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EspañolVALPARAISO UNIVERSITY
'Valparaiso University', known colloquially as 'Valpo', is a private university located in the city of Valparaiso in the U.S. state of Indiana. Founded in 1859, it consists of five undergraduate colleges, a graduate school, and a law school. Valparaiso University is owned and operated by the Lutheran University Association, a non-profit corporation, and is the largest independent Lutheran university in the United States.
History
| Valparaiso Male and Female College | 'Established' | 1859 | 'Affiliations' | Methodist |
| 'Closed' | 1871 to 1873 | |||
| Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute | 'Acquired' | 1873 | 'Affiliations' | secular |
| Valparaiso College | 'Renamed' | 1900 | ||
| Valparaiso University | 'Renamed' | 1906 | ||
| 'Acquired' | 1925 | 'Affiliations' | Lutheran | |
Methodist foundation
What is now Valparaiso University was founded by the Methodist Church in 1859 as 'Valparaiso Male and Female College', one of the first co-educational four-year institutions in the United States. The school was forced to close in 1871, due to the fallout of the Civil War.
Intermediate growth
The school was reopened by Henry Baker Brown two years later as the 'Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute'. The school was renamed 'Valparaiso College' in 1900 and gained its current university status when rechartered in 1906. For the next two decades, Valpo gained a national reputation as an economical institution of higher learning, earning it the positive nickname ''The Poor Man's Harvard''. At the height of enrollment, it was the second largest school in the nation, behind only Harvard University. However, the aftermath of another conflict, World War I, took its toll, and the school was forced into bankruptcy.
Lutheran revival
In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan assembled a bid to purchase the university.[2] They pledged to offer the university's appraised value of $175,000, expand it to the size of Purdue University, and devote the institution to the instilling of Americanism.[3] However, in 1925 the Lutheran University Association outbid the Klan for the school's ownership. The association was a group of clergy and church laity that saw promise in the school and wished to create an academic institution not controlled by any church denomination. Valparaiso is still operated by the Lutheran University Association, and remains an independent Lutheran institution which enjoys close relations with the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
Student activism
As a liberal arts institution, Valparaiso University has a detailed history of student activism.
Kinsey Hall fire
While many colleges either amended or cancelled their remaining semester following the Kent State shootings due to unrest, the Valparaiso administration ignored student calls for a series of seminars and forums on violence at other campuses. A large group of students then organized a peaceful protest march from the campus Victory Bell to the Porter County courthouse. Continued protests led to discussions between the administration and student leaders. When these talks failed, a group of still-unidentified students set fire to the empty Kinsey Hall administrative building in the early morning. The aftermath of the fire left Kinsey Hall destroyed and the remainder of the academic year cancelled.
Burning of the shanty
During the 1988-89 school year, a mock shanty town was erected on campus to show solidarity with victims of apartheid in South Africa. Mike Weber and Phil Churilla, two columnists for VU's student newspaper ''The Torch'', wrote a column critical of the protest due to student use of portable CD players, wool blankets and packaged food in the shanties. A few days later the shanty town burned down and a culprit was never found.
Valparaiso University Police Department
For campus security, Valparaiso University employs a police department with academy trained and certified officers that sometimes assist other local law enforcement as a result of reciprocal agreements.
Valpo has long been a dry campus,[4] but enforcement was raised dramatically in recent years,[5] and in the spring of 2006, the VUPD began considering placing officers on the campus escort vans in an attempt to curb underage drinking. Days later a city police officer entered the Sigma Pi fraternity house with his gun drawn, believing he had witnessed drug use through a window.[6][7] Though university officers only responded to the scene later, these incidents strained student-police relations further, prompting mass resignations of student drivers from the escort service and a protest of over 500 students.[8] The protests centered around the VUPD's increased focus on alcohol consumption and new placement of police officers with student escort services.
Campus
Location
Valparaiso is located an hour southeast of Chicago, and sponsors numerous events in the metropolitan area. It is also 15 miles south of Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. The 310-acre campus as well as its main entrance are located off U.S. Highway 30 on the south side of the city and is the site of over sixty buildings and a number of academic resources.
Improvement
Building projects at Valparaiso University are funded entirely by donation. No student tuition dollars are used, which helps keep the school a highly rated value school. The university also receives no support for operation from the state or federal government.
Old Campus
The ''Old Campus'' of Valparaiso University is both adjacent to and a part of the historic downtown district of the city. Old Campus is the site of the School of Law, which is made up of Wesemann Hall and
Heritage Hall. Heritage is the oldest remaining building on the campus, and was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The school's fraternities, the Martin Luther King Cultural Center, and the Kade-Duesenberg German House and Cultural Center are all also located here.
