of William and Mary.In 1928, Hibbs hired the Richmond-born Theresa Pollak as the first full-time art instructor. She founded the School of Art, the forerunner to the VCU School of the Arts. There were 8 full-time students the first year and 25 or 30 part-time students. When RPI became VCU in 1968, the School of the Arts was the largest professional art school in the country, with 1,200 full-time undergraduate students and 75 graduate students. RPI suffered from having a campus with no new buildings and instead consisted entirely of renovated houses. This in turn hurt RPI's reputation and so in effort to improve the image of RPI, the first new buildings were created in the late 1950s. In 1956, Franklin Street Gym became the first new building constructed on RPI's campus and still stands there today. In RPI's 1953 pamphlet, An Entirely Different College, Hibbs defined a professional institute as a college or university that arranged most of its programs of study around occupations or professions. Not abiding to the traditional University system, RPI gained a reputation as a unique institution in conservative Virginia. This uniqueness found its way into many of the art and literature students during the 1950s and 1960s as they adopted the beatnik look and dress style. When George Oliver took over as President in 1959, he did not believe that RPI still needed the name recognition that William and Mary brought. This, along with growing radicalism among the students and faculty of RPI began to sever the relationship with the parent school. Richmond Professional Institute became an independent state university for the first time in 1962 and took on the name Rams. References General Footnotes External links Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University