Corporate Research Center, CRC, aerials, Phase 2, Dairy Farm
Luxury apartments for research park. The Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, which has more than one million square feet of office space, is joining forces with a local real estate developer to add luxury apartments to the mix, reports the Roanoke Times. The company had previously added amenities to play soccer, lacrosse, volleyball, basketball, and disc golf to its work-live-play options.
“What we’re trying to do is create a self-contained community that has all the amenities at your fingertips,” said CRC President Joe Meredith. “The last amenity that we don’t have is housing.”
The Corporate Research Center, in my recollection from visits a decade ago, was a classic suburban office park, the main selling point of which was its proximity to the Virginia Tech campus. It was a pretty sterile place. Integrating apartments into the mix sounds like a good move — indicative of a larger trend in which suburban office parks are busily reinventing themselves as islands of walkable urbanism capable of attracting Millennials and the businesses that want to hire them.
Longwood revising bias reporting protocols. Longwood University has temporarily shut down its bias incident reporting system, reports Campus Reform, and is rewriting protocols to protect freedom of speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) had criticized Longwood for its particularly broad definition of what constituted a “bias” incident.
Director of Citizen Leadership and Social Justice Education Jonathan Page conceded that some of the definitions the school had used were problematic, telling the Rotunda that Virginia Assistant Attorney General Cameron O’Brion advised the university to remove the former protocol and provided recommendations for revision in response to [a] student’s complaint.
“A lot [of O’Brion’s recommendations] were based in how we were not only defining bias and hate crimes, they really didn’t fall in line with how the FBI defined hate crimes, that a lot of the things we defined as bias incidents were really freedom of speech issues,” Page explained. “Some of the language that we modeled came from some private institutions and so as a public institution we can’t have the same stance that privates do.”
