation! I believe that many of the images ARE from fair-use sources; i found one on a vcu website. what can be done about this?
the images that are up show a much older campus, please update as well as give clear documentation, Images should be able to be obtained
[edit] Size
The article states a few times that VCU has a student body of 31,000 students. What is the source of that? I checked collegeboard.com, which has it at 25,961, and VCU.edu, which simply states "more than 29,000." Preston 08:03, 19 March 2006 (UTC)
I've had trouble verifying VCU's actual student enrollment myself. The latest number I could find was from 2004, and I know the university has grown since then. It sounds like the 31,000 number is an estimate. --69.255.3.194 15:10, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
VCU has a live headcount. http://iserver.adm.vcu.edu/reports/pub/stats/univ.htm
The Fall of 2006 Enrollment is as follows
Undergraduates - 21249 Graduates - 7611 Professional (PhD)- 1592
Total of Fall 2006 - 30452
The Spring 2007 Enrollment is as follows
Undergraduates - 19677 Graduates - 6042 Professional (PhD)- 1574
Total of Spring 2007 - 27293
As you see There is a drop from Fall 2006 to Spring 2007
that being said http://www.news.vcu.edu/vcu_view/pages.aspx?nid=1914
VCU went on those fall headcounts and announced themselves the largest university in Virginia.
-Good catch, but you also have to remember more people are graduating in the fall than people transferring in during spring, so most school have a fairly large drop in enrollment between these two semesters. Hence why it’s the standard to list fall semester enrollment for most schools. --Bvjrm 22:10, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] VCU/MCV naming controversy
It seems this is a hot-button issue, so I thought it would be useful to start a discussion thread on the subject. The way I see it is this: there are two sides to the story, and we should do our best to present both. While MCV students and alumni have obvious emotional reasons to be attached to the MCV name, I think Trani had a valid point in showing how the lack of public awareness of the MCV name since VCU's merger was harming VCU's efforts to gain recognition as a global research university. In any edits that are done to this section I hope to see a balance between these two points of view. I think the section is already pretty biased toward the MCV point of view as it is – most of the section dwells on MCV's "separate identity" without too much of a counterargument for a unified VCU identity. I didn't want to put up a neutrality flag because so far the section is mainly fact-based, but we need to be careful about making the issue too emotionally charged on one side or the other.
--69.255.3.194 15:08, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
"lack of public awareness of the MCV name" ?? If anything it's a lack of awareness of the VCU name, MCV had and still has a great reputation as a medical school, unfortunately there is not a medical residency chair anywhere who knows what or where VCU is. You also miss the fact that the law joining VCU and MCV in 1968 dictated the name as "the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University". By formally changing that to "VCU Medical Center' Trani broke that law, regardless of your stance on the usefulness of combining the schools under the VCU banner it is an illegal act.
As far as emotionally charged, I think you will find it quite emotionally charged for MCV alums who now no longer have a school, or at least have a school that no longer associates itself with what they consider their history.
The main argument for unifying the schools is monetary saving by shrinking departments and more government funds because one large school gets more money, in my opinion whenever something is being done for money that is the wrong decision. Interestingly, as the article notes, the alumni fund is still run by the MCV Foundation - don't tell the alums we changed the name.
Cry me a river. How do you think RPI alums feel? MCV is very well known in the medical community, I will grant you, but the general public outside of Richmond has never heard of MCV. There is nothing illegal about promoting VCU to the outside world as VCU, and as for your little law, it says it's a college at Virginia Commonwealth University. Note that the university still refers to the campus as the MCV Campus.
The naming controversy has nothing to do with saving money - it is a marketing decision. Nothing is changing about the school's internal workings; only the branding. Instead of two separate schools getting credit in the public eye for doing different things, Trani is making sure that all the university's accomplishments are recognized as one body. The very fact that you view VCU and MCV as separate schools to begin with only lends credence as to why such a move is needed. It is a move that is 38 years overdue. The only reason I am not adding "lack of public awareness" to the article is because I can't find online the results to a survey that showed that most people in Virginia thought MCV was part of the University of Virginia, not VCU.
If nothing else, the "VCU Medical Center" name is common sense. The opinion of every university goes up when it has a medical center (see Johns Hopkins, University of Michigan, et al.). And that's what MCV is: a medical center, at VCU. It's about time that we started calling it for what it is instead of having an emotional attachment to an old name that doesn't make sense in the modern world. But then again, since when has Richmond ever let any of its history get out of the way for a little progress?
--24.125.147.15 07:25, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Problems with faculty section
The problem with the paragraphs in question is that they read more like a history of MCV and the Massey Cancer Center than a listing of notable faculty at VCU. They also have several POV statements without justification or citation, and there are buzzwords throughout ("leading edge," "shake up," etc.). If there are no objections or edits in the next few days or so, I think the remaining paragraphs should be deleted. While these paragraphs are relevant to the history of MCV specifically, the rest of the faculty are notable because they already have articles elsewhere on Wikipedia. --Omaryak 12:30, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
- After further research, I've found that the faculty members listed in the article did their primary work at places other than MCV/VCU. They were just passing through. While the faculty listed did perform the first transplants in Virginia, the transplants were not the first in the country, let alone the world. Hume performed the first transplant in the nation at Harvard before coming to MCV. It seems his accomplishment would be better listed over at the Harvard entry. I would welcome trivia like this in the MCV article for those seeking a more detailed history of the institution (with cited sources), but I don't think it belongs in a current listing of notable faculty of VCU. As for the Massey Cancer Center, I would support that information going into a new article about the center itself, but the director does not have information about him available on Wikipedia, so a source was definitely needed there. --Omaryak 21:41, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
