VCU Board of Visitors Minutes

About this collection
The files presented here are copies of the official minutes of the VCU Board of Visitors and its Executive Committee. All Virginia public universities are governed by a Board of Visitors appointed by the Governor and approved by the General Assembly. The Board's minutes document the growth of VCU from its founding to the present.

The 1965 report of the Bird Commission recommended the creation of a state university in Richmond. Governor Mills E. Godwin Jr. created the Wayne Commission, chaired by Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Edward A. Wayne Sr., to make a recommendation on the best way to achieve this objective. In 1967 they recommended the creation of Virginia Commonwealth University.

In doing so, the commission rejected the notion that this would be a merger of the Medical College of Virginia, founded in 1838, and the Richmond Professional Institute, formed in 1917. Instead, they envisioned an entirely new entity with these two institutions as integral components. Their report stated that "an urban-oriented university is unique in that its basic philosophy concentrates on meeting the needs of an urban population living and working in an urban environment. The city is truly its living laboratory."

Three years of commissions, studies, and legislative activity culminated on March 1, 1968 with Virginia Governor Godwin signing legislation creating Virginia Commonwealth University. VCU's Board of Visitors first met in April 23, 1968 with historian and newspaper editor Virginius Dabney serving as the University's first Rector.

These minutes cover every meeting of both the Board of Visitors and its Executive Committee from April 23, 1968 to October 28, 2010. Minutes from 1968 to 2007 were scanned from the bound originals located in the President's Office. An annotated copy of the legislation establishing VCU was included with those bound volumes, and is available here. From 2007 on, the minutes in PDF form appearing on the VCU Board of Visitors web page were captured for inclusion here. This web site will be updated twice a year. These minutes are presented as PDF files, and they are full-text searchable.

Copyright
This material is protected by copyright, and copyright is held by VCU. You are permitted to use this material in any way that is permitted by copyright. In addition, this material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Acknowledgment of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as a source is required.

Credits
VCU Libraries digitized the minutes for this collection (from 1968 to 2007) in 2008. Jennifer Cason supervised student employees, digitization, and quality control. Student employees Kaitlin Foray and Kelly Crone assisted with digitization. Metadata Librarian Mary Anne Dyer created the metadata for this digital collection.

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