VUU: a different mission

RICHMOND, Virginia -- Derrick Jones Jr. didn’t have a way to get to Virginia Tech for his interview for veterinary school, so his biology professor at Virginia Union University drove him there — in a snowstorm. And then the professor made the six-hour round trip to Blacksburg again to pick him up the next day.

His trip to Alabama for an interview at Tuskegee University was a similar team effort — pooled resources to pay for his airfare and rides to and from the airport.

That’s why Jones, a Maryland resident now in veterinary school at Tuskegee, feels he has many aunts, uncles and grandmothers at Virginia Union.

“My real family always says, ‘Every time you come home from Alabama, you don’t come straight home. You have to stop in Richmond and see those people,’ ” Jones said.

And he said he always tells them that if it weren’t for his other family at Virginia Union, “I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I wouldn’t be in vet school.”

His experiences speak to why proponents maintain that historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, remain a vital part of academia.

Virginia Union was one of six universities Jones applied to and the only HBCU. He was rejected by the five predominantly white institutions, sometimes called PWIs.

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