For a college playing for the first time in the NCAA men’s basketball championships, the tournament represents an opportunity to become a household name.
In the case of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, an urban commuter school with the peculiar motto, “Why not both?”, obviously it will require a pretty big house to fit everything under one roof when it makes its NCAA debut this week.
“It’s a very hard name to describe,” said Jill Morgan, a grad school alum who is actually in the business of description as an Indianapolis-based TV producer.
“It can be confusing,” agreed Rick Callahan, another alum in the business of clearing up confusion as an Associated Press reporter in Indianapolis.
Most people in the know simply boil everything down to IUPUI, or, annoyingly to some at the school, ooey-pooey. The acronym IUPUI makes a nifty little palindrome TV’s Vanna White could have fun with on “Wheel of Fortune.”
In fact, the school’s formal name — don’t forget, it’s Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis — was once used as an Alex Trebek answer on “Jeopardy.”
The question turned out to be: What is the U.S. university with the longest name? Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne isn’t far behind, of course, but that’s another story.
You can be sure the media will go with IUPUI when it refers to the university in accounts of its opening game, but it sure would be fun to hear announcers call the school by its full name in their play-by-play descriptions. Headline writers could be similarly challenged too.
William Kulsrud, IUPUI’s faculty athletic representative to the NCAA, said he was watching “Jeopardy” the day his university became part of a trivia question, but he prefers the tournament as a vehicle for telling the university’s story.
“We who have been here for so long have been waiting for a moment like this to put this campus on the map,” said Kulsrud, an associate professor of accounting on the faculty for 23 years. “From this day forward, people all over the country will have a sense of who we are.”
Well, maybe. Those paying attention to the NCAA tournament (which begins Thursday) will learn IUPUI is a huge, urban commuter university that has sprung up in a hurry.
The school was founded in 1969 by consolidating Indiana and Purdue university extensions — many of them professional schools — which were already in existence in downtown Indianapolis serving mostly non-traditional students.
29,026 students
Today, there is a total IUPUI enrollment of 29,026, approximately 8,000 of whom are graduate students in schools such as law, medicine and business. Many are part-time, and nearly half of those attending class are 25 and older.
Indeed, one of the current basketball team’s star players, Matt Crenshaw, is a 27-year-old junior who spent seven years in the military.
“He’s a veteran, literally,” said Ron Hunter, IUPUI’s coach.
This is also a school with world-class athletic facilities. Many venues funded by the Eli Lilly Co. and used for the 1987 Pan-American Games in Indianapolis, including a track and field stadium, tennis center and natatorium (indoor swimming pool), are on the campus — though only in the last few years has IUPUI fielded teams in some of these sports.
The school has played major college basketball for five years, going 20-13 this season to lift the Jaguars to a less-than-modest 64-83 record overall. Paradoxically, the men’s team plays in what might be the worst Division I facility in the nation — a tiny, 2,000-seat gym with folding bleachers.
The gym is in the natatorium and, for all practical purposes, it’s an anteroom overlooking the swimming pool, which seats 5,000 spectators. The basketball venue’s most distinguishing characteristics, according to visitors, are the smell of chlorine in the air and sound of players occasionally crashing into walls too close to the playing floor.
Think of the cozy little facility in the 1986 basketball movie “Hoosiers,” but in an urban setting. “We’re definitely challenged,” said an IUPUI administrator of the facility.
While there are many large, public and urban universities in the U.S. catering to commuter students, some of which have basketball teams in the NCAA tournament, the IUPUI story gets a little trickier than most. This is a school that means it when it says, “Why not both?”
Everyone at the Indianapolis school is considered an IUPUI student until they graduate, when, depending on their major, their degree is then granted either by Indiana University in Bloomington or Purdue in West Lafayette, which happen to be bitter rivals in almost everything.
“We call ourselves a core campus,” Kulsrud said, “but the relationship is different than the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago, which are more autonomous.”
Who goes where
The basic breakdown sees science, engineering and technology majors getting Purdue stamped on their diplomas, while Indiana gets the rest. Kulsrud said the IUPUI faculty likes the ties to the more prestigious Big Ten universities.
One bottom line is that the Jaguar squad has athletes playing together who eventually will be eligible for either Indiana or Purdue alumni events, which also will lead to some unusual class reunions down the road.
A lot of “legislative compromise” went into the university’s formation in 1969, according to Stefan Davis, IUPUI alumni director.
He said thought was given to a better, more autonomous-sounding name, but nothing materialized.
At the time, then Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut encouraged officials to call it the University of Indianapolis. But that became impossible when little Indiana Central, a private school in town, struck first and changed its name to exactly that.
Every year, Indiana State Sen. Larry Borst (he’s an Ohio State grad) introduces legislation designed to put more order in IUPUI’s unwieldy makeup, give the school more autonomy, and rename it the University of Central Indiana. The measure gets nowhere.
The fact is, everyone in the state has learned to live with IUPUI. Ooey-pooey is another matter.
Hunter noted that success in basketball can help everyone overcome any name problems, pointing out few people knew what to make of Mike Krzyzewski until he started winning NCAA championships at Duke.
“When I first came here,” said Hunter, who’s been the school’s head coach for all five Division I seasons, “everyone told me you can’t go to a place they call ooey-pooey. It’s not even pronounced right, but now we are in a position to do some educating.”