New Campus
Chapel of the Resurrection
The city and the University have grown together over a century and a half. Beginning in the 1950s, the school expanded eastward to occupy what is now known as ''New Campus''. It is part time home to thousands of students living in nine residence halls. The campus is not laid out in a vehicular grid as the rest of the city, but as a pedestrian campus of winding walkways and distinctly landscaped areas. At the center of campus is the Chapel of the Resurrection, a 98-foot high building which is the home of Valparaiso University's many worship services and convocations. Built on the highest elevation of land on the university's campus, it has been a Northwest Indiana landmark since 1959.
The Neils Science Center was erected in 1974 and includes an astronomical observatory, greenhouse, and a sub-critical nuclear reactor which helped the facility receive a Atomic Energy Commission citation as a model undergraduate physics laboratory.
The newly built Christopher Center Library houses over 350,000 books and numerous video and audio resources.
The Valparaiso University Center for the Arts (VUCA) offers multiple performance facilities, which are most notably used by students to produce full scale theatrical performances every year. The performances and exhibits in the Center for the Arts are always open to the public, and the Center houses the nationally renowned Brauer Museum of Art. The school also hosts WVUR-FM, the university's student-run radio station.
The new Kallay-Christopher Hall, adjoined to the Schnabel Hall communication building, is home to the Department of Geography and Meteorology. As of the summer of 2006, it has an observation deck and large weather lab facilities, and plans to complete installation of a Doppler radar by January 2007. The radar should be operational by the beginning of the fall 2007 semester. The School of Engineering has both a 16-inch computerized reflecting telescope to aid in NASA research and VisBox-X2, a virtual reality system used to immerse students in a visualized three dimensional image.
The School of Nursing uses SIMMAN, a robotic patient simulator used to train students in real life treatment.
CONSTRUCTION: An $8.5 million, 4-story parking garage is under construction between Alumni Hall and the Domke Power Plant. It is expected to be complete by Spring 2007 and should have space for 386 cars when complete.
A $74 million new Student Union is under construction and should be complete during the 2008-2009 school year, just in time for the school's 150th anniversary. It is located on the site of the former Moellering Library.
Academics
Organization
Undergraduate
Valpo is organized into five undergraduate colleges:
College of Arts and Sciences
College of Business Administration
College of Engineering
College of Nursing
Christ College
The Christ College was chartered by President O.P. Kretzmann in 1967 as the honor college of Valparaiso University. Centered in Mueller Hall, it is the successor to the Directed Studies Program, which was established to better serve the influx of gifted students to the institution. Roughly 80 students, or ten percent of the class, are admitted each year. Along with concurrent enrollment in a fundamental college, the discourse provides immersion in the fields of history, literature, art, music, philosophy, religion and social science. A student steering committee composed of upperclassmen guides the development of the program and a multitude of annual events. The Student Scholarship Symposium features diverse, student selected research projects delivered in a critical and interactive environment. Students complete their study with a degree in humanities to complement that received in their main field of study.
Graduate Division
Valparaiso University also offers graduate studies programs. Areas of study include liberal arts, nursing, psychology, sports administration, international commerce & policy, and education. The graduate division also includes an MBA program connected with business leaders throughout the region.
School of Law
Main articles: Valparaiso University School of Law
College of Adult Scholars
The College of Adult Scholars is a unique program geared toward non-traditional students. Through it, adult students can pursue degrees, certificates, or further training and specialization in other areas.
Reputation
''U.S. News & World Report'' named Valparaiso University as #3 in the Universities-Master's category for the Midwest in its annual rankings of "America's Best Colleges."[9] It also ranked Valparaiso among the "Best College Values" based on a ratio of price to quality, and placed the College of Engineering in the nation's top 25 undergraduate-only engineering schools.[10] Over ninety-five percent of graduates secure employment or further education (twenty-three percent) within six months. More than ninety percent of students receive financial aid totaling over fifty-two million dollars annually. Charity Navigator also gave the institution four out of four stars based on its organizational efficiency and capacity.[11]
Faculty
Valparaiso University faculty work with governments, communities, colleagues, and students. Ninety percent of the faculty members hold a doctorate or the highest degree in their field. Valparaiso is a teaching school where each professor lectures and every class is led by a professor. Thus, there are very few teaching assistants at Valpo and in nearly every class professors are on a first name basis with their students. The student-to-faculty ratio is 13 to 1, and there is an average of 22 students per class.
Culture
Valparaiso is a growing school that works to uphold the benefits of an intimate education. All first-year undergraduate students take a year of Core, a common interdisciplinary course rooted in liberal arts and focused on the understanding the purpose and fulfillment of human life. Students are also subject to an honor system originally implemented by the students themselves in 1943 which remains in effect today. The school also puts a heavy focus on diversity. Each January, the school holds a weekend of Martin Luther King, Jr. events as its major annual event, as well as offering study-abroad programs in fourteen nations including sites in Cambridge, England (Anglia Ruskin University), Reutlingen, Germany, Puebla, Mexico, Namibia and Hangzhou, China (Zhejiang University).
