Blacksburg--The students worked into the night in the fourth-floor hallway of Virginia Tech's Durham Hall, wheeling makeshift radio gear past the doorways of empty offices and classrooms.

Ajid Bhanod shifted a tape measure from hand to hand. It was his job to see how far the undergraduate engineering majors could throw a radio signal. The longest transmission had been 110 feet; now they were trying for 112 feet. Like the other students, Bhanod, who is working on a master's degree in electrical engineering, gave elaborate descriptions of the research surrounding the patchwork of wires and alligator clips. This was part of a much bigger puzzle, he said, one whose answer involved a new take on the idea of magnetically levitated trains. The students' professor, Krishnan Ramu of Tech's electrical engineering department, for years had championed environmentally cleaner, cheaper alternatives to highways.

But there would be time for those explanations later. Now Bhanod watched with the others as 22-year-old James Hooper knelt beside the transmitter and aimed a thin antenna. There was quiet, then a cheer down the hall as waves danced across the receiving unit's amber screen.

"It's working," Hooper said.

On the shoulders of projects like this rest Tech's hopes for the latest in what has been 130 years of near-constant transformation: the university's goal, announced by Tech President Charles Steger as he took office two years ago, of joining the nation's Top 30 research universities by the decade's end. The long shift from "cow college," as its detractors and even one of its historians termed it, to would-be research titan continues to send ripples throughout Western Virginia and beyond. Government and business leaders in the New River and Roanoke valleys pin the region's economic hopes to high-tech spinoffs and commercial applications of university research.

Big hopes, big changes

But the Top 30 goal is not an easy one.

Since Steger was installed as president in April 2000, Tech achieved its goal of yearly 10 percent to 12 percent increases in spending on research and development, sending this total above an annual $200 million for the first time. Yet the university slipped three places to 48th on the ranking that Tech officials held as their primary yardstick, a National Science Foundation list based solely on spending. The General Assembly's cuts to higher education budgets this spring, which even after tuition increases mean $25 million less for Tech in the next two years, present new challenges.

Now, besides the research goal, university administrators talk about attaining a more generalized Top 30, of "raising the intensity of intellectual activity, whether it's in the philosophy department or anywhere else," as Steger put it recently. They want to measure their progress on a variety of national rankings, such as those issued by U.S. News & World Report or the National Research Council. Top 30 status "truly is a metaphor for the scholarship," Vice Provost for Research Leonard Peters said.

Steger and Peters predict a sort of rising tide from greater research spending - that increased quality in any part of the university will bring campuswide benefits. Steger casts the goal in do-or-die terms, predicting an era when only a handful of top-tier institutions have the resources to conduct high-level research.

But apart from whether Tech can become a Top 30 institution is the question of what the attempt will mean for the university, and whether such status is meaningful enough to pursue at all.

Long time engineering science and mechanics professor John Duke Jr. graduated from Johns Hopkins University, which tops the NSF rankings. "I never once heard anyone at Hopkins say we're number one on that list. ... I just don't know if what we're all striving for is solved by being Top 30."

Recent conversations with more than three dozen faculty members, students and administrators showed a spectrum of opinions about the Top 30 drive - optimism but also worries, some fed by uncertainties about the still-unfolding reorganization of Tech's colleges, which addresses both budget cuts and excellence goals. Some on campus are concerned an emphasis on a Top 30 research berth could separate arts and humanities programs, which teach most of Tech's undergraduate core curriculum, from the engineering and science areas that have the potential to attract more research money.

After all, said Paul Torgersen, Tech's immediate past president and a supporter of trying to reach the Top 30, "If an English professor gets a $1,500 grant for travel expenses, that's big news. ... That just falls off the table in engineering."

And engineering research is likely to hit a financial ceiling soon, Torgersen said, as federal funding priorities continue to shift toward medical and biotechnology research. Administrators say the university will deepen its focus in both areas, using partnerships with other institutions - including Carilion Health System and Wake Forest University - to cover Tech's lack of a medical school.

"The fear has been that the arts would become a stepchild," said David Johnson of the theater department, a professor at Tech since 1988. Generally positive about Top 30 goals, which include attracting more graduate students, Johnson said he wondered how those goals mesh with the situation his department faces. There will be no incoming theater graduate students next year because no money is available to support them, Johnson said.

If too many resources are shifted away from the arts and humanities, Tech faces a danger Johnson describes in metaphysical terms: "If the university does that, I think it stands in danger - not to be hyperbolic, but to lose its soul."

Magnetics and genetics

In many ways, professor Ramu's work is similar to the research conducted at Tech since at least 1921, when the Engineering Experiment Station joined an agricultural station as the second of what are now more than 100 research centers and institutes. But in other ways, Ramu is in line with the latest thinking of Tech's administration.

