VCU’s Trani helped transform school, city and lives

Eugene Trani is known for the big buildings that transformed the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University and revived the pulse of downtown Richmond.

Even his critics acknowledge the impressive imprint Trani will leave when he steps down June 30 after 19 years as VCU's president.

From a basketball arena and residence halls that repopulated Broad Street to a business and engineering complex that expanded the academic campus east of Belvidere Street, Trani is credited with spearheading $2.2 billion in investment for a struggling city core.

But anyone who thinks bricks and mortar are Trani's sole legacy has not met Jibran Muhammad.

"My life has been totally changed in four years," said Muhammad, a senior who will graduate next month.

Muhammad was 16 and barely spoke English when he came to Northern Virginia from Pakistan. He worked three jobs in high school to help his parents and caught up on his sleep in class.

But this year, at 26, he is president of VCU's student government association with plans to go to law school. Last month he became a U.S. citizen.

At VCU he found mentors who helped him succeed, and he credits Trani for the chance the university gave him to excel.

"His vision is the reason so many lives have changed," he said.

"There are so many students in this institution who are ordinary just like me, who come from nowhere, who face a lot of adversity," he said. VCU "offers us an opportunity to make a difference, to do something with our lives."

Muhammad personifies how VCU has come to define itself during Trani's tenure -- a university of opportunity.

VCU, which has become the state's largest university, has opened its doors to many first-generation college students such as Muhammad. Last year, nearly 60 percent of VCU graduates were the first in their families to receive a college diploma.

It is the fulfillment of a pledge that Trani made when he arrived in Richmond: He said he would make VCU "the people's university."

"He has built a more diverse and vibrant institution than it was when he came here," said Gordon K. Davies, the former longtime director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia who had been considered for the presidency himself.

Trani could have "chased after the prestige that goes with taking more and more well-qualified students," Davies added. But he said it would have been a disservice to have built that sort of a wall around VCU.

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When Trani came to VCU in 1990, the university was primarily a commuter school with an enrollment of 21,764. Last fall, 32,284 students enrolled, and that growth is the source of both praise and criticism of Trani.

Critics see a university where increases in the number of students outpaced the hiring of faculty, where new buildings weren't supported by enough people, and where growth came at the expense of historic city neighborhoods.

But accolades are far more likely to be heard than criticism as Trani, 69, nears the end of his tenure. Some faculty members who have been outspoken in their concerns about VCU's fast growth say they prefer not to openly discuss those issues now.

Some cite Trani's health, but one said he didn't want to be seen as "still stirring the pot" as a new president comes on board.

Trani may have been downtown's savior, this faculty member said, "but that wasn't his job."

"It's easier to generate funds to build a building than it is to buy the broom to sweep it with."

Others have a far more positive view of the landscape that Trani shaped, and they wonder what Richmond would be like without him.

"I think of President Trani as Jimmy Stewart in 'It's a Wonderful Life' for the Richmond Broad Street corridor," said Gary L. Rhodes, president of J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College.

Trani, said political analyst Robert D. Holsworth, gave VCU its identity as an urban research university by melding its medical and academic campuses.

While some had viewed VCU's location in a deteriorating downtown as a liability, Trani used it as an asset, Holsworth said. The research focus he gave the university attracted a talented work force that ultimately transformed the regional economy.

The campus now reminds Holsworth of the United Nations plaza.

"It represents the future," said Holsworth, a former VCU dean. "It is truly multicultural."

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Trani, who declined to be interviewed for this article, said at a recent campus forum that his last year as president has been interesting and difficult.

He has lost about 25 pounds, and he said people have hinted he needs a new wardrobe.

But his suit-wearing days are almost over, he said. He expects he will be dressing in khakis for his new role as a distinguished professor in the Honors College. And, he added, he doesn't recommend losing weight the way he did.

In July, Trani underwent quintuple coronary artery bypass surgery and announced the next month that he would retire a year early for health reasons.

His announcement came amid two controversies that erupted almost simultaneously in May. The campus was preoccupied throughout the summer and fall by criticism over research contracts with cigarette maker Philip Morris and by an investigation into the improper awarding of a bachelor's degree to Rodney Monroe, Richmond's police chief at the time.

Then in January, the campus police chief at the time was arrested on charges of soliciting sex online from a detective posing as a teenager.

"We all have challenges we have to get beyond," said Ohio University President Roderick J. McDavis, who served as VCU's provost from 1999 to 2004.

He thinks Trani will be judged not by such controversies but by the difference in the way VCU looked when he took office and how it looked when he stepped down.

