Indiana University Bloomington

Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington) is a public research university located in Bloomington, Indiana, in the United States. IU Bloomington is the flagship campus of the Indiana University system. Being the flagship campus, IU Bloomington is often referred to simply as IU or Indiana. However, in recent years, the name "Indiana University" has been applied more broadly to the entire Indiana University system.

It is considered to be one of America's Public Ivy universities, which recognizes top public research universities in the United States. It is also a member of the Association of American Universities. Numerous schools and programs are part of IU, including the Jacobs School of Music, the IU School of Informatics and Computing, the Kelley School of Business, the School of Public Health, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs, the Maurer School of Law, the IU School of Library and Information Science, and the IU School of Education.

With a spring 2013 enrollment of more than 42,081 students, IU Bloomington is the largest university campus in the state. While 55.2% of the student body was from Indiana, students from 49 of the 50 states, Washington D.C., and 165 foreign nations were also enrolled. The university is home to an extensive student life program, with about 17 percent of undergraduates joining the Greek system. Indiana athletic teams compete in Division I of the NCAA and are known as the Indiana Hoosiers. The university is a member of the Big Ten Conference.

Earlier years
Indiana's state government in Corydon founded Indiana University in 1820 as the "State Seminary." It was originally located at what is now called Seminary Square Park near the intersection of Second Street and College Avenue. 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, partly due to a debate regarding whether the Indiana Territory's public university—what is now Vincennes University—should be adopted as the State of Indiana's public university or whether a new public university should be founded in Bloomington to replace the territorial university. While the original state-issued legislative charter for IUB was granted in 1820, construction began in 1822; the first professor, Baynard Rush Hall, was hired in 1823; classes were offered in 1824. The first class graduated in 1830. Throughout this period and until the rechartering of Vincennes University from a four-year institution to a two-year institution in 1889, a legal-political battle was fought between the territorial-chartered public university in Vincennes and the State of Indiana on behalf of the state-chartered public university in Bloomington, including the legal case (Trustees for Vincennes University v Indiana, 1853) which was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. IU developed rapidly in its first years. The hiring of Andrew Wylie, its first president, in 1829 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 only the fourth public university to admit women on an equal basis with men. Morrison went on to become the first female professor at IU in 1873.

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 another incident that year was far more important to the university: the university's original campus in Seminary Square near the center of Bloomington burned to the ground. Instead of rebuilding in Seminary Square, as had been the practice following previous blazes, the college was rebuilt between 1884 and 1908 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.)

One of the challenges facing Indiana University in the early 20th century was providing the university campus with a sufficient amount of water for its operation. (Bloomington, and the IU campus in particular, is located on a high ground without any major rivers or lakes in the vicinity, and with little usable groundwater). The city's waterworks existing in the early 20th century being utterly inadequate, in 1909 the university's Board of Trustees made the decision that the university should solve the water problem on its own. University president William Lowe Bryan commissioned a team of IU researchers, led by the geologist E.R. Cumings, to investigate the campus' water situation. On March 8, 1910, the Cumings commission recommended a site for the new reservoir, a couple miles northeast of the campus; the reservoir, which became known as the University Lake, was constructed in 1910-1914. Although not used for water supply anymore, the reservoir exists to this day, and is the centerpiece of Indiana University's Research and Teaching Preserve (Griffy Woods).

The first extension office of IU was opened in Indianapolis in 1916. In 1920/1921 the School of Music and the School of Commerce and Finance (what later became the Kelley School of Business) were opened. In the 1940s Indiana University opened extension campuses in Kokomo and Fort Wayne. The controversial Kinsey Institute for sexual research was established in 1945.

Campus
The Indiana University Bloomington campus of 1933 acre includes abundant green space and historic buildings dating to the university's reconstruction in the late nineteenth century. The campus rests on a bed of Indiana limestone, specifically Salem limestone and Harrodsburg limestone, with outcroppings of St. Louis limestone.

