today just ain’t anywhere!” lamented one Muncie man, but this realization alone could not get a man or woman through college.61 The normal school had served obliquely as an instrument for the enrichment and protection of the business elites in the northwestern part of the city—the anchor to a real-estate endeavor—and directly as a means of class mobility and professional training unevenly shared by the business-class and working-class segments of the population living in their neighborhoods around the city.
BTC was growing, and an expanding institution needed a campus plan. The student body grew more than 450 percent over its first six years as a public institution, from 155 during the 1918–1919 school year to 833 in the fall of 1924.62 College enrollment boomed nationwide, and annual college enrollments rose about 10 percent a year; but BTC grew faster than its counterparts elsewhere.63 When the institution became Ball Teachers College in 1922, it began offering four-year degrees.64 The state of Indiana approved new education programs, which brought more faculty, staff, and students to the campus.
Frank C. Ball used philanthropy and political clout to help the college in its new growth phase. In 1921 Muncie’s state legislators appropriated funds for a new science building that would dramatically increase the college’s instructional space. Governor Warren McCray, successor to James Goodrich, questioned the necessity of such an expense and worked to have it removed from the budget. Frank Ball caught wind of the proposed cuts and made a personal visit to Indianapolis to lobby the governor. The manufacturer won out as the governor shifted his position on the construction funds and signed on to state appropriations to the college for 1923.65 Ball was not to be trifled with.
There had been a single neoclassical building and wood-frame dormitory on the campus when the Balls bought it. It could not contain the college’s growing agenda. The institution turned to city planning, the progressive marriage of urban reform, scientific expertise, and the arts, to help provide for and manage the growth of the college. At the turn of the century, this urban reform movement joined with the new architectural profession to create the field of city planning, developing urban space and employing civic symbols to promote the uplift of the American metropolis in concert with bourgeois elites.66 Cuno Kibele was Muncie’s leading architect and a member of the civic leadership. He designed commercial buildings downtown such as the Wysor Building and the Commercial Club block; residential buildings throughout the city, including additions to and redesigns of the Ball homes at Minnetrista; and industrial plants, including expansion of the Ball Brothers manufacturing plant.67 Kibele was brought aboard to impose order on the campus. The college had averted the chaos that could have erupted around the bankrupt normal school, and Kibele’s hire ensured the grounds and buildings would have the classic Vitruvian features of firmness, commodity, and delight (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Ball Gymnasium. The Balls’ donation of several hundred thousand dollars helped give the university its first major athletics building. Muncie architect Cuno Kibele designed the gymnasium and continued his signature style that ran through many Ball-financed projects. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
Conservative forms molded BTC campus planning. Kibele provided a plan of development in 1921 featuring a partially enclosed lawn on a north–south axis, surrounded by a symmetrical quadrangle of buildings. The influence of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris dominated American architecture—training that emphasized grand, monumental designs and adaptations of classical and Renaissance architectural and planning principles.68 A generation of Beaux-Arts architects had employed this spatial arrangement in cities and on college campuses. They drew on the Columbian Exposition of 1893 that crystallized and popularized Beaux-Arts planning and design in the United States.69
BTC leaders traveled to Chicago for inspiration. The master planning committee included Frank Ball, administrators W. W. Parsons and Linnaeus Hines, and a pair of other trustees. They visited Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of the city, and the University of Chicago on the South Side, where the Columbian Exposition had been held. The committee was impressed with Chicago and loosely adopted that city’s university as their campus model. The institution was a national leader in research and civic engagement. Kibele’s designs had established an architectural association between the college and the city’s leading manufacturers and businessmen. Ball State leaders also emulated the works of the country’s leading philanthropists, architects, and education institutions, making visible and tactile the alliance among business, civic, and education leaders.
Institutional Growth
After a decade as a public institution, BTC had solidified its position as a branch campus of ISNS, but Muncie boosters and politicos were determined it would be more than that. Lemuel Pittenger was a lawmaker and educator who held a long affiliation with the Ball family, playing an important legislative role in the development of the BTC campus. Pittenger followed Charles McGonagle’s legacy when he became the Muncie state representative in the early 1920s and served as chair of the Ways and Means Committee for the Indiana State House, handling the state budget in the lower chamber. He helped BTC achieve independence from ISNS by developing separate budget appropriations for the Muncie institution, effectively ending Terre Haute’s control over the junior campus.70 When the president of BTC died suddenly in 1927, students led a successful campaign to have Pittenger named his successor.71 With the Ball brothers’ blessing, Pittenger served as president for fifteen years, continuing as an ally to the family.72
By 1925, enrollment at the college had nearly reached a thousand students, only sixty of whom could live on campus in the lone, wood-framed Forest Hall for women.73 The Ball family addressed the problem, donating $300,000 for construction of a women’s dormitory in honor of their late sister.74 Lucina Hall was a Tudor Gothic brick-and-limestone structure designed by Indianapolis architect George Schreiber. Along with the administration building, the new dormitory served as the southern edge of the quadrangle. Housing over eighty students, it doubled the capacity of the college to house women students on campus. The measure, of course, expanded the reach of Grace DeHority and other college administrators to control the social lives of female students (Figure 6).75
Figure 6. Aerial view of the Ball Teachers College campus, ca. 1929. Several buildings begin to give form to the campus quadrangle. Aside from a handful of homes located north of the university, acres of open land extend into the distance. Ball State University Archives and Special Collections.
In the final phase of building in the 1920s, the college abandoned the formula of private capital and public operational expenses in favor of wholly public expenditures, creating a new laboratory school directed by the college and the Muncie school district. BTC administrators lobbied the state for appropriations for the school, which would provide progressive education for Muncie students from kindergarten through senior high school. It also gave future teachers opportunities for the practice teaching required in the college curriculum. BTC leaders arranged with Muncie school officials to close a nearby grade school and have the new Burris School serve the population of northwestern Muncie, beginning in 1929.76 The lab school, which drew on the ideas of education reformer John Dewey, was located on University Avenue, just across from Lucina Hall at the edge of BTC’s campus. The school soon earned a reputation as the city’s best.
College officials battled charges that Burris served only the wealthy business class. The new construction of the school, its excellent reputation, and the geographic district boundaries meant
