The Books of My Life: Ball State University

I wasn't much of a middle school, junior high, or senior high school student as my working class mum and my middle class dad and most of my teachers in Texas and Indiana can well attest. Most of my junior high and senior high school years in Dallas simply involved trying to survive the intense and debilitating asthma I got when I was around twelve, an asthma which sent me to the hospital on too many occasions to count and played a major role in turning me into introverted recluse. Medicines for asthma weren't as helpful in allowing one to live a "normal" life back then beyond cortisone which had its downsides. I enjoyed history and the social sciences but maths, the hard sciences, and the arts weren't really my cup of tea. As a result, I really didn't have outstanding grades coming out of high school in the early 1970s. 

My future life was already planned out even though I didn't plan it out. I was channelled into Distributive Education in high school by the high school powers that be. They apparently expected that I would ring cash registers and stock shelves for the rest of my life. My other option was the factory. I graduated from high school before America and most of the core country world deindustrialised thanks to the economic, political, and cultural transition of the core nation world from modernity to postmodernity, from a world in which manufacturing dominated to a world in which, for most, retail, or for the few, information, were generally the only economic options one had, and from a world in which the economy was largely national or even regional to a world in which the economy was increasingly global.

It was a serious injury that changed my life and made me consider options other than retail and factory work, which I did briefly but really didn't like as mine was increasingly the life of the mind. While recovering from this injury I grew increasingly interested in history, sociology, religious studies, and cultural anthropology, and, as a result, started thinking more and more about going to college. At the time I was living in East Central Indiana and there was a relatively inexpensive and not particularly selective university near me, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. So, I applied for admission and was admitted.

I was quite naive when I matriculated at Ball State University in the mid-1970s. My high school teachers didn't even broach the possiblity that I might go to college with me so I knew little about what it meant to go to college. In fact, the first class I signed up for was a Comparative Religion taught by a professor who would become one of my first academic mentors, Carl Andrae, who had studied at Harvard with star Biblical Studies scholars Robert Pfeiffer and Henry Cadbury. Little did I realise that the Comparative Religion course I signed up for was a 400 level course and hence a senior level course. I saw it and wanted to take it. What I did realise was that the study of religion would become a part of my intellectual life ever since.

I liked Ball State. There were some lovely parts of campus, particularly the old quad. I met some intellectual stimulating fellow students and teachers and made some good friends (e.g., Russell Todd and Duane Stigen). I got a job working at a wonderful bookstore southwest of campus; I had long loved books thanks to my mum. Academically I did pretty well at Ball State making the Dean's List several times while I was there. In my heart of hearts, however, I wanted to go to Indiana University. IU, given that it was a long time member of the elite Association of American Universities, the research universities that trained and train most of those who taught and teach in America's colleges and universities--and I now wanted to be a college teacher-- seemed the right choice for me. I grew quickly to love the depth and breadth of IU's curricular offerings, the limestone gothic beauty and almost pastoral quality of its campus, and Bloomington, the quintessential college town, the places that I now most prefer to live in. By the way, years of graduate work, a Ph.D., and college teaching have cured me of any romanticism I once had about academia and teaching in higher education.

Though I tranferred out of Ball State I still have very fond memories of my time there. So, when I learned about a recent history of Ball State University, Ball State University: An Interpretive History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) by Anthony Edmonds and Bruce Geelhoed, two Ball State history faculty members, I had to read it. Edmonds and Geelhoed do an excellent job of telling the Ball State story, a story BSU shares with other similar universities, the story of a how a normal school or teacher's college, a normal school that was initially the eastern branch of the Indiana State Normal School (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute that was founded in 1918, transitioned from a state supported teacher's college to a state supported multiversity in 1965. They do a nice job telling how, as a consequence, so Edmonds and Geelhoed argue, BSU moved from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft. Along the way, Edmonds and Geelhoed explore the tensions that arose as Ball State became less a community and more a corporation. They explore how, in this journey, faculty salaries moved from an equity model to a merit model. The explore how Ball State became less a teaching oriented school and more of a research oriented school though teaching remained important if not central to the Ball State mission. They explore how administrative personnel, the faculty, and student numbers grew, particularly after Ball State became a university. They explore how the academic revolution that took place at Ball State changed the curriculum and culture of BSU. They explore how academic retrenchment with its decreased state support for higher education, has impacted Ball State since the 1980s. They explore how the transition from community to corporation at Ball State created tensions between an increasingly centralising administration and the faculty and, to some extent, between town and gown. They explore the well known role political and economic elite boosters and real estate promoters and speculators, particularly the Ball family of Ball Jar fame, played in BSU's history. Edmonds and Geelhoed end their tale of BSU's history with the inauguration of Blaine Brownell as the university's new president and with the hope that the Brownell years might restore the stability that existed at Ball State during the paternalistic and benevolent authoritarian Pittenger, Emens, and Pruis presidential eras. Unfortunately, since Brownell resigned Ball State has had five presidents, something some might see as a mark of instability or at least a symptom of the corporatisation of neoliberal American higher education with its musical chairs administrative positions.

There were a number of things I found interesting about Ball State University: An Interpretive History. One of the things I found interesting about the book was Edmonds and Geelhoed's exploration of student culture, the limited social activism at Ball State, a university where panty raids and streaking were more important to most of Ball State's students, who came primarily and still do, from East Central Indiana, than ending segregation or the war in Vietnam. I also found the reactions of Munsonians to social liberalism and what activism there was on campus, fascinating. Some of the reactions Edmonds and Geelhoed document are right out of the anti-communism liberal is socialism playbook of the now mainstreamed right in contemporary America. The more things change...

I really enjoyed reading Ball State University: An Interpretive History. I learned a lot of things I did not know about an institution I attended for a few years including my total lack of memory about the faculty and administration tensions over cancelled humanities and social science classes in the late 1970s when I was there. Highly recommended for anyone interested in higher education, college culture, and the broader factors affecting a number of colleges become universities in post-World War II America.