Facilities such as the new complex for business and engineering are necessary to be "players on a national level," McDavis said.

When he was VCU's top academic officer, McDavis had expressed concern that crowded classes and reliance on part-time faculty could threaten the university's accreditation.

Now, as president of Ohio University, he said he has a different perspective.

Trani faced difficult decisions on where to invest limited resources, McDavis said. But the infrastructure Trani built was necessary "to attract top-notch faculty."

"I understand that now as a president more than I did as a provost and vice president for academic affairs," McDavis said.

Anne G. "Panny" Rhodes, a board of visitors member who will become rector in July, said criticism that VCU sacrificed quality for growth is misguided.

She noted that VCU has stepped up to accommodate the growth in the number of Virginia students seeking to go to college. About 86 percent of VCU undergraduates are state residents.

Rhodes, a former state delegate, watched what she described as the "amazing" progress Trani made building VCU into a research university during her years in the state legislature.

The National Science Foundation ranked VCU 104th out of 657 schools in research and development expenditures for fiscal 2007.

Despite his health concerns, Trani has not slowed his ambitious agenda, Rhodes said.

"I don't think you hold back Dr. Trani," she said. "He's an engine that just goes."

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In a February meeting with the faculty senate, Trani said the biggest change since he became president is that VCU has become a true university.

Dan Ream, the faculty senate president, has seen that change firsthand.

"I'm actually pre-Trani," said Ream, who came to VCU from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

He said he immediately saw a difference between the two campuses. "VCU was not the center of attention," he said. "When I came here in 1986, it was a fairly generic state university."

The personality of the university began to change as VCU became less of a commuter school, he said.

Residence halls were built -- VCU now has housing for 4,986 students, compared with 2,684 when Trani arrived -- drawing a younger group to campus.

In the 1980s, Ream would have been taken aback to see a student with his face painted with the school colors of gold and black, he said. "Now it's relatively routine."

The VCU Rams play at the Siegel Center, where a jersey bearing Trani's name hangs next to one for senior Eric Maynor, who has twice led his team to the NCAA basketball tournament.

The recreation and convocation center, which replaced a block of vacant warehouses, began the transformation of a desolate stretch of Broad Street when it opened in 1999. A block to the east is the School of the Arts building, which opened the same year and houses VCU's top-ranked sculpture program.

New residence halls and the Siegel Center put pressure on the Carver community to the north of Broad. That discord led to the Carver-VCU Partnership, which offers mentoring and health services as well as police patrols in the neighborhood.

But the loudest protests against Trani's vision for VCU have come from Oregon Hill on the south side of the Monroe Park academic campus.

"He's expanded VCU at the expense of a lot of other components of Richmond," said Scott Burger, president of the Oregon Hill Neighborhood Association.

Burger laments the passing of the vibrant music scene that was along Grace Street through the 1980s and the opening of chain restaurants that have replaced homegrown restaurants with their local flavor.

He sees the mammoth recreation center under construction along Cary Street as a major intrusion into his neighborhood, which is wedged between campus and the James River.

Burger said Oregon Hill residents thought they had a commitment for a much smaller facility. VCU last year demolished an old livery stable and moved another to make way for the 100,000-square-foot addition to the Cary Street Gymnasium.

He finds it ironic that Trani, a historian, "demolished historic fabric that cannot be replaced."

Such dissension is inevitable, said Melvin Law, who sees Trani as "a transformational agent" who "came to Richmond at a very critical time and the right time."

Law recalls meeting with Trani on ways to improve city schools while Law was Richmond School Board chairman in the 1990s.

"Progress has a price," said Law, president of the Richmond branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "When there's a need to grow, something has to give."

Wesley J. Poynor, an associate professor of pharmaceutics, credits Trani with hand-picking a first-rate leadership team. But Poynor, who is taking early retirement in May after 28 years at VCU, thinks the rapid growth on the academic campus will be an issue VCU will face for years to come.

VCU's student-faculty ratio last fall was 18-to-1, a figure that includes the medical campus, where class sizes are smaller. That compares with an average of 14.8-to-1 for other Virginia doctoral institutions.

"It's much harder to grow a faculty population than a student population," Poynor said.

Even so, he noted that the longevity of faculty members such as himself un Continued on Page A7 derscores that most view VCU as good place to work.

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Trani's forceful personality has been a factor in several campus controversies. It surfaced during the investigation into how Rodney Monroe, now police chief in Charlotte, N.C., received a bachelor's degree without taking enough courses at VCU.

