Women at Indiana University by Andrea Walton

Author:Andrea Walton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253062482
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2022-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE PHYSICAL CAMPUS

One of the complications students in the 1970s faced as they moved around the city were the several physical locations of their classes. As Ralph Gray’s history of IUPUI details, prior to the establishment of the IUPUI campus, students studied at the Purdue Extension on Thirty-Eighth Street across from the Indiana Fairgrounds and in several locations in downtown buildings.24 The construction of the first three IUPUI campus buildings—Cavanaugh Hall, Lecture Hall, and the library (now Taylor Hall)—took place in 1971.25 Other buildings, such as Education/Social Work, Business/SPEA, and the science and engineering buildings came later in the 1980s, meaning that students often needed to attend classes both in the new location and in several city locations as the new physical campus was coming together. Some were at remote locations—for example, Meredith, who studied physical education, had most of her classes at what was called Leonhart Center on Sixty-Fourth Street. She described this unique option as being in “our own little world.”

Students’ memories of the older extension buildings were both positive and negative. While some students liked the older buildings, others complained of their condition and environment for learning. Lavinia remarked, “I looked around, and my first thought was, this is a college campus? Those buildings were in terrible shape, especially S building. I came from Tech, which is 76 acres. I came from a college campus. This is not a college campus. I’m just taking classes here.” Students remembered the Thirty-Eighth Street location, where some took science classes, as a building that straddled a Burger Chef, a source of convenient food but also of fumes that pervaded their classes. They also recalled parking problems when there were offerings at the state fairgrounds competing for space.

Those who attended classes in the downtown IU buildings had many stories to tell about their condition and the urban environment. Lavinia observed, “The S building was at 122 E. Michigan, and around the corner at 518 N. Delaware there was A building. Those two should have been torn down years before they were . . . because in that A building, you’d be in the library and you could feel it swaying in the wind.” Meredith recalled noisy classroom conditions in the C building: “It was one of those hot, steamy rooms with the steam heat and so we’d have the windows open and kids would be out in the alley playing football. We’d hear that and then there was a pop machine right outside the door.” Miriam experienced a suicide as a person jumped from an adjoining building while she was in class: “So, it was this real dense urban environment. You saw everything there was to see in an urban environment there.”

Safety issues were a concern to the women navigating the downtown buildings, particularly with the M building on Meridian Street, situated next to a bar called the Duck In, which separated the class building from the student parking lot. Barbara observed, “The Murat, the M Building, was the one that

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