Scientific Indiana: Indiana University
When I submitted my book Scientific Indiana to The History Press, I was asked to edit the book down from 70,000 words to around 50,000. Thus, a few chapters had to be cut. This blog entry that follows is a chapter on the history of Indiana University.
The story of Indiana University began on January 20, 1820 when the state legislature, then meeting in Corydon, passed a law establishing a state seminary. Two years later, construction started on a seminary building in Bloomington located at what is now Seminary Square Park near the intersection of Second Street and College Avenue. Classes began in 1825 with an enrollment of ten male students. Baynard Rush Hall was the only professor and taught all the classes for the first three years. Typical for the time, the curriculum focused on Greek, Latin, and classical philosophy. In 1828, the name of the school changed from “State Seminary” to “Indiana College” and in 1938, the name was changed for a final time to “Indiana University.” In 1829, Andrew Wylie became the first president of IU and in 1830, the first class graduated. Wylie and the president of the board of trustees, David Maxwell, were both devout Presbyterians and, although the school was in theory nonsectarian, most new faculty were members of the Presbyterian church. The first six presidents of IU were preachers.
Science may have entered the IU curriculum as early as 1828 when John H. Harvey was hired to teach mathematics and, if he could fit it in, a smidgen of natural science. In 1840, the IU Board of Trustees passed a resolution allowing the teaching of mineralogy and geology if time permitted. This action by the board presumably originated with Reverend Theophilus Wylie, a professor and a cousin of president Andrew Wylie, since he was the only instructor teaching science classes at the time. There were no formal science courses until the 1853-1854 academic year when Reverend Robert Milligan taught physics, chemistry, and geology. In the 1850s, instruction was by lecture only – no laboratories. Lectures lasting an hour were held Monday through Saturday at nine, ten, and eleven o’clock in the morning leaving the remainder of the day free. Attendance was required and absences were noticeable since the enrollment at the time was only around a hundred students.
Richard Owen, son of New Harmony’s socialist reformer Robert Owen, joined the faculty on January 1, 1864 after serving as an officer in the Civil War. Owen’s main field of interest was geology, but he had earned a medical degree from Nashville Medical College in 1858 although he never actually practiced medicine. Owen brought with him an extensive collection of rocks and fossils, a variety of geological equipment, and a bunch of maps, charts, and diagrams. During the summer of 1864, while the Civil War still raged, Owen embarked on a speaking tour of southern Indiana. The goal was to inform the public about the university, impress them with the importance of higher education, and encourage them to enroll. Student enrollment had declined sharply because of the war and Owen’s status as a war veteran made him an effective recruiter. In 1868, IU increased its science offerings and Owen and Wylie began sharing the teaching load. The next year, botany and zoology were listed as separate courses. Even at that early date, Owen mentioned Darwin’s theory of evolution in his lectures. He continued teaching science courses until his retirement in 1879.
On July 12, 1883, tragedy struck when the original campus in Seminary Square, including a new Science Building built in 1873, burned to the ground. The campus was rebuilt at what was then the far eastern edge of Bloomington on land purchased from the Dunn family. Owen and Wylie Halls, named in honor of Richard Owen and Andrew Wylie, were the first two buildings constructed around the central quadrangle in an area known as Dunn’s Woods. The first classes were held here in 1885 and the modern campus grew up around it.
The first non-clergyman to be named president of IU was a thirty-four-year-old zoology professor named David Starr Jordan who took over the reins of the university in 1885. Jordan had come to IU in 1879 as a professor of natural science but spent his first year on a leave of absence collecting fish specimens in the Pacific Northwest for the U. S. Fish Commission. After returning to IU, he continued his research on ichthyology and aquatic biology, an area in which the biology department continues to excel.
During Jordan’s six-year tenure as president, he improved the school’s finances, polished its public image, doubled the enrollment, started the summer session, and initiated an elective system which allowed students to choose their own classes. Jordan led an interesting life. He was an expert witness during the Scopes Monkey Trial, a supporter of the eugenics movement, and a vocal critic of pseudoscience. Jordan abruptly left IU in 1891 to become the first president of the newly established Stanford University taking some of IU’s best faculty and students with him. Legend has it that Leland Stanford offered Jordan a bonus for every faculty member he enticed to California. This resulted in twelve of IU’s twenty-nine professors following Jordan to Stanford along with thirty-nine students including some of the best football players. Today, several places in Bloomington and on campus are named in Jordan’s honor including Jordan Hall, home of the IU biology department, the “Jordan River,” a creek that runs through the campus, and Bloomington’s Jordan Avenue.
In 1938, Herman Wells was named president of IU and led the school for the next twenty-five years. Rotund, jovial, highly intelligent, energetic, and progressive, Wells was only thirty-five-years-old at the time making him the youngest state university president in the country. It would be hard to overstate the impact Wells had on IU; he transformed the university from a rather sleepy, provincial, backwater university into a leading research institution. He set out to recruit brilliant research-oriented faculty from across the country and, in one year, traveled over 30,000 miles to accomplish this goal.