The episode highlighted Trani's political alliances with Richmond's power elite. Then-Mayor L. Douglas Wilder, the former governor who is also a VCU professor, had hired Monroe as city police chief and encouraged him to get his degree. Wilder did not return phone calls for comment.

A dean who signed off on the degree said he felt "implied pressure" from the president's office.

That dean reported to Holsworth, who adamantly denies there was any such conspiracy to get Monroe his degree. Both deans left the university amid the controversy.

Holsworth said the anonymous allegations unfairly tarnished Trani, who "suffered physically as well as psychologically from the types of attacks that were made."

An investigation ordered by the board of visitors cleared Trani.

In 2000, the board also dismissed a grievance against Trani by a longtime member of VCU's medical faculty. Dr. Steven Price, a VCU physiologist since 1966, contended that he was fired on Trani's orders from his part-time job as VCU's basketball scorekeeper for expressing concerns in a newspaper interview about the university's academic and research programs.

"I think it's in the past," Price said of that dispute. He describes his relationship with Trani as cordial.

Ream, the faculty senate president, thinks Trani may have on occasion been "set up as a straw man." There are some on campus who might invoke his name -- "Trani wants it done this way" -- as a way to stifle dissent within their department, he said.

Ream's position as director of outreach and distance education means he is not eligible for tenure. Even so, he said he has no qualms about speaking his mind to VCU administrators.

"I deal with them honestly and straightforward," he said. "They want to be aware of what faculty concerns are."

Still, he acknowledges that with 1,927 full-time instructional faculty members and 1,161 part-timers, "experience varies widely."

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Trani is the fourth president of VCU, formed in 1968 by the merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia.

But it was Trani who stitched together the two campuses, renaming MCV the VCU Health System. The 88-acre academic side of VCU became the Monroe Park campus, while the 52-acre medical end is now the MCV campus.

Subordination of the MCV name has been a sore that hasn't entirely healed. In 2003, a judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by an MCV professor who wanted to block the name change.

Trani was known to publicly bristle over continued use of the MCV name. But in August, it was all laughter when he gave MCV baseball hats to two state legislators at a reception honoring them for their support of the medical campus.

Linda Corey, a professor of human genetics who is vice president of the faculty senate, said part of the objection to the name change was that MCV's reputation was well-established. She thinks the anger has subsided now that the VCU Health System name has become better known.

"It's not such a visceral issue anymore," she said.

But it's still an issue. Last month, Michael Rao, who will become VCU's fifth president July 1, met on the medical campus with students, faculty and staff and was asked about fundraising efforts.

"Call it MCV and you'll get alumni support," muttered a faculty member attending the session.

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With about 18,000 employees, including those who work for the health system, and more than 32,000 students, VCU is now more populous than 90 percent of the localities in Virginia. Its arts school has a Middle East campus in Qatar with about 200 students that just celebrated its 10th anniversary.

Trani has been closely entwined with the politics and the economy of Richmond. He has traveled abroad with Wilder, for whom the School of Government and Public Affairs is named. When Wilder was governor, Trani accompanied him on a business mission to China and South Korea. When Wilder was mayor, the VCU Foundation paid for him to accompany Trani on trips to India, England and Russia.

Trani is on the board of directors of the tobacco company Universal Corp. and is a former director for LandAmerica Financial Group Inc., now in bankruptcy. He served as chairman of the Metropolitan Richmond Chamber of Commerce and was the catalyst for the development of the public-private biotechnology research park by the MCV campus.

According to the university, VCU and its health system are responsible for $2.2 billion in capital construction and renovation projects since Trani arrived in 1990. That includes work that is under construction or has been authorized.

Trani came to VCU from the University of Wisconsin, where he was vice president for academic affairs for the 160,000-student system. At VCU, he pledged that he would be an advocate for diversity and promised that a close relationship with the community would be a cornerstone of his administration.

Trani's legacy "is important to what our state has become during these two decades," said University of Virginia President John T. Casteen III, who had briefly considered seeking the VCU job himself.

Casteen was president of the University of Connecticut at the time and withdrew from consideration because he said he quickly decided he "was not a great fit" for the VCU post. Casteen became U.Va. president a month after Trani took over at VCU.

"In my trade, everyone knows Gene's successes at VCU," Casteen said by e-mail. "He has become a legend for his capacity to imagine and inspire change, and to build the surrounding city while also building the university."

VCU "attracted exactly the right president, and Gene has delivered what he promised."

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at (804) 649-6119 or .