University of Indiana
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Indiana University has eight campuses: the original campus in Bloomington, which is a residential campus; an urban campus in Indianapolis, which also includes the IU Medical Center; and six regional campuses in the Indiana cities of Gary, South Bend, Fort Wayne, Kokomo, Richmond, and New Albany. IU has:

More than 98,000 students on its eight campuses
882 degree programs
Almost 450,000 living alumni, including 200,000 working in Indiana
An annual operating budget of $2.2 billion
15,000 employees, including faculty and professional and support staff
More than 150 research centers and institutes
An endowment of more than $1 billion
Indiana University is internationally known for the quality of its academic programs and attracts students from all over the world. At the same time, IU plays a key role in the economic and social well-being of Indiana residents, offering educational, cultural, and economic benefits to the state.

The IU campus is considered one of the most beautiful college campuses in the nation, with its abundance of flowering plants and trees and graceful, cool limestone buildings. Art critic Thomas Gaines called IU one of America's five most beautiful universities in The Campus as a Work of Art.

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.

The Bryan House is the traditional on-campus home of the university president. In the 17,000-seat Assembly Hall and stadium (home to the IU NCAA basketball team), there are five NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship banners on display. (For more on athletic facilities, see Indiana Hoosiers.)

Indiana Memorial Union
The 500,000-square-foot Indiana Memorial Union (IMU) is the campus centerpiece -- a place where students go to study, relax, eat, bowl, watch a movie, and even to shop. It is one of the world's second largest college union. In addition to numerous stores and restaurants, it features a seven-story student activities tower, a 186-room hotel, a 400-seat theatre, a 5,000-square-foot Alumni Hall, and 50,000 square feet of meeting space.

Herman B. Wells Library
IU's Herman B Wells Library is the thirteenth largest university library in North America. Built in 1969, the building contains 11 floors in the graduate tower and five floors in the undergraduate tower. The building also contains the Information Commons, a fully-integrated technology center for learning and collaboration -- open 24 hours a day, seven days a week - which attracts 82 percent of all undergraduate students. IU Libraries earned its highest ranking ever, advancing to twelfth place in a survey of North American academic research libraries.

Built as a Federal Works Agency Project, the auditorium - located in the heart of campus - opened on March 22, 1941, and has been host for the last sixty years to the world's top performers and entertainers. The Auditorium is also home to Thomas Hart Benton's "Century of Progress" murals, painted for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, the priceless Dailey Family Memorial Collection of Hoosier Art, and two Robert Laurent sculptures. It is also home to the Roosevelt pipe organ, the largest pipe organ in the United States. Closed for a $13 million renovation and restoration in 1997, the Auditorium reopened in 1999.

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. Completed in 1982, the museum collection of over 30,000 objects includes works by Claude Monet and Jackson Pollack. 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.

Geography
IUB's 1,931 acres (7.8 km²) includes copious 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. It is named for David Starr Jordan, Darwinist, ichthyologist, and president of IU and later Stanford University.

Academics
IU has 110 programs ranked in the nation's top 20. Twenty-nine graduate programs and four schools at Indiana University-Bloomington are ranked among the top 25 in the country in the US News & World Report's Best Graduate Schools 2001-2002. Time magazine named IU-Bloomington its 2001 College of the Year among major research universities.

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 Hoosiers became a member of the prestigious Big Ten Conference December 1, 1899. The school's national affiliation is with the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The teams won one women's and six men's national team titles (now totaling 25; 24 NCAA, 1 AIAW), topped by a record-setting six straight men's swimming & diving titles, seven 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 fund-raising 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 spite of this giving, IU's athletics department has been unable to balance its budget. Because of this the university administration has attempted, thus far unsuccessfully, to double the athletics fee which students pay with their tuition each semester. A number of students argue that the athletics department's financial woes are its own problems, and that support of athletics should be voluntary. Others, especially in the athletics department, argue that athletic programs are an integral part of the university experience, and therefore everyone should pay into it.