Eugene P. Trani is running about 10 minutes late when he comes through a side door of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center. The president ducks into a stairwell and heads up to the second floor, where he’s due to speak to employees who are completing a leadership-training program.

Making his way to the engagement, Trani keeps moving as he meets me. Winding down a hallway, he quips, “So, you drew the short straw. Or maybe the long straw.”

At 5-foot-7, Trani walks with an arm-swinging shuffle, not the hard-driving stride one might expect of the man a former colleague describes as a “dynamo.”

After he’s introduced at the training session, Trani launches into a slide presentation that seems to encapsulate VCU’s accomplishments since 1990 and convey the force of nature Trani has been on its behalf, shaping a city within a city.

He comes to a bar chart detailing the number of degrees VCU has handed out, and he can’t resist the opportunity for a little joke.

“We awarded 3,500 degrees in 1990. We awarded 6,000 in 2008,” he says, adding in a textbook Bob Newhart dead-pan: “All but one had the right amount of credit hours.”

The staffers had already begun to laugh as he explains he is kidding, but, ever a stickler for detail, Trani makes sure to clarify. “And that one did have the right amount of credit hours. They just weren’t earned at Virginia Commonwealth University. But that’s another story.”

That other story — the one about a police chief who received a bachelor’s degree that he didn’t properly earn — is one Trani would rather forget.

The story he likes to tell is about a university that was divided and came together.

In simple terms, Trani’s imprint has been about three things: buildings, people and money. All three have sprouted wildly at VCU under his direction, elevating the university to a singular brand that is locally monolithic and nationally recognizable.

“Whenever someone asked where I went to college, and I would say VCU, either they thought I had said ‘ECU’ or they had no idea where it was,” says 1983 graduate and bestselling novelist David Baldacci, who recently completed a six-year term on the school’s board of visitors. “But these days that doesn’t happen very often.”

During Trani’s tenure, VCU has invested more than $1.2 billion in construction projects in the city, and the VCU Real Estate Foundation, a mechanism created after Trani’s arrival, has acquired more than 36 properties in and around the city.

“We’ve built and built and built because this place was so underfacilitied in 1990,” Trani tells the leadership-training group.

The son of a civil engineer, Trani notes that he was walking construction sites when he was 4 years old, about the age he was when his family moved from his birthplace, Brooklyn, N.Y., to Philadelphia, where he grew up. He says this may explain some of his fascination with the process of bringing buildings to fruition.

It’s that construction boom, however, that serves as a fulcrum of opinion for many when it comes to Trani’s role in the region.

Some voices in the surrounding neighborhoods — the Fan, Oregon Hill, Carver and Randolph — have sometimes found occasion to rail against the university for the collateral issues that have come with its expansion: influxes of people and cars drawn to the school’s campuses, the demolition of some architecturally significant structures and the encroachment on historic properties.

“Those are legitimate issues,” Baldacci says, “and people should raise concerns. And I’m sure Gene would be the first one to say that not everything he’s done has made everybody happy.”

“He could have been more responsive to the community and allowed for greater participation in planning and development,” says Jennie Dotts, former executive director of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods. “Dr. Trani’s building spree was the result of a unilateral decision-making process that altered the character of our historic city with a collection of monuments to architectural mediocrity.”

Since the mid-’90s, Trani says, VCU has spent $9.64 million to improve historic properties. When asked about his biggest regret, he says he wishes he had been able to forge stronger relationships with the neighborhoods around VCU. While he points to the “partnership” the school has with the Carver district that abuts Belvidere Street and surrounds the Siegel Center, he admits that relations with Oregon Hill have remained rocky despite VCU’s commitment of health care and other services to the neighborhood’s residents.

Others see Trani as the savior of downtown Richmond, the shadow mayor who brought stability and economic viability back to the city core.

One afternoon in late April, Trani was walking back from a meeting when Westover Hills resident Parker Hale, who was on campus for business, stopped the president on the sidewalk to shake his hand and gush praise.

Out of Trani’s earshot, Hale says, “He takes a lot of grief, but that’s a part of the job, right? Well, he deserves credit, too.”

When Trani came to Richmond, VCU also had a total of 21,764 students on the medical and academic campuses; today it’s 32,284, the largest enrollment in the state. And alongside the students are 18,200 employees.

In 2000, after VCU suffered a halt in its federal research funding because of record-keeping issues in studies involving human subjects, I spoke with an administrator who expressed concern that the controversy was partly the result of the university’s emphasis on building, leaving some areas of the institution understaffed.

It’s a criticism that echoes at the university today.

Trani himself concedes that the university’s mix of faculty needs to include more tenure-track professors; he suggests that goal may provide a focal point for the university’s incoming president, Dr. Michael Rao.

Terry Oggel, the chair of VCU’s English department and a former president of the faculty senate, says Trani’s ability to raise academic standards takes some of the sting out of the criticism about VCU’s need for more faculty.

“VCU is understaffed — there are too few faculty for the size of the place. That’s true.” But Oggel recalls a decade ago when Trani deftly negotiated with state legislators to fight a national backlash against the tenure system. Oggel credits the president with behind-the-scenes finesse that protected the position of faculty at VCU and elsewhere in Virginia. He also gives Trani kudos for trying to bolster the college’s academic mission by raising admission standards.