Students take, but don’t give back to city

Emmett Fleming 
Guest Columnist 

West Grace Street’s facelift evokes a question about VCU’s future: Does all this building and growth come with the unintended consequence of reforming the city through VCU’s student population boom? These projects bring money into the city and help the school in like fashion, but they come with some negatives; one is in the behavior of a booming student body, the other, the new sense of community that VCU’s expansion brings.

Last year, VCU earmarked almost $2 billion to expand the university, as stated by RVA News, which includes about $300 million for student housing and around $200 million for the medical campus. These projects will last through 2016. The expenditures are slated to provide new student housing on Grace Street, additions to the hospital on Broad Street and parking garages. The boom started happening at a time when VCU seems to be trying to redefine itself.

These additions to the campus expand the school’s borders, making space available for the student boom. This “bond” allows the school to build as quickly as they desire to supply a demand for growth as Richmond follows the path VCU carves. The city benefits by securing its revenue with an influx of students. But the members of this boom are not necessarily dedicated to staying in Richmond.

The city could be equated to a layover at an airport to these students, who lack a sense of belonging. Though this is not a bad transition, it goes a long way to establishing and sustaining a sort of “unloved” air onto this city. Almost as if the students impress their own foreign habits onto the city using Richmond’s rich historical and geographical past only as a backdrop, creating a comfortable disinterest in the city’s traditions rather than continuing to enrich them or invest in them. Broad Street’s transformation shows this — the city has a few more attractions to suit more students, with chain restaurants that have a smattering of metropolitan ambiance, like Five Guys and Jersey Mike’s, alongside newly built loft apartments close to VCU.

Joey Elswick, a 2003 graduate of VCU, remembers his time at the university well, remarking with tender reflection on the school’s then-gigantic size, “Well, my joke as a student was that VCU will become the capital of Virginia in my lifetime.”

The relationship between VCU and Richmond is one where the school expands from necessity and the city feeds off that success, like a tick on a dog.

Before coming to VCU, I attended a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. While I was there, the students had to take a service learning course. It was dreadful. Everyone avoided that class because it focused on Milwaukee and how to give back to it. It was community service for college credit. But the course forced us to engage in the community, help the those who were less fortunate. If we did not see the altruistic importance of this class, we still needed it for graduation. It was this class, from that little college that always impressed me.

Despite my criticisms of the college, the class always seemed to be most important to me. It was like the college insisted that the student body be aware of their surroundings. VCU does not have a requirement like that for students to graduate, although there are service learning programs in place for students to elect to take. If not a class like this, then a program that clearly and concisely outlines “who” Richmond is and how students can give a little back to Richmond’s community. VCU’s expansion alone will not do the job. We need to build the city and the school together investing equally, or at least, mindfully.

There is a clear distinction between VCU and Richmond — both benefit from this boom and continued investment, but the city and its communities need attention from the university so that the it is not just a machine churning higher numbers and getting record results. I hope to see VCU and Richmond work stronger as a unit instead of two separate entities.