The "Jordan River" is a stream flowing through the center of campus. A section of Bloomington's Clear Creek, it is named for David Starr Jordan, Darwinist, ichthyologist, and president of IU and later Stanford University.



Facilities and architecture
Many of the campus's buildings, especially the older central buildings, are made from Indiana limestone quarried locally. The Works Progress Administration built much of the campus's core during the Great Depression. Many of the campus's buildings were built and most of its land acquired during the 1950s and 1960s, when first soldiers attending under the GI Bill and then the baby boom swelled the university's enrollment from 5,403 in 1940 to 30,368 in 1970. Some buildings on campus underwent similar expansion. As additions were constructed by building onto the outside of existing buildings, exterior surfaces were incorporated into their new interiors, making this expansion clearly visible in the affected buildings' architecture. The Chemistry and Biology buildings serve as examples, where two of the interior walls of the latter's library are clearly constructed as limestone exteriors. The Bryan House is the traditional on-campus home of the university president.

The 1979 movie Breaking Away was filmed on location in Bloomington and the IU campus. It also featured a reenactment of the annual Little 500 bicycle race. The IU campus also has trails that many use for biking and running. The trails in Bloomington and nearby areas total nearly 1200 mi.

Athletic facilities
Indiana University's athletic facilities are located on campus and are grouped in between East 17th Street, Dunn Street and the IN-45/IN-46 bypass. In the 17,000-seat Assembly Hall (home to the IU NCAA basketball team), there are five NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship banners on display. Cook Hall, Memorial Stadium, Mellencamp Pavilion, the Gladstein Fieldhouse, the IU Tennis Center, the Billy Hayes Track and Bill Armstrong Stadium are all also located within the complex.

Indiana Memorial Union
The 500000 sqft Indiana Memorial Union (IMU) is the second largest student union in the United States. In addition to stores and restaurants, it features an eight-story student activities tower (home to the Indiana University Student Association, Indiana Memorial Union Board, and a variety of other student organizations), a 186-room hotel, a 400-seat theatre, a 5000 sqft Alumni Hall, 50000 sqft of meeting space, and a bowling alley. The IMU houses an outstanding collection of Indiana art including artists from Brown County, the Hoosier Group, Richmond Group and others.

Libraries
The Indiana University Bloomington Library System supports nineteen library facilities and three special research collections, consisting a total of 7.8 million books. The system was named the top American research library system in 2009 by the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Herman B Wells Library
IU's Herman B Wells Library is the 13th largest university library in North America. Prior to a ceremony in June 2005 when it was renamed for IU's former president and chancellor, this building was simply called the Main Library. Built in 1969, the building contains eleven floors in the Eastern Tower (research collection, used primarily for graduate students) and five floors in the Western Tower (the undergraduate collection). The building also contains the Information Commons, a fully integrated technology center for learning and collaboration which attracts 82 percent of all undergraduate students.

An oft-repeated urban legend holds that the library sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building. A webpage hosted on the Indiana.edu domain debunks this myth, stating, among other things, that the building rests on a 94 ft (28.6 m) thick limestone bedrock.

Branch Libraries
In addition to IU's main library, the Bloomington Libraries support eighteen additional facilities:


 * Business/SPEA Information Commons (Library for the Kelley School of Business and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs)
 * Chemistry Library
 * Education Library
 * Fine Arts Library
 * Geosciences Library (Library for the Geography and Geology Departments)
 * SPH Library (Library of the School of Public Health)
 * Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, Center for Disability Information and Referral (CeDIR) Library
 * Indiana Prevention Resource Center Library
 * Kinsey Institute Library
 * Law Library (Library for the Maurer School of Law)
 * Life Sciences Library (Library for the Biology Department, Medical Sciences Program, and Nursing Program)
 * The Lilly Library (rare books and manuscripts)
 * Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library
 * Office of University Archives and Records Management
 * Optometry Library
 * Swain Hall Library (Library for the Departments of Physics and Mathematics and the School of Informatics and Computing)
 * William & Gayle Cook Music Library
 * Wylie House Museum

