Early years
Indiana's state government founded Indiana University in 1820 as the "State Seminary." The 1816 Indiana state constitution
required that the General Assembly (Indiana's
state legislature) create a "general system of education,
ascending in a regular gradation, from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open
to all." It took some time for the legislature to fulfill its promise. While the original legislative charter was granted in
1820, construction began in 1822, the first professor was hired in 1823, and classes were offered in 1824. The first class
graduated in 1830.The school developed rapidly in its first years. The hiring of Andrew Wylie, its first president, in 1828 signified the
school's growing professionalism. The General Assembly changed the school's name to "Indiana College" in the same year. In 1838
the legislature changed the school's name for a final time to Indiana University.Wylie's death in 1851 marks the end of the university's first period of development. IU now had nearly a hundred students and
seven professors. Despite the university's more obviously secular purpose, presidents and professors were still expected to set a
moral example for their charges. It was only in 1885 that a non-clergyman, biologist David Starr Jordan, became president.Between Wylie and Jordan's administrations, the University grew slowly. Few changes rocked the university's repose. One
development is interesting to modern scholars: The college admitted its first woman student, Sarah Parke Morrison in
1867, making IU the first state university to admit women on an equal basis with men.
In mid-passage
In 1883, IU awarded its first Ph. D. and played its first intercollegiate sport, baseball, prefiguring the school's future
status as a major research institution and a power in collegiate athletics. But two other incidents that year were far more
important to the university. First, the university's original campus in Seminary Square near the center of Bloomington burned to
the ground. Second, instead of rebuilding in Seminary Square, as had been the practice following previous blazes, the college was
rebuilt at the far eastern edge of Bloomington. (Today, Bloomington has expanded eastward, and the "new" campus is once again at
the center of the city.)