A History of Indiana State University

Dan Clark

Description

In 1865, Indiana State University began classes as many other future regional state universities would: as a "normal school," a school that specialized in training teachers, usually in one- or two-year programs. By 1933, Indiana State had won the name Teachers College and had begun offering graduate-level education. In A History of Indiana State University, Dan Clark explores the history of Indiana State's institutional transformation against the backdrop of the amazing expansion of public education and the scope of higher education in the United States during this period.
 
Starting with the origins of the normal school and the need for professional teachers to help construct the educational infrastructure of Indiana, Clark examines how the faculty and students pushed the school to conform to increasingly popular traditional collegiate ideals, broadening their curriculum and student extracurricular life (athletics and Greek life), until by the 1920s Indiana State had transformed itself into a teachers college.
 
A History of Indiana State University offers an invaluable guide to the history of this beloved Indiana institution, and details the underappreciated impact that normal schools had in providing an educational opportunity to less privileged aspiring students.

Preface
1. The Founding and Early Years of the Normal School
2. Years of Turbulent Growth: ISNS 1879–1893
3. The Golden Age of the Normal School: Academic Change, 1893–1918
4. The Development of Student Extracurricular Life at the Normal School, 1893–1918
5. From Normal School to Teachers College: World War I and the Academic Changes of the 1920s
6. Becoming Indiana State Teachers College: The Maturation of Student Life in the Interwar Years: The Maturation of Student Life in the Interwar Years
Afterword
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Midwest
• HISTORY
• EDUCATION
• Histoire
• Unión Internacional de Patinaje sobre Hielo
• Mensajería instantánea
• Higher
• History of education
• Level
• State
• Terre Haute, Indiana
• School
• Higher education
• History of the Americas
• United States
• KS
• Local
• IL
• ND
• IN
• NE
• OH
• MN
• SD
• MO
• ISU
• MI