The Lilly Library


The Lilly Library is one of the largest rare book and manuscript libraries in the United States. Founded in 1960 with the collection of Josiah K. Lilly, Jr., of Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, the library now contains approximately 400,000 rare books, 6.5 million manuscripts, and 100,000 pieces of sheet music. The library's holdings are particularly strong in British and American history and literature, religious texts, Latin Americana, medicine and science, food and drink, children's literature, fine printing and binding, popular music, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, and early printing. Notable items in the library's collections include the New Testament of the Gutenberg Bible, a first edition copy of the Book of Mormon, the first printed collection of Shakespeare's works, Audubon's Birds of America, one of 25 extant copies of the "First Printing of the Declaration of Independence" (also known as the "Dunlap Broadside") that was printed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, George Washington's letter accepting the presidency of the United States, Abraham Lincoln's desk from his law office, a leaf from the famous Abraham Lincoln "Sum Book" ca. 1824-1826, Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, the manuscripts of Robert Burns's "Auld Lang Syne", the Boxer Codex, J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and typescripts of many of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. The library also owns the papers of Hollywood directors Orson Welles and John Ford, the poets Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound, and authors Edith Wharton, Max Eastman and Upton Sinclair. In 2006, the library received a collection of 30,000 mechanical puzzles from Jerry Slocum. The collection will be on permanent display. Special permission is not required to use the collections, and the library has several exhibition galleries which are open to the public.

Within the Lilly Library is the Ruth E. Adomeit collection of miniature books, one of the world’s largest. Among the collection are rare miniature books such as "From Morn Till Eve", a miniature book that presents biblical quotations in a devotional form, with one phrase for each morning and evening of a month. The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) had listed that, "the only known copy as being in the collection of famed miniature book collector Ruth E. Adomeit", which is now in the Lilly Library.

The Fine Arts Library
The Fine Arts Library houses Indiana University's books and journals in the fields of the visual arts, art history, architecture, design and related disciplines and supports the academic needs of the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, and the Indiana University Department of Fine Arts. The collection comprises over 140,000 volumes and 322 periodicals, including collections of circulating slides and plates and a non-circulating collection of over 1200 artists' books.

IU's first Fine Arts Library was established in the late 1930s as part of the Departmental office on the second floor, east wing of the University Library which was then located in Franklin Hall. In 1941, two important events occurred: Henry Radford Hope became chairman of the Fine Arts Department in the Fall and the Fine Arts Center was created by remodeling Mitchell Hall Annex. The Fine Arts Library moved into its current quarters inside the IU Art Museum designed by I.M. Pei in August, 1981.

Special Research Collections
Special research collections supported by the IU Bloomington Libraries include the Archives of Traditional Music, the Archives of African American Music & Culture, and The Black Film Center Archive.

IU Art Museum
The IU Art Museum was first established in 1941 with a later building being designed by the world-renowned architecture firm I.M. Pei and Partners. In its unique design, it has no right angles in its construction. Completed in 1982, the museum collection of over 30,000 objects includes works by Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock. The museum has particular strengths in the art of Africa, Oceania, the Americas, Ancient Greece and Rome, and Early Modernism, and its collections of works on paper (prints, drawings and photographs). The IU Art Museum is also ranked as one of the top five university art museums along with Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

Notable artists who have their work displayed there include Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Rankings and recognition
IU has over 120 majors and programs ranked in the nation's top 20. Twenty-nine graduate programs and four schools at Indiana University are ranked among the top 25 in the country in the US News & World Report's Best Graduate Schools 2001–02. Time magazine named IU its 2001 College of the Year among major research universities. Newsweek named it the Hottest Big State School in the Nation in 2005. The Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranked Indiana University as the 28th best in the world in the social sciences and the 90th best in the world overall. Also the Russian based Global University Ranking placed Indiana University among top 90 in the world in 2009. Acceptance rate for the University is 60%. Average SAT's range from 1010-1180.