For one thing, it isn't only graduate students who are building what Ramu calls PERTS, an acronym for Personal Electric Rapid Transit System. PERTS is a magnetic-levitation concept that Ramu, director of Tech's Center for Rapid Transit Systems, says is more efficient and durable, and cheaper to build, than the magnetic trains in use in various parts of the world. He envisions a system of rails run down interstate medians that would whisk automobiles - drivers and passengers still inside - between cities at 120 mph. "Take your car and skip the traffic," is one of the project's slogans.

There are 50 undergraduate students working on Ramu's project this semester. Some are so taken with PERTS, and with the chance to participate in the sort of research more often reserved for graduate students, that they sign up for Ramu's class semester after semester despite receiving no additional credit toward graduation.

One of these students, Kevin Alexander, said the attraction of the class is that Ramu sets goals and offers advice, but lets students figure how to achieve their objectives. "Seeing those things in motion and knowing you had a small part in creating it is a feeling of pride and accomplishment you don't get from answering a question in a textbook," he said.

Ramu's emphasis on turning his research into products also puts him in line with trends at Tech and in higher education nationwide. Spurred by a Tech alumnus who sits on his department's industry advisory board and with help from VT Knowledgeworks, a university alliance that tries to turn patents into products, Ramu helped start a company called TransNetics to market his research.

While the technology could have applications from door openers to launch catapults for shipborne military aircraft, Ramu's passion is for mass transportation.

With a well-polished Power Point presentation on his laptop - and a nifty computer-enhanced video that shows PERTS pods zipping past interstate traffic - Ramu takes time between classes to make the rounds of business groups and potential sponsors. Having built three variations of his design in a classroom, he's searching for money to build a full-size prototype, a 200-foot rail and a platform that could carry a loaded sport utility vehicle.

That would take $3 million to $5 million, just the sort of grant Tech administrators say they'll need in increasing numbers as the decade moves along.

According to a business model Ramu created, a PERTS system would cost one-third the price of asphalt highways and should break even in four years by charging riders 30 cents per mile.

Standing beside the largest of his prototypes, which runs on a room-length steel I-beam, Ramu flipped a switch and waited. Whirring noises came from a 160-pound metal platform that looked like a trolley carrying the innards of several personal computers.

Ramu flipped another switch and, with a groan, the platform jerked upward and hovered just over the rail. Then it slowly traveled to the end of the rail and back - lifted, stabilized and driven by Ramu's patented array of concentric electro-magnetic coils.

"This is the first of its kind in the world," Ramu said. "This is all Virginia Tech technology. We don't borrow from anyone else."

In Tech's Corporate Research Center, a somewhat different model of university research is unfolding at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute.

Bruno Sobral, the institute's director, flipped through brightly colored computer images of genetic data as he explained PathPort, a new initiative that attracted $4.5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense for the first of what is anticipated to be a five-year project.

Though the bioinformatics institute does the untangling of genes that would produce the images on Sobral's screen, PathPort, which is short for Pathogen Portal, isn't about that kind of basic science. Instead, Sobral's team is writing a computer program to let scientists access data from already-completed studies.

A dozen or so programmers are working on what Sobral calls an "Esperanto for genome data" that would let researchers link databases to ferret out interactions between disease-causing organisms, their victims and the environment. The system will retrieve information from computers around the globe, giving warning of the patterns that lead to an outbreak, for example, or showing possibilities for cures based on previously unnoticed genetic similarities between plant, animal and human pathogens.

"We may find out there are certain relationships that are used over and over and over again. And if we find that out, there may be certain Achilles' heels we can exploit," Sobral said.

Serious interest in the project didn't pick up until after last year's anthrax attacks, which highlighted the problems of scattering disease information among scores of agencies.

Now the bioinformatics institute is consulting with researchers at the National Institutes of Health, IBM, Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. A draft version of the program is due Sept. 1. Then there will be another round of visits to the dozens of organizations that Sobral hopes will use PathPort.

It's an arduous schedule, but one made somewhat easier by the fact that only one of the bioinformatics institute's eight researchers teaches a class. Sobral said he and another institute researcher hope to also teach next year.

Waking the giant

Harry Temple, who spent 28 years writing a six-volume, 5,038-page history of Tech, traces the beginning of the university's research boom to industrialization around the turn of the last century. "The agriculture side was shrinking and the engineering side was growing," Temple said.

But Temple, like other historians, cites the 1962-74 presidency of T. Marshall Hahn Jr. as the turning point for Tech.

Hahn became Tech's youngest president at age 35 and quickly began reshaping what he recently described as a "sleeping giant," making Tech fully co ed and making membership in the Corps of Cadets optional. Rapid growth followed and enrollment nearly tripled to 18,000 by the time Hahn stepped down to join the management of Georgia-Pacific Corp.

Under Hahn, Tech became a comprehensive university with expanded programs in arts and humanities. Tech also created a research division that by the end of the 1960s had secured annual funding of more than $9 million.

During the 13-year presidency of William Lavery, who followed Hahn, research truly began to flower. Lavery, who lives in Blacksburg, said he was able to capitalize on Hahn's initiatives and strong state support to hire a "superstar" faculty member in each department with the goal of attracting more research support. In 1985, Tech first cracked the Top 50 of the NSF list, ranking 49 th with research spending of $69.1 million.

