Back to the future

“A great university,” said Herman B Wells, “steadily develops its research institutes and facilities that will be needed no matter how the student population fluctuates.”

The IU vice president for research commissioned a study in 2004 calling for 5 million square feet of new research space at IU and IU-Purdue University Indianapolis over the next decade. This current shortage, the vice president said, would threaten IU’s preeminence in collegiate research.

That same vice president for research, Michael McRobbie, became president of the University three years later and announced the development of a long-term Master Plan guiding infrastructural renovations on both campuses.
 
Last Friday, the Board of Trustees approved the proposal submitted by Master Planner David King, chairman and design director for Washington-based architecture firm SmithGroup/JJR, who developed the plan throughout the past year. The broad principles of the plan aimed to “respect the character of the (campus’) historic core ... restore the Jordan River corridor ... sustainably manage physical and natural resources,” among other things. 

Some of the more radical changes include Seventh Street’s transformation into an “academic-cultural ‘main street,’ establishing a Woodlawn Avenue boulevard linking academic and athletic precincts ... enhanced gateways along Indiana Avenue ... and more efficient redistribution of parking spaces while maintaining a compact, walkable campus.”

Although the plan hopes to preserve the rich sense of tradition captured in the Gothic architecture of Wells quad or the Romanesque embellishments of Kirkwood Hall, it also accounts for the challenges of traffic congestion, storm water management and obsolescent academic facilities. Like any renovative project, it strives to manage the colossal tug-of-war between conservation and innovation.

Nostalgist that I am, I greet most sweeping change with resistance. I cringe to think of construction workers remodeling my grandparents’ favorite study nook to accommodate modernity or to envisage fluorescent yellow machinery bulldozing the canopied paths where my parents may have passed unknowingly.

Sentiment and specifics aside, the approval of this plan represents a watershed juncture in IU history; in pioneering this process, President McRobbie has looked beyond today’s transient challenges and embraced the future’s daunting uncertainties.  “IU ... is not an institution that is a stranger to change,” he declared in his inaugural address. “Its history is one of endurance, adaptation and renewal.”

In an era when most universities go through presidents like UITS goes through paper reams, ours not only acknowledges the tremendous strides of luminaries like Herman B Wells, but emulates his long-term vision as well.

As President McRobbie positions the University’s current plans in a historic framework and challenges administration, faculty and student leaders to refocus toward the future, consider your place in IU’s evolution.

As builders restructure the school’s complexion to meet the opportunities of a coming era, cherish the intangible, enduring ideals that have brought us this far; and as new demands, new visions and new ideas transform the intellectual, social and cultural landscape of IU, take part in the metamorphosis and remember this time of felicitous growth.