In 2010, the Academic Ranking of World Universities gave IU Bloomington a world rank of 90 and a national rank of 50. Time named IU Bloomington its "2001 College of the Year" among major research universities. The University is considered a Public Ivy. Indiana is one of 61 members of the Association of American Universities, the leading American research universities. Additionally, IU has over 110 academic programs ranked in the top twenty nationwide.

The tenth annual Newsweek-Kaplan College Guide, which appeared in the August 22, 2005 issue of Newsweek magazine, chose IU as its "Hottest Big State School" and extolled the campus's blend of tradition with emerging technologies.

In January 2011 Kiplinger's Personal Finance ranked IU Bloomington the 30th out of the "Best Values in Public Colleges 2011".

USA Today called Bloomington one of the top 10 student-friendly college towns with a population of less than 1 million. The university offers the latest in technology: IU was ranked as one of the top five wired universities in America according to Princeton Review and PC Magazine in 2007. On the 2011 Green Report Card, issued by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, the university received a B.

Upon assuming leadership of Indiana University, one of President Adam Herbert's biggest initiatives focused on "mission differentiation" for IU's eight campuses, which includes making the flagship Bloomington campus choosier among freshman applicants. Under the proposal, IUB would educate the professionals, executives and researchers while the regional campuses would educate the state's remaining labor force. Advocates believe it will rejuvenate Indiana's economy while critics argue it betrays the university's mission of educating more of Indiana's populace. The university's academic system is divided into one large "College" (which itself contains one school) and twelve other schools and divisions. Together, these thirteen units offer more than 900 individual degree programs and majors.

College of Arts and Sciences
The College of Arts and Sciences, known as the College, is the largest of the University's academic divisions, and is home to more than 40 percent of IU's undergraduates. In addition, the College offers many electives and general education courses for students enrolled in most other schools on campus. There are more than 50 academic departments in the College, encompassing a broad range of disciplines from the traditional (such as biology, chemistry, biochemistry, English, economics, Geography, mathematics, and physics) to more modern and specialized areas, including Jewish Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, and International Studies. Through the College, IU also offers instruction in over 40 foreign languages, one of the largest language study offerings at any American university. IU is the only university in the nation that offers a degree in Hungarian (although it was done through the Individualized Major Program) and is the first university in the United States to offer a doctorate in Gender Studies. The Department of Geography has highly recognized programs in climate and environmental change, GIS, human-environment interaction, and human geography. Indiana University is also home to the nation's only degree-granting Department of Central Eurasian Studies. The university's catalog at one time boasted that a student could study any language from Albanian to Uzbek. The College is the parent division for fifteen individual research institutes, and holds the distinction of being the only academic division within the university to house an autonomous school (The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts) within it. A number of first- and second-year students from the Indiana University School of Medicine (which is based at IUPUI) complete their preclinical education at the Bloomington campus's Medical Science Program, which is housed within the Department of Biology and the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute. The College is also home to the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, the first formally established academic department in folklore at any United States university, and the only such department to integrate these two practices into one field. IU also features a world-class cyclotron, the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility, operated by the Department of Physics. The College also houses IU's Department of Theatre and Drama which offers a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, Directing, Playwriting or Design/Technology, and as of the 2007-2008 school year, a BFA in Musical Theatre. In 2009, professor of political science Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences since its inception in 1969.

Maurer School of Law


The Maurer School of Law, founded in 1842, is one of the oldest schools on the Bloomington campus. It features a law library recently ranked first in the nation and is situated on the southwest corner of campus. In 2000, then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist presided over a mock trial of King Henry VIII in the school's moot courtroom. In the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings, the school was ranked 23rd in the nation among law schools and tied for 7th in public law schools. Notable alumni from the School of Law include songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, and Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton. On December 4, 2008, the school of law was renamed the Michael Maurer School of Law.

School of Library and Information Science
The IU School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) was ranked by U.S. News & World Report in 2006 as the 7th best program of its type in the nation. It has also been ranked number 1 in scholarly productivity by a 2006 study published in the journal Library & Information Science Research.

SLIS is housed in the ground floor of the Wells Library's Western Tower.

