Building the Ivory Tower. LaDale C. Winling
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line, noting African American residents with an asterisk, lest an unsuspecting white shopper patronize a black business by accident.45
Figure 4. Muncie fox hunt. The wealthy Ball family anchored high society in Muncie, organizing social events including fox hunts, as depicted in a 1937 Margaret Bourke-White photo essay on Muncie for Life. Margaret Bourke-White/Getty Images. Image from Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Box 65, Folder 514, “Fox Hunt.”
The Normal School
The term “normal school,” common parlance at the time for a school that trained teachers, came from the ecole normale system that instituted teaching standards in France. As EINU and as ISNS, the Muncie schools offered teacher training in a two-year program. They reflected a precarious balance between civic enterprise and the conservative, normative impetus of the project of educating teachers.46 The state renamed the school Ball Teachers College (BTC) in 1922 in recognition of the family’s commitment and the school’s growing curriculum. At older and larger institutions than BTC, small groups of students from a wide variety of backgrounds kept up an intellectual and political churn. At BTC, though, the career-oriented student body largely came from the region and was disengaged from student governance and electoral politics, which slowed development of campus life in the 1910s and 1920s.47 A few years later, Ralph Noyer, the BTC dean, considered a rash of smoking on campus and speculated it came from student dissatisfaction with “the boredom of existence here.”48
The college operated in the colorful context of a growing industrial city with numerous opportunities for indulging in worldly pleasures and vices. Throughout the 1920s, the large majority of students resided off-campus in Muncie, embedded in the urban realm of what was then a moderately sized, largely walkable city.49 In the early years of the normal school, Doc Bunch suffered political storms for allowing some two hundred brothels and speakeasies to operate unfettered in Muncie.50 However, the new urban pattern emerging in Muncie shaped the geography of vice. Normal City had been dry before its annexation, and Prohibition began shortly after its addition to the city, precluding the development of a pub culture near campus. Muncie’s saloons were largely located in the center of downtown or in the working-class sections like Industry near the rail lines: even if they wanted to, students would have found it hard to get a drink before Prohibition in the new neighborhoods and commercial districts of Muncie.51
Higher education operated in loco parentis—“in place of the parent”—in part to protect students from these urban vices. By the 1920s, women’s higher education had been stripped of its nineteenth-century radicalism, and women had been incorporated into the conservative, consumerist realm of collegiate life, in part by bringing women’s housing on campus.52 Women’s dormitories predominated at colleges across the country, and administrators worked to re-create a domestic sphere on campus.53 This was so important to the original Muncie normal school that the first building after teaching and office space at EINU was a women’s dormitory.54 Oversight of women’s dormitories was more extensive and protective than men’s off-campus housing. Women had curfews, for example, requiring them to be back at set times in the evening, where men did not.
Grace DeHority, the dean of women, enforced these restrictions. Deans of women made it possible for women to go to college and join the workforce by maintaining traditional social structures to calm conservative parents and provide a familiar environment. DeHority was a ruralite who made it off the farm because of her education and devoted her life to providing education to others. She came to Muncie in 1922 after she earned a bachelor’s degree at ISNS in Terre Haute and taught junior high in her hometown. In addition to inspecting boardinghouses, DeHority expelled students for offenses from drinking alcohol to loafing. In one incident, the dean learned a student had “rather intimate connections” with a married man. She wrote the girl’s parents to let them know and asked the student to leave school to “prove an unforgettable lesson.”55 DeHority expelled a man but not his girlfriend, both BTC students, when they stayed overnight together in Muncie, causing the woman to miss her curfew. She graduated; he did not.56
The African American experience at BTC mimicked that within Muncie—free from the constraints of Jim Crow but still segregated by state action. The first black student to graduate from BTC, Jesse Nixon, earned her degree in 1925. But African Americans were severely underrepresented at BTC, and the college relegated its black students to the margins of campus life.57 Despite African Americans making up about 6 percent of the Muncie population in 1930, there were only a handful of black students at the college. They were not allowed in the college dormitories, fraternities, or sororities, and most lived in boardinghouses on the east side of the city. They also were shut out of the school’s student social organizations, which were some of the key platforms for economic mobility in higher education.58
Campus Planning
Muncie industrial workers, black and white, read the world around them and realized that education was key to social and economic advancement—a path to the other side of the tracks dividing Muncie into north and south. Nationally, one out of twenty college-age adults attended college by 1920, more than double the rate from the beginning of the century.59 The Muncie working class, however, had difficulty paying for advanced schooling and suffered from low educational expectations.60 A pair of sociologists, Robert and Helen Lynd, studied Muncie in the early 1920s and published a best-selling book on the city called Middletown: A Study in American Culture. According to the Lynds, working-class families believed higher education provided a means of escaping lives of manual labor. “A boy without an education today just ain’t anywhere!” lamented one Muncie man, but this realization alone could not get a man or woman through college.61 The normal school had served obliquely as an instrument for the enrichment and protection of the business elites in the northwestern part of the city—the anchor to a real-estate endeavor—and directly as a means of class mobility and professional training unevenly shared by the business-class and working-class segments of the population living in their neighborhoods around the city.
BTC was growing, and an expanding institution needed a campus plan. The student body grew more than 450 percent over its first six years as a public institution, from 155 during the 1918–1919 school year to 833 in the fall of 1924.62 College enrollment boomed nationwide, and annual college enrollments rose about 10 percent a year; but BTC grew faster than its counterparts elsewhere.63 When the institution became Ball Teachers College in 1922, it began offering four-year degrees.64 The state of Indiana approved new education programs, which brought more faculty, staff, and students to the campus.
Frank C. Ball used philanthropy and political clout to help the college in its new growth phase. In 1921 Muncie’s state legislators appropriated funds for a new science building that would dramatically increase the college’s instructional space. Governor Warren McCray, successor to James Goodrich, questioned the necessity of such an expense and worked to have it removed from the budget. Frank Ball caught wind of the proposed cuts and made a personal visit to Indianapolis to lobby the governor. The manufacturer won out as the governor shifted his position on the construction funds and signed on to state appropriations to the college for 1923.65 Ball was not to be trifled with.
There had been a single neoclassical building and wood-frame dormitory on the campus when the Balls bought it. It could not contain the college’s growing agenda. The institution turned to city planning, the progressive marriage of urban reform, scientific expertise, and the arts, to help provide for and manage the growth of the college. At the turn of the century, this urban reform movement joined with the new architectural profession to create the field of city planning, developing urban space and employing civic symbols to promote the uplift of the American metropolis in concert with bourgeois elites.66 Cuno Kibele was Muncie’s leading architect and a member of the civic leadership. He designed commercial buildings downtown such as the Wysor Building and the Commercial Club