Bowling for Ballantine

Last May I found myself walking through white walls of emptiness buried under eight floors of horrific modern architecture; I was in Ballantine Hall. Constructed in 1959, IU's largest academic building was supposed to be a modern marvel, the epicenter of the Bloomington campus. Instead, Ballantine has come to embody the burgeoning cultural crisis currently facing IU.\nDevoid of art, Ballantine remains a great 'what if' in the growing struggle for more artistic expression around campus. Since the Benton Mural controversy, IU has pledged to become an artistic Mecca. Will IU initiate a cultural revival or will it continue to watch its budget evaporate, its history wither and its eminent reputation decline?\nAdorning the side is a sculptural relief by Showalter Fountain's creator, IU artist Robert Laurent. Blackened by time and cloaked by leaves, Veritas Filia Temporis -- "Truth, the Daughter of Time" -- pierces the sheet of green for those perceptive enough to catch its glare. Yet Ballantine's interior offers no such relief, holds no art and displays not one iota of individual expression. Instead students find themselves in a mountain of cement with not one mural, not one photograph, not one painting and not one reason why. Why are students challenged to analyze and develop our own modes of expression but are given the most spartan conditions in which to do so? \nThe IU that I love is a place of cultural history: celebrated artists, eminent academics and burgeoning multiculturalism on a campus that was (as we've heard every day) "one of the most beautiful in the country." With its resources, IU is capable of so much more. But IU's rich historical legacy is beginning to evanesce. Its story is kept in archives, its paintings kept in museums. Though the pledge has been made for more art on campus, IU's curator, the tireless Sherry Rouse, is responsible for eight campuses! Students are forgetting, the student population itself is beginning to dwindle, and the budgets are constricting. Even I can't blame this on George W. Bush, although I've tried. \nWhat is needed is a major investment in the arts around the Bloomington campus. Focusing our energies on the rich legacy of IU and the ability of the arts to stimulate debate (as in the case of the Benton Murals) and showing how that history will pave a path into the new millennium would be a small investment with significant rewards. It would be a statement by the Hoosier community to prospective students about IU's dedication to cultural enrichment and a pathway to a stronger, richer, more diverse Indiana.\nI asked Vice Chancellor Bruce Jacobs, whom I believe to be the new Herman B Wells and the best administrator at IU, why there has not been a focus in recent years on achieving the goal of more art in the academic halls and his reply astounded me. He said, "No one has pushed hard enough. Sometimes it is just a matter of asking the right people at the right times to get something changed." Where there is a will, there seems to be a way. In 1939, Herman B Wells envisaged a fine arts center where the IU Art Museum and Auditorium now stand. And under his leadership, IU's fine arts and music programs became some of the best in the nation.\nI believe, like Wells did, that we should take action to ensure art's survival and that the spirit of a college campus is manifested in the art bedecking the walls and the cultural spirit kept alive through student discourse. Indiana has a lush cultural heritage, and it can build on that foundation. The question regarding the lack of art in Ballantine and other academic centers can be summed up by asking the simple question: What would Hermie do?