As a land-grant institution, Virginia Tech has a long tradition of creating and disseminating new knowledge on issues that are of public concern and importance. The School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) supports these missions through its instruction, research, and public service programs. The School’s goals are to focus Virginia Tech’s excellence in government, public administration, international affairs, planning, public policy, and urban affairs, to help individuals and communities across the world understand their most critical problems. Since 1996, SPIA has established new interdisciplinary and collaborative links across several of the University’s colleges.

As a “soft school,” SPIA encompassed six departmental units and one program spread across three colleges – Agriculture and Life Sciences, Arts and Sciences, and Architecture and Urban Studies, plus the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Because of this mix of units, over sixty faculty members, 200 graduate students, and 1,100 undergraduate students were covered under the umbrella of SPIA’s activities.

In response to the University’s overall plans for restructuring in 2001-2003, however, the School assumed a new organizational structure due to changes in almost all of the departments and colleges that constituted SPIA at its beginnings. Faculty from departments in the former College of Arts and Sciences, including Geography, Political Science, and Sociology, created a new program focused upon Government and International Affairs (GIA) during 2003. This unit joined the existing departments of Urban Affairs and Planning and Public Administration and Public Policy in a new “hard” School of Public and International Affairs inside CAUS. The School has teaching and research facilities in three locations within the Commonwealth: Blacksburg, Falls Church, and Alexandria. Other academic units traditionally affiliated with SPIA in other colleges continue loosely articulated collaborations, but their colleges administer all matters pertaining to those individual disciplinary units. The School has continued to stimulate interdisciplinary initiatives, first, by building cooperative arrangements and collaborative programs among units within the School and, second, by partnering with organizations external to the University. Like SPIA, the Program on Government and International Affairs also emphasizes innovative research for faculty and interdisciplinary instruction for students, while giving added value to all existing academic teaching and research programs for public and international affairs within the University.