In April 2012, SLIS and IU's School of Informatics and Computing began a discussion on a possible merger of the two schools. With the success of negotiations and arrangements, Indiana University Board of Trustees approved the merger on October 22, 2012. Effective from July 1, 2013 IU School of Informatics and School of Library and Information Science will merge into a single school to be called the IU School of Informatics and Computing.

Jacobs School of Music


Founded in the beginning of the 20th century by Charles Campbell, the Jacobs School of Music focuses on voice, opera, orchestral conducting, and jazz studies. It has been ranked #1 in the country tied with Juilliard and Eastman School of Music by U.S. News & World Report. With more than 1,600 students, the school is one of the largest of its kind in the US and among the largest in the world. The school's facilities, including five buildings located in the heart of campus, comprise recital halls, more than 170 practice rooms, choral and instrumental rehearsal rooms, and more than 100 offices and studios. Its prestigious faculty has included such notable names as David Effron, Arthur Fagen, János Starker, Costanz Cuccaro, Timothy Noble André Watts, Menahem Pressler, Linda Strommen, Abbey Simon, Ray Cramer, David Baker, Earl Bates, Carol Vaness, Sylvia McNair, Howard Klug, violinist Joshua Bell, conductor Leonard Slatkin, and composer Sven-David Sandström. Notable alumni include Edgar Meyer and soprano Angela Brown.

Kelley School of Business
The Kelley School of Business (known colloquially as "Kelley" or "The B-School") was founded in 1920 as the University's School of Commerce and Finance. Approximately 6,100 students are enrolled in undergraduate, graduate Accountancy and Information Systems degrees, MBA and PhD programs, and online degree program Kelley Direct.

It is one of only three business schools in the nation for whom all undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top 20 of the US News & World Report college rankings. In 2010, US News ranked the undergraduate program 10th in the nation (6th among public schools) and, in 2010, the MBA program 23rd in the nation (7th among public schools). In 2007, the Wall Street Journal ranked Kelley's MBA program fifth in the nation among regional programs. Kelley's programs in consumer products, and energy and industrial products and services were second, marketing was third and accounting, eighth. Business Week ranked the undergraduate program 16th in 2008 (6th among public schools) and the graduate program 15th in the nation in 2008 and fourth among public schools. In addition, Business Week gave the undergraduate program an A in teaching and an A+ in career services.

Department of Labor Studies
The Department of Labor Studies, a unit housed within the School of Social Work, was founded in the 1940s during the tenure of Herman B Wells in response to the growing role of organized labor in American society. Today, the Division is one of only several degree-granting programs in the nation for the area of labor studies or industrial relations. Notable faculty in recent years have included Leonard Page, General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board during the Clinton Administration, and labor economist/author Michael Yates.

School of Public Health
Established in 1946 as the first School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation in the United States, the school and programs have grown to encompass a broad spectrum of academic interests and professional fields. The school was renamed as the School of Public Health-Bloomington in September 2012, and is working toward the goal of becoming Indiana's first accredited public health school. SPH has more than 2,500 students and almost 17,000 living alumni, with undergraduate and advanced degree programs in Applied Health Science, Environmental Health, Kinesiology, and Recreation, Park, and Tourism Studies. Campus Recreational Sports provides sport and fitness services for the IU community and the public.

The school's resources include more than 12,000 sqft of research and teaching laboratories, and nearly 275,000 sqft of indoor and outdoor sport and fitness facilities, including recreation centers, aquatics centers, and acreage that includes Bradford Woods.

School of Education


The School of Education, formerly a part of the College of Arts and Science, has been independent since 1923. One of the largest schools of education in the United States, and consistently placed among the top 20 graduate schools of education in the United States by U.S. News, it offers a range of degrees in professional education: a B.S. in teacher education leading to a teaching license, M.S., education specialist (Ed. S.) and doctoral (Ed. D, Ph.D.) degrees.

