The disappearance of Mechanicsville teenager Theresa Marie Meadows languished in relative obscurity from the time she vanished in September 2004—until she was located alive last week in South Carolina. On the flip side, the case of missing 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Dana Harrington has received intense state and national attention since she disappeared Oct. 17 after a Metallica concert in Charlottesville. A three-day search last weekend involved more than 500 volunteers.

For a moment, it appeared that the timing could not have been worse. As the band played the final notes of “Pomp and Circumstance” and the last of the students took their seats on Worsham Field, the first drops of rain began to fall. Black clouds rolled in from behind Lane Stadium’s south end zone as Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger addressed the Class of 2009.

A letter from Virginia Tech’s president reaffirming the university’s commitment to diversity has reignited an ideological dispute over political correctness on campus. Tech officials last month backed away from a proposed policy that critics said tied promotion and tenure to participation in diversity initiatives. An array of mostly conservative organizations had lobbied against the guidelines, calling them an affront to academic freedom and a political litmus test for promotion.

Virginia Tech’s board of visitors is holding down tuition increases for next year. Tech, which had anticipated a 9 percent rise, has approved a 5 percent increase for tuition and mandatory fees for Virginia undergraduate students. That will bring their cost to $8,605, a $407 increase. Total average annual costs for a Virginia undergraduate student living on campus will rise from $13,674 to $14,429.

Virginia Tech timeline

The story of April 16, 2007 first of three parts His Hokie Passport keycard wasn’t coded to let him in the dorm where, the year before, he’d tried to kindle a relationship with a girl from his high school. But his behavior then had been so bizarre—he stood in the fourth-floor hallway with sunglasses on and a hood over his head—that she’d called the police.

About 10 days before the beheading of a female graduate student from China that led to a murder charge against Haiyang Zhu, he told a fellow student at Virginia Tech that he was attracted to the woman. “He said he liked the girl very much and he wants to be her boyfriend, I think,“ said the friend, who requested anonymity for privacy reasons.

Virginia Tech police chief said 22-year-old slaying victim had been decapitated. She had only recently arrived at Tech to begin graduate studies.

The Virginia State Crime Commission yesterday decided it will not recommend legislative passage of a bill that would require people who buy guns at gun shows to undergo mandatory background checks.

Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times is posting a number of documents related to the April 16, 2007, massacre that were released to victims’ families on Wednesday. The documents provide a new portrait of shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

Nuclear engineering studies is making a comeback in Virginia. Some of the state’s universities have added programs, are planning to do so or are considering it because of renewed interest in the nuclear industry.

Three weeks after its emergency notification system failed to deliver messages to students, Virginia Tech ran a test of the system yesterday and said it apparently worked well. More than 35,000 subscribers to the VT Alerts system appear to have received a test message sent yesterday afternoon via text message, e-mail and telephone, said Tech spokesman Mark Owczarski.

Three weeks after its emergency notification system failed to deliver messages to students, Virginia Tech ran a test of the system yesterday and said it apparently worked well.

The head of a state panel that investigated the Virginia Tech massacre says he would be willing to fix any serious errors in the massive report, an action being demanded by some agitated parents of the dead and wounded. But Col. Gerald Massengill, who headed the governor-appointed panel, said, “I don’t know if it really needs to be done. . . . If the governor feels it’s important enough to have an appendix, to get it straight, we would want to interview people involved, we would want to do things not available at the time.“

Virginia Tech, whose teams are known as the Fighting Gobblers, is leading a consortium trying to determine the genetic sequence of that Thanksgiving Day staple—the domestic turkey.