In the 1940s, due to the efforts of Wells and Fernandus Payne, Dean of the Graduate School, IU became a world leader in the field of biology, especially in the area of genetics. Among the many imminent biology faculty members during this golden age were protozoologist Tracy Sonneborn, embryologist Theodore Torrey, and geneticist Ralph Cleland. Two faculty members from the time, geneticist Hermann Muller and microbiologist Salvador Luria, won the Nobel Prize. The outstanding faculty also produced some outstanding students who went on to have distinguished careers in the biological sciences. Most notable among these was James Watson, who went on to discover the structure of DNA and win a Nobel Prize.
During Wells’ tenure, the area of the campus expanded by a factor of ten to about 1,700 acres, it’s approximate size today. This was coupled with an increase in IU’s enrollment, nearly tripling from 11,000 in 1938 to 31,000 in 1962. Within Wells’ first five years as president, fifteen new buildings were added to the campus. A new university library was added in the 1960s. One of his highest priorities was improving and expanding the performing arts. With the help of the Works Progress Administration, he built one of the best auditoriums in the country, home to performances by what would become one of the best music schools in the world. As Wells expanded and built-up the campus, he was careful to preserve the natural environment and guarded against unnecessary tree cutting. As a result of his stewardship, the IU campus is now considered to be one of the most beautiful college campuses in the country.
Wells was a champion of academic freedom. He once said: “I had early made up my mind that a university that bows to the wishes of a person, group, or segment of society is not free and that a state university in particular cannot expect to command the support of the public if it is the captive of any group.”1 Welles practiced what he preached. When Alfred Kinsey’s research on human sexuality was being attacked by forces on the political right, Wells unflinchingly supported Kinsey and his work. Wells also fought tirelessly against racism on campus. He began by ending segregated seating in the dining halls. When the Bloomington barbers refused to cut the hair of African-American students during regular business hours, he leased out space in the student union for a barber who agreed to cut everyone’s hair. He also worked with the basketball coach, Branch McCracken, to recruit the school’s first African-American basketball player.
Welles loved the students and the students loved him back. He would often go for walks through campus greeting and talking with students. He was genuinely interested in their lives and sometimes participated in student activities. Amazingly, he personally signed every one of the nearly 63,000 diplomas issued by the university during his tenure, sometimes adding a personal note. Welles retired in 1962 and became the university chancellor, a position that had been created for him by the trustees and included tasks such as raising money, attending events and ceremonies, and overseeing special projects. He held the title of chancellor until his death in 2000, just shy of his 98th birthday.
The faculty and alumni of Indiana University have made contributions in all fields of science and technology. In astronomy, alumnus Vesto Slipher discovered that galaxies are moving away from us. In physics, Emil Konopinski worked on the atomic bomb and Alan Kostelecky is known for his efforts in particle physics. Douglas Hofstadter is a cognitive scientist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. On the practical side, back in 1931, Professor Rolla N. Harger invented the Drunk-O-Meter, the first device to measure blood-alcohol content. In the 1950s, IU dental scientist Joseph Muhler and chemists William Nebergall and Harry Day filed a patent for a formula for toothpaste that used stannous fluoride and a calcium pyrophosphate abrasive. In 1956, Proctor and Gamble marketed the new toothpaste as Crest. In earth and atmospheric sciences, Lisa Pratt is currently serving as the Planetary Protection Officer for NASA, a role in which she is responsible for protecting our planet from space microbes.
Eight IU faculty or alumni have won a Nobel Prize – three in physiology or medicine, three in physics, and two in economic sciences. Hermann Muller, Salvador Luria, and James Watson won for physiology or medicine, have a strong connection to IU, and will be portrayed later in this book. J. Hans D. Jensen, a visiting professor in 1953, won the 1962 Nobel Prize in physics for the shell model of the nucleus. Riccardo Giacconi came to IU on a Fulbright Fellowship as a research associate in 1956 and worked on a cloud chamber for cosmic ray research. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his work in X-ray astronomy. Renato Dulbecco was invited to work as a post-doctoral student at IU after WWII by Salvador Luria. He shared a lab with Luria for two years where they studied viruses. Dulbecco shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discoveries about tumor viruses. Most recently, Elinor Ostrom shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for her research that “challenged the belief that common property is always poorly managed and should be regulated by the state or privatized.” She was the first woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Oliver Williamson was a visiting professor at IU for a year and shared the economics prize with Elinor Ostrom. (Some sources erroneously list Ferid Murad as an IU Nobel Laureate. He took some classes at a regional IU campus, but graduated from DePauw.)
Today, IU is a major public research institution enrolling over 40,000 students and employing over 1,800 full-time faculty. About half of the student body is from Indiana, but all fifty states are represented. IU consistently ranks as one of the best public universities in the country and its programs in analytical chemistry and nuclear physics are ranked in the top ten in the nation.