School of Public and Environmental Affairs
The School of Public and Environmental Affairs (or SPEA) is the largest school of its kind in the United States. Founded in 1972, SPEA is known for its distinctive interdisciplinary approach. It brings together the social, natural, behavioral, and administrative sciences in one faculty. SPEA has a sister "core" campus at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (or IUPUI) and an affiliate program is operated at Indiana University's Gary campus.

In the 2012 "Best Graduate Schools" survey by U.S. News & World Report, SPEA ranked second and is the nation's highest-ranked graduate program in public affairs at a public institution. SPEA was ranked just behind Syracuse University and ahead of Harvard. SPEA is also the highest ranked graduate school at Indiana University in Bloomington, In. Four of its specialty programs are ranked in the top 10 listings. Similar rankings do not yet exist for graduate schools of environmental science or for undergraduate schools in either public affairs or environmental science.

SPEA is the headquarters of the Public Administration Review, the premier journal of public administration research, theory and practice. SPEA is also home to the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Public Budgeting and Finance and Small Business Economics.

SPEA has more than a dozen joint programs in social and natural sciences and professional fields. Popular majors include nonprofit management, public policy, public finance and arts administration. SPEA alumni include radio and television host Tavis Smiley and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. Among SPEA's faculty is Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economics. She was named by Time Magazine one of the 100 most influential people in the United States.

School of Journalism
Housed in a building named for famed war correspondent and alumnus Ernie Pyle, the School of Journalism was established in 1911. The school offers undergraduate and graduate programs for those preparing for careers as reporters, editors, broadcasters, public relations professionals, multimedia specialists, and educators. The School of Journalism draws students from as far away as China and Ukraine and as close as Bloomington or other Indiana towns.

Among the alumni are more than 30 Pulitzer Prize winners. Alumni work in every field of journalism, from the oldest form of print publishing to newest form as online journalists. Many remain active in supporting the school by mentoring students, facilitating internship programs, and donating time and financial gifts to the school.

School of Informatics and Computing
In 1999, the Indiana University School of Informatics was established as an environment for research professors and students to develop new uses for information technology in order to solve specific problems in areas as diverse as biology, fine arts, and economics. Informatics is also interested in "how people transform technology, and how technology transforms us." In 2005 the Department of Computer Science moved from the College of Arts and Sciences to the School of Informatics, prompting the school to expand its name to "School of Informatics and Computing". This move merged several faculty, bringing the total core faculty to over 100. Informatics also has strong ties with the School of Library and Information Sciences, Department of Telecommunications, Jacobs School of Music, and the Cognitive Science program.

The School is one of a handful that offer degrees in Human-Computer Interaction. The School is the only one in the country to offer a formal degree which combines Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Security. In addition to the innovative HCI/security degree, the School offers master's degrees in Human-Computer Interaction Design, Music Informatics, Bioinformatics, Chemical Informatics, Security Informatics, and Computer Science, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and in Informatics. Specialization areas for the Ph.D. in Computer Science include artificial intelligence, databases, distributed systems, formal methods, high-performance computing, programming languages, and security. The Informatics Ph.D. program offers tracks in bioinformatics, cheminformatics, complex systems, human-computer interaction design, logic and mathematical foundations of informatics, music informatics, security informatics, and social informatics.

Athletics
IU's intercollegiate athletics program has a long tradition in several key sports. From its beginnings with baseball in 1867, the Hoosier athletic program has grown to include over 600 male and female student-athletes on 24 varsity teams boasting one of the nation's best overall records. Sports sponsored by the university include football, men's basketball, women's basketball, cross country and track, baseball, golf, tennis, rowing, volleyball, swimming & diving and more.

The Hoosiers became a member of the prestigious Big Ten Conference on December 1, 1899. The school's national affiliation is with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). National team titles (now totaling 26; 25 NCAA, 1 AIAW) have been won in nine men's sports and one women's sport (tennis), topped by a record-setting six straight men's swimming & diving titles, eight men's soccer crowns and five titles in men's basketball. Indiana student-athletes have won 133 NCAA individual titles, including 79 in men's swimming and diving and 31 in men's track and field. In addition, IU teams have won or shared 157 Big Ten Conference championships.

