Talk:History of Ball State University

Infobox title
I changed the infobox title back to "History at a glance" to be consistent with all of the other universitites and colleges that have (albeit smaller) "History at a glance" infoboxes, which are so far the Indiana colleges and universities that have at least one renaming or acquisition: Rose-Hulman, UIndy, IPFW, IUPUI, Valpo plus perhaps more that slip my mind right now. Some are n-ary trees that cannot be organized linearly without significantly increasing the difficulty of reading due to interleavedness, such as IUPUI's and IPFW's. By the way, I am visiting each and every college/university at first in Indiana then Illinois then Michigan then Ohio then ... to:
 * convert it over to Template:Infobox_University to support the unification of the previously 42 Template:Infobox_*University*s into one consistent-but-flexible format/content; and
 * use the recently-added fields that Template:Infobox_University added if that article was already using Template:Infobox_University; and
 * use only the academic logo at the top of the Infobox_University (instead of the athletics logo/spirit-mark); and
 * display the athletics logo/spirit-mark (which is often an order of magitude more publicly recognizable, such as in U of Notre Dame's case) in miniature in the athletics field of the Template:University_Infobox in a consistent format along with the number of teams and their broad NCAA-division/NAIA affiliation and their team-members moniker that may differ drastically from their mascot's name (such as Purdue's Boilermakers as team-members, but which has a mascot that is a faux steam locomotive engine, plus as is the case with BSU the team-members are not called Charlie Cardinals or Charlies but simply Cardinals, again where the mascot differs from the team's moniker, in this case only slightly).
 * ensure that the first three entries in the External Links section are
 * Official website,
 * Official athletics website (unless the institution has no intercollegiate athletics), and
 * Campus Map (unless the institution has no physical campus or the campus map has a URL that looks like it would not remain the same from year to year, or the institution provides no campus map(s) online); and
 * capture in as small of a nutshell as possible any complications regarding the interpretations of "established" date that permit meaningful comparison across all university/college articles.
 * Note for example that Valpo considers 1859 to be their established date, despite being founded by a different religion, being closed due to bankruptcy for two years, reopening as a secular/nonaffiliated institution that itself fell into bankruptcy (and was nearly bought by the KKK) and then & only then bought & reopened as much resembling the Lutheren institituion that it is today. Conversely, BSU takes the opposite perspective of jettisoning the financially-failed prior institutions on its established date.  But there is a third viewpoint, UCLA takes still another perspective of jettisoning the normal-school/teachers-college era of their history on their established date, focusing solely on its era as a university in the University of California system.  In the Valpo school of thought, BSU's established date would be 1899.  In the UCLA school of thought, BSU's established date could be 1965 (the date of, like UCLA's College of Letters and Science in 1919, being chartered as a full university, officially recognized as being comprised of more schools than the College of Education nee teachers college nee normal school).  (Similar difficulties in deciding on the date of first establishment arises with complex mergers such as IPFW and IUPUI, especially IUPUI most of whose components were on towards a century old at the time of merger into the modern IUPUI.)  As one can easily deduce, there is no convincing each institution (or Wikipedia editors) that their date of first establishment is "wrong" as viewed from the vantage of other institutions and that they should change or that the Wikipedia article should differ from what that institution's president's office says.  Instead, I say when one date is needed, use the year that is the official favorite for that institution (such as from its president's office) and then in the History at a glance table briefly provide the information to the reader of multiple articles to match up the analogues between radically different definitions of "established" among institutions.  Oh, and yet another definition of "established" is demonstrated by UIndy, where they were chartered (the official established date) three years before they opened to teach their first class (which is by far the more common established-date definition).
 * So long story short, I find similarities between BSU's Charlie Cardinal and Purdue's Boilermaker Special as well as BSU's Cardinals and Purdue's Boilermakers as well as BSU's nontrivial history and IUPUI's much different style of nontrivial history. I also see conflicts among university/college articles that can seriously confuse the reader.  By adding the proper amount of well-formatted consistency across the articles, all of these would-be problems/conflicts become non-issues.  It is for these reasons that I changed the "timeline" title back to "History at a glance" for inter-article consistency. Optikos 22:49, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Continuing the History
I'll be resuming my work on the history of the University within the next week or two. --Vortex 16:23, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:BSUNewLogo.png
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BetacommandBot 05:14, 16 September 2007 (UTC)