Lavery laughed recently as he remembered the delight in Burruss Hall, Tech's central administration building, when word came from Richmond that the university's appropriation would support 10 percent raises for faculty and allow the filling of 200 positions, half of them new. "Man, are we having fun or what?" Lavery recalled Provost John Wilson exclaiming.

Hahn, who still has a home in Montgomery County, and Lavery said they don't envy their successors, who have faced reduced state support since the budget crunch of the early 1990s.

"I think it's short-sighted on the part of state leaders," Hahn said. "Investment in higher education brings rich dividends."

Asked if he thought Tech can become a Top 30 research university by 2010, Lavery hesitated.

"I would've said no question," he said.

Campus concerns

Ask students about the Top 30 drive and responses - at least during trips to campus during the past month - often are a shrug. "I've seen more in advertisements. The school saying: 'This is what we're trying toward,'" said Sartaj Dhami, one of the students working with Ramu.

One effect that may be felt by future students, or at least by future high schoolers applying to be Tech students, is in admissions standards. Administrators and faculty say intensified research will require more graduate students, and since the university does not plan to greatly increase total enrollment, now at 25,643, that means reducing the number of undergraduate slots from its present 21,419.

Karen Torgersen, director of undergraduate admissions and Paul Torgersen's daughter, said fewer slots means tougher admissions standards. Already, with the number of applications rising in recent years, the "solid B" high school student who had no problem getting into Tech five years ago needs a B+ or A- average, Torgersen said. She emphasized there's been no action yet to actually reduce undergraduate admissions.

Faculty members were quick to point to positive aspects of the Top 30 drive, though many said too much focus on research dollars could split the university along revenue lines.

"What about poetry? Creative research? A musical composition?" asked Edd Sewell, a communications studies professor at Tech since 1972.

"It's so practical for Tech to say let's be Top 30," said Nikki Giovanni, the poet who has been a Tech English professor since 1987. "I'm saying, hey, let's dream a little."

Giovanni and other faculty members said building excellence - whatever the target - depends on fostering a creative climate, and that depends on supporting the arts. "This is the imagination that makes the money happen," Giovanni said.

Harry Dorn, a Tech chemistry professor since 1974 and director of the Center for Self-Assembled Nanostructures and Devices, said the Top 30 goal offers a welcome chance to focus the efforts, and maybe trim the numbers, of Tech's many centers. But Dorn, like others, worried that blows to Tech's research infrastructure will make it hard to compete with schools that have not endured a decade of budget hits.

For example, Dorn remembers that in the 1980s his research was supported by research associates and a glass-blowing shop. Those positions disappeared more than 10 years ago. Now, despite Dorn's string of discoveries in nanotechnology, he and his colleagues work with equipment that "should be in a museum," he said.

"It's like we're telling you we want you to be one of the Top 30 boxers, but we're going to tie your hands behind your back," Dorn said.

Duke, the engineering professor, said faculty feel pressured to choose between improving their courses and seeking out grants.

"If you feel like you're working at full tilt now, what do you do to try to bring in twice as much?" asked Duke, who has been at Tech since 1978 and whose research involves studying how bridges decay. "For many of us, the reality is the biotechnology area isn't going to fund the type of research we do."

And the research arena is much more competitive than it used to be. "If the government were to advertise they need research on doing back flips in the nude, people would line up saying, 'I have experience doing that,'" Duke said.

Anita Puckett, at Tech for nine years and coordinator of the Appalachian Studies program, said the Top 30 drive is helping the humanities grow.

"We're beginning to make things happen," said Puckett, pointing to her program's involvement in the new Scots-Irish center, which is a collaboration with the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and the new South Atlantic Humanities Center, a joint venture with the University of Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. "People should stay tuned."

Torgersen, the former president and now an engineering professor, poked fun at the notion of striving for a place on any list, writing in an e-mail, "Any ranking is suspect (unless you are ranked relatively well)."

One of his goals as president was becoming one of the nation's Top 10 land-grant universities. That remains unfulfilled, he said. But that goal shifted to a successful effort to build Tech's endowment, an example of how in the university's present Top 30 hopes, "the journey may be as important as the destination," Torgersen said.

On the fourth floor of Durham Hall, the students said the effort of assembling their radio rig was definitely more valuable than the transmission record - so far - of 112 feet. They'd had to overcome technical hurdles and a last-minute scramble after discovering just weeks before the end of the semester that they couldn't afford a key component in their design.

Now they switched wires on the $30 board that had replaced the $350 unit they'd wanted, scratched their heads over the set up's unexpected quirks and watched the receiver to see if the data was getting through. Students nodded as Bhanod called the exercise valuable preparation for the real-world tangles they'd face as engineers. "Equations may work but the actual thing may not," 22-year-old Michelle Douglass said.

The waves jumped and flickered on the screen in front of her.