The IU athletics endowment is $42 million, the largest in the Big Ten Conference. The Varsity Club, which is the fundraising arm of the Athletics Department, drew a record $11.5 million in gifts and pledges in the fiscal year 2004–05. In addition, overall annual giving has increased 8.3% in the last year and 44.8 percent in the last three years.

In addition to its rich tradition in intervarsity sports, IU also boasts a strong reputation in many non-varsity sports. Many of these "club" teams, especially those in ice hockey and rugby union, have achieved a great deal of success in intercollegiate competition. Hurling has also become more popular, with the Indiana University Hurling Club becoming the first American national champions in history. The consistent success of these athletic clubs has several times led the university to establish varsity programs in sports in which there had previously not been a team for NCAA intervarsity competition. A large percentage of the IU student body regularly participates in both formal and/or informal intramural sports, including football, soccer, tennis, basketball, and golf. Among intramural athletics, IU's reputation for student participation and instruction in the martial arts is particularly strong.

Media
Media outlets of Indiana University include:
 * WFIU radio - a charter member of the National Public Radio network, WFIU is a public radio station operating out of the Radio and TV Center on the Bloomington, Indiana Campus. Licensed to the Trustees of Indiana University, it is funded by several sources: Indiana University; the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; program underwriting grants from community businesses and organizations; and voluntary contributions from listeners.  Programming centers on classical music, national and international news. Other formats include folk music, jazz, comedy, and news & public affairs programming.
 * WTIU television - a 24-hour public television licensed to Indiana University, operating out of the Radio and TV Center on the Bloomington, Indiana campus. WTIU is a PBS affiliate and carries national and locally produced programming, serving over 20 counties in west and south-central Indiana, including the cities of Bloomington, Bedford, Columbus, and Terre Haute, and the communities of Martinsville, Linton, Bloomfield, Nashville, Spencer, and Seymour. Approximately 175,000 TV households are included in the viewing area, cable and off-air combined.
 * IUSTV (Indiana University Student television station) - an entirely student run television station broadcasting to over 12,000 on campus residents and over 40,000 Bloomington residents via Public-access television. Founded in 2002, IUSTV has quickly grown to be a leading media entity and student organization on campus.
 * Indiana Daily Student - free daily newspaper fully supported financially through ad sales. Founded in 1867, it has a circulation of over 15,000 and is produced by IU students.
 * WIUX - an entirely student run radio station that broadcasts currently on FM 99.1 and via live internet streaming on its website. It broadcasts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week during the fall and spring semesters. Besides playing independent music, the station provides coverage of nine different Indiana University sports teams. The station was established in 1963 under the call letters WQAD. It was granted a low-power FM license in the spring of 2005 and transitioned to FM in early 2006.
 * IU Home Pages - faculty and staff news. In print, the audience includes approximately 17,000 employees on eight campuses.

Faculty
With over 1,823 full-time faculty members, Indiana University leads the Big Ten public universities in the number of endowed faculty positions, with 333 chairs, professorships, and curators. IUB also reported in fall 2004 that it employed 334 part-time faculty, totaling 1,877 full-time equivalents. Of the full-time faculty, 76% were tenured. Like the student body, IUB's faculty is predominantly white. Of full-time administrators, faculty, and lecturers, 118 (6%) were Asian, 74 (4%) were African-American, 62 (4%) were Hispanic, 5 (0.3%) were Native American, and 1,535 (85%) were "other." More men (62%) than women held academic appointments at the university.

Professors at IUB were better paid than their counterparts in the IU system. A full professor earned an average of $126,500, an associate professor $89,000, and an assistant professor $74,400.

Sustainability
IU Bloomington's Von Lee Theatre building is LEED Certified. The "More Art, Less Trash" recycling initiative included a design contest for recycling bin artwork and promotes both recycling and outdoor art. The university employs a group of student sustainability interns each summer, and students can get involved in campus and community-based sustainability initiatives through the Volunteers in Sustainability coordination group or the Student Sustainability Council.