Virginia Union University students will have access to a new fitness center when they return to campus in the fall. And students living in Newman Hall can look forward to air-conditioned dorm rooms. Those are among $1.8 million in expenditures approved Saturday by VUU’s board of trustees. The board agreed to spend $450,000 for additional faculty members and for personnel in student affairs and the library.

The University of Virginia has received a record 21,511 applications for 3,170 places for the fall semester, an increase in applications of at least 16 percent from last year. Preliminary numbers released yesterday show a greater diversity in the applicant pool for first-year undergraduate students: 22 percent more African-American students, 56 percent more Hispanic students, 50 percent more international students and 100 percent more Native American students.

A group of historians will explore the state of the country on the eve of the Civil War in a conference April 29 at the University of Richmond. Sponsored by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission, the conference will be the first event commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war. UR President Edward L. Ayers will moderate as Civil War historians discuss events of 1859 that foreshadowed the war that would begin two years later.

Virginia Union has become the third area university in search of a new president with Belinda Childress Anderson’s announcement that she’ll step down June 30. Anderson told faculty members Tuesday the date that she will leave the job she has held for five years, and she reiterated that it was her decision to move on. “This is her decision, and she wanted the faculty to know that,“ said Lucille Brown, a member of VUU’s board of trustees who attended the faculty meeting. Anderson announced Nov. 25 that she would resign to make way for new leadership, but did not say when.