Union needs to toot its horn louder

Next to the job Barack Obama will start in January, the presidency of Virginia Union University may be the toughest gig around.

Imagine inheriting the helm of a historically black college with relatively threadbare facilities in an increasingly competitive higher education environment. Did we mention that the nation is in the midst of a major recession?

You must schmooze, raise funds and trumpet the story of the glory that is VUU. And you must sell a millennial generation with no cruel memories of segregation on the benefits of a historically black institution.

Any takers?

Belinda Childress Anderson recently announced that she's leaving after a five-year run.

With her selection as the first woman president at VUU, Anderson made history. But her aversion to publicity did not bode well. VUU -- my alma mater -- needs salesmanship at the top, not reticence.

Anderson, in an e-mail, listed among her accomplishments "bringing financial stability to Virginia Union University" and strengthening its academics through the re-accreditation of its programs in business, theology, interdisciplinary studies and social work.

But turmoil, like everything that happens at this intensely private school, simmered under the surface.

Athletics -- always VUU's most visible face -- offered a glimpse of the dysfunction. Anderson presided during the awkward departures of two football coaches, including Union icon Willard Bailey. The low mark of her tenure may have been the school's baffling divorce from the Gold Bowl.

Gold Bowl weekend had become a social calendar staple and VUU's signature public-relations event. The football game, tailgate party and other activities highlighted the school at its most extroverted. Its mysterious demise was another stone in the granite wall VUU has so purposefully built around itself.

Union has a surfeit of history. But the school, curiously, has failed to capitalize on it.

VUU -- whose beginnings are in the former Lumpkin's slave jail -- should have partnered with alum L. Douglas Wilder on the former governor's vision of a national slavery museum that could have been an extension of the school's academic program.

VUU has as many distinguished graduates per capita as any school in the nation.

There's Wilder, of course, and Samuel Gravely, the Navy's first black admiral, and the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, the civil-rights leader who headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the behest of Martin Luther King Jr.

Add Max Robinson, the first black news anchor for a major television network; his brother, human-rights activist and author Randall Robinson; Bishop Leontine T.C. Kelly, a trailblazing female religious leader; and Dr. Jean Louise Harris, the first African-American to graduate from the Medical College of Virginia. You could go on and on.

VUU has much to promote, if it only would. But the institution has become too isolated, insular and cautious.

Anderson called VUU "a healthy and thriving institution," and said her successor's greatest challenge "will be to keep the university in its current state in light of the predictions of a sustained recession."

But VUU should not be content with its current state. The school needs a 21st century vision worthy of its illustrious past. Contact Michael Paul Williams at (804) 649-6815 or .