Campus baseball field

ver notice IU is shaped like a giant baseball field?\nLook at a map. The School of Law is home plate. The School of Music is first base. Second base: the Main Library. Yogi's is the third-base coach's box. The Bypass is the home run fence.\nNow look again: Virtually every academic building at IU is in the infield. Except for Collins and maybe a dozen greek houses, virtually every on-campus student residence is in the outfield.\nThis is no accident.\nDid you know Collins once had a twin? Most of Collins was built circa 1940, the same time as Goodbody, Memorial, Morrison and Sycamore Halls. These buildings were IU's original residence halls. What's now Collins was the "Men's Residence Center." The others were the "Women's Residence Center."\nIU commandeered the women's residence center for academic use by 1970. Imagine how popular those buildings would be today as residence halls. They'd be full of seniors, with a waiting list to get in. (Wouldn't you think about living there?)\nThe campus is littered with ex-greek houses. The School of Informatics was once Alpha Omicron Pi. The Admissions Office: formerly Sigma Kappa. The International Center: formerly Alpha Chi Omega. (Jordan Avenue from Seventh to Third streets used to be entirely greek housing. Only the Delta Gammas are left.)\nWhat's the big deal? Who cares where students live?\nIU certainly does. When greeks screw up and get booted from campus, or when a residence hall suits a different need, the University snaps up the building.\nIU has had a master plan that called for housing to be segregated from academic buildings. It's been organizing the campus into "single-use zones" since the 1950s.\nWhen people are concentrated in a limited area, a zone where housing, shopping and workplaces are mixed together, that zone is capable of handling the greatest volume of traffic and least in need of parking. \nLiving there, it's easiest to go many places and do many daily tasks without needing transportation at all.\nSingle-use zoning is the primary characteristic of suburbs and office parks, not cities. Single-use zoning isn't civically healthy. It increases our isolation from each other. And it creates traffic jams on IU's basepaths.\nWhere you live right now may not be a residence when you visit IU in 10 years. Does that kind of IU "tradition" matter to you? Look at that map one more time.\nMeanwhile, departments drool over the old Pike house on Third Street. Even though Briscoe Quad looks like office towers (think Assembly Hall lots for employee parking), covetous administrative eyes look at the Kappa Alpha Theta house, the Phi Gamma Delta house or Brown and Greene Halls in Collins, all thriving communities of students.\nThe pitcher's mound on our giant diamond -- the very heart of campus these days -- isn't a ceremonial plaza, or a hallowed building where tourists and alumni visit.\nIt's a parking lot.\nWhat was there before "IMU Lot No. 1?" There was green space, named for one of IU's most illustrious historical figures, the late 19th century IU president David Starr Jordan.\nGuess what its function was?\nA baseball field.\nQuestions or comments, e-mail volans@bloomington.gov.