File:Trgates.jpgThe Sample Gates, marking the entrance to the Old Crescent, the site of IU's historic campus buildings built between 1884 and 1908
IUB's enrollment in the spring semester of 2005 was 35,694 students, of whom 30,334 (85%) were full time. Undergraduates accounted for 27,787 (78%) students, while graduate and professional students accounted for 7,907.
Most IUB students are white Indiana residents. Of students enrolled in spring 2005, 1,433 (4%) were African-Americans, 1,174 (3.2%) were Asian-Americans, 785 (2.2%) were Hispanic, 83 (0.2%) were American Indian, and 28,699 (80%) were white, 3,096 (8.7%) were foreign, and 422 (1.1%) were unknown. More women, 18,428 attended IU than men, 17,266. Despite IUB's status as the principal campus of the Indiana University system, only 21,296 (60%) of its students in spring 2005 were native Hoosiers.
Indiana University's freshman experience was recognized by U.S. News & World Report in 2003 as among the best in the country. The 10th annual Newsweek-Kaplan College Guide, which appeared in the Aug. 22, 2005 issue of Newsweek magazine, chose IU Bloomington as its "Hottest Big State School" and extolled the campus' blend of tradition with emerging technologies. IU was the only Big Ten institution included.
USA Today called Bloomington one of the top 10 places for campus culture. The university offers the latest in technology as IU was ranked as one of the top five wired universities in America according to Yahoo! Internet Life. IU is home to one of the largest and oldest Greek systems in the country. Nearly 5,000 students (about 17 percent of undergraduates) join one of the 55 fraternities and sororities.
Campus
The IU campus is considered one of the most beautiful college campuses in the nation, with its abundance of flowering plants and trees and graceful, cool limestone buildings. Art critic Thomas Gaines called IU one of America's five most beautiful universities in The Campus as a Work of Art.
Facilities and architecture
Many of the campus's buildings, especially the older central buildings, are made from Indiana limestone quarried locally. The Works Progress Administration built much of the campus's core during the Great Depression. Many of the campus's buildings were built and most of its land acquired during the 1950s and 1960s, when first soldiers attending under the GI Bill and then the Baby Boom swelled the university's enrollment from 5,403 in 1940 to 30,368 in 1970.
IU's Herman B Wells Library is the thirteenth largest university library in North America. Built in 1969, the building contains 11 floors in the graduate tower and five floors in the undergraduate tower. The building also contains the Information Commons, a fully-integrated technology center for learning and collaboration -- open 24 hours a day, seven days a week - which attracts 82 percent of all undergraduate students. IU Libraries earned its highest ranking ever, advancing to twelfth place in a survey of North American academic research libraries.
IU Auditorium
File:Iuaud.jpgThe IU Auditorium
Built as a Federal Works Agency Project, the auditorium - located in the heart of campus - opened on March 22, 1941, and has been host for the last sixty years to the world's top performers and entertainers. The Auditorium is also home to Thomas Hart Benton's "Century of Progress" murals, painted for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the priceless Dailey Family Memorial Collection of Hoosier Art, and two Robert Laurent sculptures. It is also home to the Roosevelt pipe organ, the largest pipe organ in the United States. Closed for a $13 million renovation and restoration in 1997, the Auditorium reopened in 1999.
IU Art Museum
File:Trartms.jpgThe IU Art Museum
The IU Art Museum was first established in 1941 with a later building being designed by the world-renowned architecture firm I.M. Pei and Partners. Completed in 1982, the museum collection of over 30,000 objects includes works by Claude Monet and Jackson Pollack. The museum has particular strengths in the art of Africa, Oceania, the Americas, Ancient Greece and Rome, and Early Modernism, and its collections of works on paper (prints, drawings and photographs). The IU Art Museum is also ranked as one of the top five university art museums along with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.
Geography
IUB's 1,931 acres (7.8 km²) includes copious green space and historic buildings dating to the university's reconstruction in the late nineteenth century.
IU has 110 programs ranked in the nation's top 20. Twenty-nine graduate programs and four schools at Indiana University-Bloomington are ranked among the top 25 in the country in the US News & World Report's Best Graduate Schools 2001-2002. Time magazine named IU-Bloomington its 2001 College of the Year among major research universities.
College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences is the academic home to more than 40 percent of IU's undergraduates, while also offering the electives and general education courses for most other schools on campus. There are more than 50 academic departments in the College, ranging from biology to art history, from Jewish Studies to telecommunications, from computer science to political science, and IU teaches nearly 40 foreign languages.
The schools listed here are degree-granting units made up of smaller departments or programs. Many of IUB's schools are among the best in their areas of expertise, with renowned faculty and modern facilities.
With over 1,823 full-time faculty members, IU Bloomington also leads the Big Ten public universities in the number of endowed faculty positions, with 333 chairs, professorships, and curators. IUB also reported in fall 2004 that it employed 334 part-time faculty, totalling 1,877 full-time equivalents. Of the full-time faculty, 76% were tenured. Like the student body, IUB's faculty is predominantly white. Of full-time administrators, faculty, and lecturers, 118 (6%) were Asian, 74 (4%) were African-American, 62 (4%) were Hispanic, 5 (.3%) were Native American, and 1,535 (85%) were "other." More men (62%) than women held academic appointments at the university.
