ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 10, 1996 TAG: 9602130074
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
YES, IT'S a tight budget year for Virginia. But state Sen. John Edwards is right to push ahead with the effort to get $6.4 million for a higher-education center in downtown Roanoke. As members of the General Assembly's money committees consider the proposal, they should keep in mind that:
* To prosper in the future, Virginia must make as its goal not merely an adequate system of higher education, but a world-class system.
* To make that goal attainable, the focus must be on cost-effectiveness, and on initiatives designed for the needs not of the century now ending but of the one just around the corner.
* To find an excellent example of an initiative so designed, Virginians need look no farther than the Roanoke proposal.
The plan has evolved in conversations among city officials, Norfolk Southern representatives and higher-education leaders. Norfolk Southern would donate its historic General Office Building North to the city. The building, vacated by NS when it built and moved into new quarters a few blocks to the south, would be renovated to house a growing array of higher-education offerings in the Roanoke Valley. The state appropriation sought by Roanoke-area representatives, to be funneled through Virginia Western Community College, is for those renovations,
Virginia has no urban university west of Richmond. Indeed, the Roanoke Valley is rare for a metropolitan area its size in having no four-year public institution at all.
This matters. In the emerging knowledge-based economy, a higher-education presence is increasingly essential for any city's well-being. Moreover, such an economy requires a work force engaged in lifelong learning - higher education's growth area.
Even so, the absence in Roanoke of a public university could prove not so bad ultimately - if seeds already sprouted are given room to grow. Meeting the demand for continuous learning and the continual updating of worker skills suggests the need for more programs located not on isolated campuses but near where people live and work, adhering not to rigid academic calendars but to the flexible rhythms of the work place.
And so, emerging to begin filling the Roanoke Valley void is not the old model of a free-standing and independent institution, but a newer paradigm of off-campus and long-distance instruction, and of partnerships among existing institutions whose contributions create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The Roanoke Valley Graduate Center, where several institutions offer master's level programs, would find a permanent home at the proposed center. So would the bachelor-level classes offered by Radford University in affiliation with burgeoning Virginia Western, through which the renovation money would be funneled. Other programs would add to the partnering.
But the promises of synergism don't end there. A higher-ed center and, just across the street, the new Conference Center of Roanoke and the newly rehabbed and reopened Hotel Roanoke, owned by Virginia Tech, would be mutually supportive. An essential and unique piece of Roanoke's railroad history and architecture would be preserved. Activity and commerce would increase, along with learning.
Tight times? Growth-building and -sustaining investments like the higher-ed center are the way to avoid far leaner times in the future.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB