Bloomington, The Transition

Purdue University and Indiana University are similar in a few respects. They are similarly in Indiana, located in similarly sized small towns, with similarly sized student populations. Consequently, you would expect the towns to be similar overall, but your expectations could not be more fortunately disappointed. If you call them both small Indiana "college towns," it would be simply on cause of the fact that both are small towns in Indiana that house universities; but by calling the two towns "college towns" you stretch the idea of "college town" to a level of generality so broad that it is no longer descriptively effective. Simply put, Bloomington and Lafayette/West Lafayette are at opposite ends of the spectrum of Indiana college towns, which is to say, even more simply, Lafayette might very well be the worst college town in Indiana, and Bloomington might very well be the best. How so? Let us count the ways.

Music venues, art museums, art galleries, ethnic restaurants, ethnic people, music schools, parks, street vendors selling paintings, jewelries, crafts, in short, everything you would classify under the rubric of culture and art, Bloomington has it, and has it in spades, whereas if Lafayette has it, it has it, well, like hens have teeth. What's strange is how immediately apparent it is that Bloomington is a college town, full of youth and art and music and life, whereas Lafayette, in comparison, is full of abandonment, absence, and the smells of industry. Let's just say that if a famous Colombian author would have written about love in the two towns, he would have titled the novel about Bloomington, "Love in the time of youth and music," reserving the title, "Love in the time of abandoned factories," for Lafayette. I mention this because while I was in Lafayette, I had completely forgotten that love existed, mostly because love doesn't exist in Lafayette (on a side note, I have been somewhat corrected of this statement by being referred to a certain club named the "Neon Cactus" in West Lafayette, where love exists, but it is the kind of love that Usher describes, a feeling that makes you want to make love in the club, the kind of love that the DJ has you falling into, but to be sure, a kind of love all the same). It took entering into Bloomington, seeing young couples walking in and out of restaurants holding hands, kissing in park benches, laughing and smiling on the way to shows, for me to remember that people did, in fact, fall in love, that it was a real thing after all.

Of course, going to Bloomington directly from Lafayette highlights the distinction between the towns, like going to Paris directly from, say, Sarajevo, or Baghdad, or Rotorua in New Zealand, where the smell of the city's rot chokes horses from hundreds of meters away, highlights the distinction between those cities. I'm not saying that Bloomington is some kind of epicenter of culture and that Lafayette is some kind of epicenter of death, I'm just saying that Bloomington reminds one of Austin, Texas, which offers friendliness, green architecture, and Wes Anderson, and that Lafayette reminds one of, well, Atlantic City, New Jersey, which offers gang stabbing, slums, and Donald Trump. Still, one expects Paris, the city of love, to be significantly different from, say, Dzernzinsk, Russia, home of the former Soviet Unions' chemical weapons manufacturing plants and, subsequently, home of the five-headed three-footed toad, whereas the two townships in question here actually invite comparison. In fact, IU and Purdue are rival universities (I'm not quite sure in what way), and for all these reasons you would expect, again, the towns to be much more similar than they actually are. So naturally, the question arises, what happened that made these small Indiana towns so different?

This question required some research on my part. I looked for intrigue, seduction, and espionage. I found what follows.

On July 2, 1862, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, through which the federal government was able to donate public land to any state that agreed to use the land to establish a college for the express purpose of teaching agriculture and the "mechanic arts." Indiana University was under the administration its fifth president, Cyrus Nutt, who admitted IU's first female student in 1867, making IU a coeducational institution. Nonetheless, Bloomington vied for the Indiana General Assembly's favor for the land to be donated to them in order to augment IU. John Purdue, the famous businessman/industrialist who made a fortune off selling grain, had different ideas, and money to set them in action. Now, "vying for favor" here translates into bidding, and John Purdue put $150,000 of his own money and acres of his own land on the table, effectively nipping Bloomington's aspirations in the bud, as the Indiana General Assembly, of which John Purdue was a member, took the bribe, I mean, accepted the bid.

Classes began at Purdue on September 16, 1874. Almost exactly two years later, on September 12, 1876, John Purdue died. But that is not to say that he did not exert a lasting influence on the University. For example, the formerly mentioned ugly ruddy bricks that the school-buildings are made from were the cheapest building blocks in the late 1800's. John's idea was that if you made the school from the cheapest materials you had more money to spend on "education," which here means revenue sports. Early on, the 'boiler-maker' education enjoyed a happy coincidence with football, since the 'mechanic arts' of engineering at that time meant actual time in forge rooms, toughening the football players since 1874. And this buisiness/industrialist persuasion that John Purdue bestowed upon Purdue University has persisted throughout the career of the university, as even today the Buisiness and Engineering schools of Purdue continue to grow, ugly brick by ruddy brick, along with revenue sports programs, while the Arts and Humanities are gradually dwindling into non-existence.

Now, much of the civic planning in and around Lafayette was based upon the needs of Purdue University, the chief investment of the township. In keeping with the industrial aesthetic, Lafayette city planners welcomed the erection of large emission spewing factories along the industrial roads scoring the town. With a mind persuaded by 'practicality', the town didn't worry much about clogging itself with eyesores. Curiously enough, this 'business-industrial-practical' persuasion would end up costing the town more than it afforded, as no one that cares about life wants to live there now. More concretely, despite the fact that Purdue University is more wealthy and famous than IU, the people of Bloomington enjoy a higher median household income than the people of West Lafayette, while living basically within one of the most beautiful campuses in America, according to Thomas Gaines' book, The Campus as a Work of Art.

Some people have told me that I've been too harsh on Lafayette, and they sometimes argue with me by saying that a place is only as good as you make it, but why is it that you only hear that when you're in a real shithole? In San Francisco, for instance, no one says, "you know, this town, it's just what you make of it." Likewise, no one in Bloomington says that it's as good as you make it. Here's why.

Like Purdue for Lafayette, IU for Bloomington is the chief feature of the town. But the schools couldn't be more different. Whereas Purdue is a school for industry, IU is deeply an Arts & Humanities school. IU has a reputable music program, as well as folklore, ethnomusicology, and environmental affairs programs. Although IU can not compete with Purdue in terms of Engineering, it is nonetheless still competitive in the sciences and technology (the university is wired in general, in fact, the Princeton Review awarded IU some mention for their technological advancement in 2007).

And like the civic planning of Lafayette followed Purdue's lead, the civic planning of Bloomington followed IU's lead. But the university with a strong focus on the Arts & Humanities laid the city out a little differently. Instead of having the campus on the edge of the town, requiring visitors to plow through roads flanked with factories and fast food joints, Bloomington continues to install academic buildings in the heart of the architecturally innovative town. And the buildings are not arranged in the government-housing style of Purdue, building next to ruddy building, with just enough concrete in between them to call them different buildings. To get from one building of IU's campus to the next, you either traipse over a stone walkway, a bridge over a stream, a park, all while flowers bloom in your wake.

So what the hell happened between the two towns in question here? Michel Foucault, a famous 20th century French philosopher, developed the simple but profound insight that institutions create individuals. Basically, factories produce individuals called 'factory workers', and schools produce 'students', prisons produce 'prisoners, farms produce 'farmers, etc. More particularly, music schools produce musicians, and engineering schools produce engineers. In short, different kinds of institutions produce different kinds of people. This might seem obvious, but on the scale of a town, the kinds of institutions that the town harbors produce the kinds of people that inhabit those towns, and so the story of the socio-economic demographics of a town runs parallel to the story of the institutions of the town.

It doesn't take much to be convinced of the thesis that life takes place more beautifully, more happily, in a beautiful and happy place. Foucault's insight couldn't be more obvious when leaving Lafayette, a town full of unemployed white people footslogging about looking like they just got punched in the face, only to arrive in Bloomington, an ethnically diverse town full of artists and musicians striding out of a good meal in love holding hands and smiling on the way to a great show they're about to see. Given what Bloomington and IU are about, it's small wonder that IU is ranked as being a super friendly university. People from all over Indiana praise Bloomington and travel there for spiritual elevation and to get drunk, good bands and musicians and students prefer Bloomington to any other town in Indiana, because they've all concluded that it's one of the best, if not the best, place to dance and live and wear a cardigan in Indiana. How so? What follows are the whimsical encounters that led me to that conclusion as well.