VCU is not on the edge of Richmond. It is inside Richmond. The Monroe Park Campus sits between the Fan District, Oregon Hill, and the Carver neighborhood — a dense academic quarter that bleeds into the surrounding rowhouses without obvious boundaries. The MCV Campus, the medical center, occupies several blocks of downtown a mile to the east. More than 79 percent of freshmen live on campus, with residential capacity around 6,200, but most upperclassmen rent apartments in the surrounding Fan and walk or bike to class. The school traces its formal lineage to 1838, but its modern shape came from a 1968 merger of the Medical College of Virginia (founded 1838) and the Richmond Professional Institute. The two trace lines remain visible: MCV's hospital towers downtown and the arts and sciences departments out near Belvidere Street.

The grandest building on VCU's downtown campus was not built by the university and was never intended for academic use. The Altria Theater — known to generations of Richmonders as simply "the Mosque" — was constructed by the Shriners of Acca Temple Shrine in the 1920s in full Moorish Revival style. Marcellus E. Wright Sr. and Charles M. Robinson designed it, J.R. Ray of Richmond Tile and Mosaic Works did the elaborate ornamental tilework, and the building officially opened in 1927. The Shriners dedicated it in 1928. The City of Richmond bought it in 1940 and converted parts of the interior to municipal use. The Richmond Police Department occupied the basement: offices, classrooms, a gymnasium, an underground swimming pool, and a shooting range for the police academy. Generations of VCU students went down to that basement for class registration. Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Sinatra, B.B. King, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead, and the Supremes all played the Mosque. Touring productions of Wicked, The Lion King, Les Misérables, and Cats have all stopped here.

VCU has competed at the NCAA Division I level for just over thirty years, and it has put together a deeper athletic resume than that timeline would suggest. The 2011 men's basketball Final Four run remains the headline, but VCU men's tennis under coach Paul Kostin — one of just five Division I coaches to reach the 900-victory mark — has won twelve conference championships and finished in the top 25 for seventeen years running. The 2000 men's tennis team finished as NCAA runner-up to Stanford. The 2008-09 women's basketball team went 26-7 with a perfect 16-0 home record. VCU baseball plays at The Diamond, the stadium where the Triple-A Richmond Flying Squirrels also play. The Rams compete in sixteen varsity sports in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The basketball team plays at the Stuart C. Siegel Center, where it holds the 11th-highest home winning percentage in Division I history at .8579. The student section, the Rowdy Rams, won the Naismith Student Section of the Year award in 2013.

VCU's School of the Arts is consistently ranked one of the top public arts programs in the United States. Its alumni cluster in unexpected directions: Patch Adams, the medical doctor and clown made famous by the Robin Williams film; Christopher Poole, who founded 4chan and reshaped internet communication; the bestselling novelist David Baldacci; the heavy metal bands Lamb of God and Gwar, both founded by VCU art students; the singer-songwriters Sam Beam (Iron and Wine), Lucy Dacus, and Will Toledo (Car Seat Headrest). The school was an academic partner of the VCU French Film Festival — the largest French film festival in the United States, drawing more than 22,000 attendees by 2012. More than 500 registered student organizations operate at any given time. With about 28,000 students and 500 organizations and an MCV health system pumping medical research through downtown, VCU functions as a city within a city — Richmond's largest single employer outside of state government.

VCU's main athletic rival is Old Dominion University in Norfolk — the Old Dominion-VCU men's basketball rivalry is often called the best college basketball rivalry in Virginia. Closer to home, the Black & Blue Classic against the University of Richmond Spiders captures the city's split personality: the wealthy private liberal arts school in the West End versus the sprawling public arts-and-medicine giant downtown. The two schools are now in the same conference for the first time since 2001, and the rivalry is heating up. From the air, the contrast is geographic as well as cultural. Richmond's campus is a wooded enclave around a private lake. VCU's campus is the city itself.