Indiana University began with one minister teaching twelve students for 250 dollars
When classes opened in Bloomington in April 1825, the whole faculty was a single Presbyterian minister, Baynard Rush Hall. He taught every subject to twelve students for a year's pay of 250 dollars, convinced that Greek and Latin were the heart of a proper education. That seminary grew into a campus of more than 48,000.
The state government, then based in Corydon, founded the institution on January 20, 1820, as the State Seminary. It became Indiana College in 1829 and Indiana University in 1838, and for most of the century it fought a drawn-out legal battle with Vincennes University over which was the real state university. Growth was slow: by 1851 there were roughly a hundred students and seven professors. Its first president, Andrew Wylie, and his board spoke of a nonsectarian college while mostly hiring fellow Presbyterians, and six clergymen in a row led the school.
Change came in bursts. In 1867 Sarah Parke Morrison enrolled as the first woman, making IU only the fourth public university to admit women on equal terms, and in 1873 she became its first female professor. The year 1883 brought the first doctorate and the first intercollegiate game, a baseball match, but also disaster, as the original campus burned to the ground. The college rebuilt on what was then the eastern fringe of town, though Bloomington has since grown around it. Two years later the biologist David Starr Jordan became the first president who was not a minister; he doubled enrolment and later left to run Stanford.
The Great Depression, ruinous for many colleges, became a building boom under the young president Herman Wells. Teaming up with Purdue's president, he lobbied Congress for federal works money, set his heart on a first-rate music school, and matched the funds with state and alumni money. By 1942 he could report 15 new buildings in five years. The Kinsey Institute for sexual research followed in 1945.
Social tensions surfaced too. In 1960 students elected Thomas Atkins, an African American from Elkhart, as student body president, and white protesters paraded with Confederate flags until residents of a women's dormitory pelted them with shoes and cosmetic bottles. Today the Hoosiers compete in the Big Ten and have won 24 NCAA team titles.
Source: Indiana University Bloomington