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253061737
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06171-3 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06172-0 (ebook)
All images courtesy of Indiana State University
Special Collections-University Archives.
Contents
Preface
One
The Founding and Early Years of the Normal School
Two
Years of Turbulent Growth ISNS 1879-1893
Three
The Golden Age of the Normal School Academic Change, 1893-1918
Four
The Development of Student Extracurricular Life at the Normal School, 1893-1918
Five
From Normal School to Teachers College World War I and the Academic Changes of the 1920s
Six
Becoming Indiana State Teachers College The Maturation of Student Life in the Interwar Years
Afterword
Notes
Index
Preface
O n a cold day in January 1870, some twenty eager students snaked their way through piles of construction debris to a beautiful but half-finished four-story building on Sixth Street in Terre Haute, Indiana. With only two floors completed, no heat, and no library save for a Bible and a dictionary, Indiana State Normal School began its first classes. Normal schools in the United States had existed only for some thirty years, with many educators highly skeptical of their utility. Indeed, Terre Haute had been the only city in the state to even submit a bid in the competition to acquire the state s normal school. That first day was an inauspicious beginning for the institution that would eventually grow into Indiana State University. This book, the first of a two-volume history, explores the transformation of the normal school into a teachers college, which on its face might not sound like much of a metamorphosis. But by the early 1930s, when this book s tale ends, Indiana State enrolled over two thousand students per year on a campus that boasted eight major buildings, and it had earned a national reputation as a superior teachers college, with many of its graduates going on directly into some of the nation s top graduate schools.
The story of Indiana State s evolution in this period reflects the story of Indiana s and the nation s advancement during the first critical period of educational expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the local level, the era of the one-room schoolhouse gave way to graded elementary schools and high schools, as the nation grew into the new urban and industrial age. In the realm of higher education, this same period witnessed the maturation of undergraduate education and the expansion of the modern university with its graduate and professional schools. In 1870, when Indiana State opened, less than 5 percent of the age cohort attended college; by 1930, roughly 20 percent attended, and professional occupations routinely demanded academic credentials (whereas in 1870 very few lawyers even received formal education). Indiana State Normal School, and schools like it, played an enormously important yet little-appreciated role in this vast educational transformation in the United States. Most people identify normal schools with teacher training, but they performed a far more vital function in the early days of the school revolution. Normal schools trained a professional elite that in turn supplied the expertise and leadership to build local schools around the state. The vast majority of Hoosier teachers, as we shall see, never actually attended a normal school, and most received what training they did have from students and graduates of Indiana State. In 1930 Indiana State had educated one-third of all teachers and administrators in Indiana, and their expertise and leadership influenced countless more.
But the impact of normal schools, and particularly Indiana State, went far beyond the field of education. With their relatively open admissions criteria, normal schools functioned as institutions of access for the majority of aspiring Hoosiers who longed for educational advancement but who, particularly in the nineteenth century, lacked the ability to prepare for a traditional college or university. Private academies were few and far between, and high schools did not proliferate until the 1890s, an expansion that Indiana State s graduates helped to fuel. Indiana State offered accessible higher education and the opportunity to teach, which then often served as a stepping-stone to other white-collar positions or good marriages. Indiana State s story of growth and service during this period is an inspiring one. The school s alumni played the key role in building Indiana s educational system in its formative stages, and the school itself provided the opportunity for accessible college-level instruction for tens of thousands of people seeking better lives, offering such opportunities to far more Hoosiers in the late nineteenth century than Indiana University or Purdue combined. The story of Indiana State s transformation into a college and the service it provided for the state is one of which all associated with the institution may be proud.
While I primarily wrote this book for a general audience interested in the history of Indiana State University, I feel that it is important also to highlight how this first volume of that history fits into the scholarship of American higher education. Most scholars dealing with the history of normal schools or teachers colleges and the few scholars who mention such schools within the broader landscape of the history of American higher education emphasize the stark differences between normal schools and traditional colleges and universities. The story that emerged from administrative and student records at Indiana State, however, presented a very different tale. Certainly real differences from traditional colleges existed. Part of the curriculum focused solely on teaching. The official program of study at ISNS, as with most normal schools, was usually shorter than the standard college course (though not always at ISNS). Most students came from different demographic backgrounds than traditional college students, with the majority of ISNS students being female throughout most of the years in this study-very typical among other normal schools and teachers colleges. Fixating on such differences, however, has led scholars to ignore the many strands of institutional evolution that united normal schools (or at least Indiana State) with the significant changes occurring at traditional colleges and universities during these same years. 1
One recurrent theme of this study involves the tensions arising from an identity crisis of sorts at ISNS among both faculty and students; they remained proud of their identification with the profession of teaching but also attracted to (and increasingly feeling a part of) the academic and student life of traditional colleges and universities, particularly by the early twentieth century. As academicians in the United States developed a professional identity centered on scholarship and advanced learning certified by professional credentials (the master s and doctoral degrees), faculty at ISNS strove to match and live up to that ideal. This was more than simple envy, though. ISNS faculty had long believed that they played a significant role as part of a broader vision of spreading the benefits of a liberal arts education; they saw their purpose in training teachers as an aspect of the same mission as traditional colleges-disseminating learning. As academic credentials and the ideal of scholarship emerged in American higher education, ISNS faculty gradually changed with the times, causing some interesting growing pains that I explore in chapters 3 and 5 .
ISNS students manifested even more of these evolving tensions, and such tensions within the student subculture form a feature element of this volume. ISNS students understood that their immediate goal (teaching) differed from most traditional college students, and they could exhibit fierce pride in that identity. While some evidence surfaced, particularly in the 1890s, of student wishes to cultivate a unique normal school identity, the more shocking thing that I found was the monumental evidence of a feeling of kinship with traditional colleges that surfaced everywhere in student records. As chapters 4 and 6 will highlight, while students might call themselves normalites or fighting teachers when referring to their sports teams, they more often regularly employed the term college when discussing their academic and student life. Perhaps taking some of their cues from faculty, student leaders thought of themselves as college students and of ISNS as collegiate in nature, something that became abundantly evident after 1900, even before the school began to offer bachelor s degrees (1908). The student push to emulate traditional college life as they understood it in athletics and extracurriculars forms a major theme of this book, something very few (if any) scholars of American higher education have explored in any depth with regard to normal schools. 2 Too often historians of American higher education have focused only on what made normal schools and teachers colleges different rather than recognizing the ways that schools like ISNS saw themselves as connected to traditional colleges and univer