Professors at IUB were better-paid than their counterparts in the IU system. A full-time professor earned an average of $126,500, an associate professor $89,000, and an assistant professor $74,400.
Former notable faculty
Notable faculty of Indiana University have included:
WFIU radio - public radio including NPR and local programming, but predominantly classical music in their own right.
Some long-time staff include: Christina Kuznych, George Walker and Joe Bourne, and Don Glass.
WTIU televsion - PBS station including national and local programming.
Indiana University Student Television - an entirely student run television station broadcasting to over 12,000 on campus residents and over 40,000 Bloomington residents via Community Access Television. Founded in 2002, IUSTV has quickly grown to be a leading media entity and student organization on campus.
Indiana Daily Student newspaper - a free daily newspaper fully supported financially through ad sales. Founded in 1867, it has a circulation of over 15,000 and is produced by IU students.
WIUS - an entirely student run radio station that broadcasts currently on AM 1570 and via live internet streaming on its website. It broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the fall and spring semesters. Besides playing independent music, the station provides coverage of nine different Indiana University sports teams. The station was established in 1963 under the call letters WQAD. It was granted a low-power FM licence in the spring of 2005, and plans to transition to FM in early 2006.
History of IUB
Early years
Indiana's state government founded Indiana University in 1820 as the "State Seminary." The 1816 Indiana state constitution required that the General Assembly (Indiana's state legislature) create a "general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation, from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all." It took some time for the legislature to fulfill its promise. While the original legislative charter was granted in 1820, construction began in 1822, the first professor was hired in 1823, and classes were offered in 1824. The first class graduated in 1830.
The school developed rapidly in its first years. The hiring of Andrew Wylie, its first president, in 1828 signified the school's growing professionalism. The General Assembly changed the school's name to "Indiana College" in the same year. In 1838 the legislature changed the school's name for a final time to Indiana University.
Wylie's death in 1851 marks the end of the university's first period of development. IU now had nearly a hundred students and seven professors. Despite the university's more obviously secular purpose, presidents and professors were still expected to set a moral example for their charges. It was only in 1885 that a non-clergyman, biologist David Starr Jordan, became president.
Between Wylie and Jordan's administrations, the University grew slowly. Few changes rocked the university's repose. One development is interesting to modern scholars: The college admitted its first woman student, Sarah Parke Morrison in 1867, making IU the first state university to admit women on an equal basis with men.
In mid-passage
In 1883, IU awarded its first Ph. D. and played its first intercollegiate sport, baseball, prefiguring the school's future status as a major research institution and a power in collegiate athletics. But two other incidents that year were far more important to the university. First, the university's original campus in Seminary Square near the center of Bloomington burned to the ground. Second, instead of rebuilding in Seminary Square, as had been the practice following previous blazes, the college was rebuilt at the far eastern edge of Bloomington. (Today, Bloomington has expanded eastward, and the "new" campus is once again at the center of the city.)
The first extension office of IU was opened in Indianapolis in 1916. In 1920/1921 the School of Music and the School of Commerce and Finance (what later became the Kelley School of Business) were opened. In the 1940s Indiana University opened extension campuses in Kokomo and Fort Wayne. The controversial Kinsey Institute for sexual research was also established in 1940.
IUB's intercollegiate athletics program has a long tradition of excellence in several key sports. From its humble beginnings with baseball in 1867, the Hoosier athletic program has grown to include over 600 male and female student-athletes on 24 varsity teams boasting one of the nation's best overall records. Sports sponsored by the university include football, men's basketball, women's basketball, cross country and track, baseball, golf, tennis, rowing, volleyball, and more.
The Hoosiers became a member of the prestigious Big Ten Conference December 1, 1899. The school's national affiliation is with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). National team titles (now totaling 25; 24 NCAA, 1 AIAW) have been won in six men's sports and one women's sport, topped by a record-setting six straight men's swimming & diving titles, seven men's soccer crowns and five titles in men's basketball. Indiana student-athletes have won 133 NCAA individual titles, including 79 in men's swimming and diving and 31 in men's track and field. In addition, IU teams have won or shared 157 Big Ten conference championships.
Women's sports at IUB have not traditionally enjoyed the same level of success, with the notable exception of the women's tennis and golf programs, which have won thirteen and seven conference titles, respectively.
In recent years, IU's athletics department has been unable to support itself financially due to revenue shortages. Because of this the university administration has attempted, thus far unsuccessfully, to double the athletics fee which students pay with their tuition each semester. A number of students argue that the athletics department's financial woes are its own problems, and that support of athletics should be voluntary. Others, especially in the athletics department, argue that athletic programs are an integral part of the university experience, and therefore everyone should pay into it.