Students
Profile
Valparaiso University students are some of the most geographically diverse in the nation. Of the 4,000 students, only one-third are from the school's home state of Indiana. The remaining two-thirds come from almost every other state of the United States and over 40 foreign countries. Over two-thirds graduate in the top quarter of their high school class and nearly ninety percent return to Valparaiso after their freshman year. Annually, more than 26 million dollars are awarded by the university to over eighty percent of the student body, which is admitted based on factors such as community involvement, interests, recommendations, and personality as well as grade point average, class ranking, and standardized test scores.
Community
Sixty-four percent of Valparaiso University students live on the school's city campus, mainly because University regulations require almost all students who do not have senior status to live in dorms. Forty percent of students are Lutheran, but over twenty percent are Catholic and seventy-five percent participate in faith-related activities. Valpo supports over 100 student administered organizations, clubs, and activities. Fifty percent of students participate in intramural athletics, and over 1,000 students give over 45,000 hours of community service to the region annually.
Greek life
More than thirty percent of Valpo students are members of one of the school's nine national fraternities or seven national sororities. The entire Greek Life community is coordinated by the ''Hellenic Council'', while fraternities cooperate in the ''Interfraternity Council'' and sororities in the ''Panhellenic Council''. Valparaiso also hosts chapters of all major honors fraternities. Many of the fraternities were local until the 1950s when they were accepted as chapters into national and international fraternities. However, the sororities were local and had no national affiliation until the late 1990's.
| Fraternities | Sororities | Honor Societies | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
★ Lambda Chi Alpha ★ Phi Kappa Psi ★ Phi Mu Alpha ★ Phi Sigma Kappa ★ Sigma Chi ★ Sigma Phi Epsilon ★ Sigma Pi ★ Sigma Tau Gamma ★ Theta Chi | ★ Chi Omega ★ Delta Delta Delta ★ Delta Xi Phi Multicultural Sorority, Inc. ★ Gamma Phi Beta ★ Kappa Delta ★ Kappa Kappa Gamma ★ Pi Beta Phi | ★ Phi Beta Kappa ★ Phi Epsilon Kappa ★ Gamma Theta Upsilon ★ Lambda Pi Eta ★ Pi Sigma Alpha ★ Sigma Theta Tau ★ Sigma Tau Delta ★ Tau Beta Pi ★ Alpha Lambda Delta ★ Chi Epsilon Pi ★ Eta Sigma Phi |
Athletics
Main articles: Valparaiso Crusaders
Valpo's colors are brown and gold and the school's mascot is the Crusader. Most athletic events are held in the Athletics-Recreation Center (ARC), which is the primary sporting facility on campus. Valparaiso's eighteen teams and nearly 600 student athletes participate in NCAA Division I (I-AA for football) in the Horizon League, except for football, in which they compete in the Pioneer Football League (the Horizon League does not sponsor football) and play at Brown Field. The school is known for its well rounded athletes as 98% successfully graduate, which ties Valparaiso with the University of Notre Dame for the third highest graduation rate in the country.[1] Valpo is well-known for its men's basketball head coach Homer Drew and his son Bryce Drew, who led the team to its improbable Sweet Sixteen appearance in the 1998 NCAA basketball tournament by making "The Shot", a three-point shot as time expired to beat favored Ole Miss by one point. Bryce Drew is now the team's associate coach.
Notable faculty
Current faculty members
★ Gilbert Meilaender, theology; member of The President's Council on Bioethics
★ David Morgan, humanities, art history; author of several popular books on religious visual culture
★ Walter Wangerin, Jr. English and theology; National Book Award winning author of The Book of the Dun Cow
Notable alumni
Over 50,000 alumni currently serve in their respective fields across the world.
★ Fredrick Barton, novelist, ''The El Cholo Feeling Passes'', ''Courting Pandemonium'', ''With Extreme Prejudice'', ''A House Divided''
★ Beulah Bondi, actress
★ Mikhail Borodin, Soviet and Comintern representative to China
★ JoBe Cerny, owner, Cerny/American Creative, well-known character actor, voice of the Pillsbury Doughboy
★ Jay Christopher, cofounder of The Pampered Chef
★ Thurman C. Crook, a United States Representative from Indiana
★ Bryce Drew, former NBA player
★ Michael Essany, television host
★ Don Fites, chairman and CEO (ret.), Caterpillar Inc.
★ Keith Kizer, executive director, Nevada State Athletic Commission[2]
★ David Lally, creator, "Bewitched, The Musical"
★ Jacki Lyden, a senior correspondent at NPR[3] and author of ''Daughter of the Queen of Sheba''
★ William March, novelist, ''Company K'', ''The Bad Seed''
★ Lloyd McClendon, former MLB player and manager, current hitting coach for the Detroit Tigers
★ George William Norris, United States Senator from Nebraska and father of the Tennessee Valley Authority
★ Caleb Powers, a United States Representative from Kentucky and the first Secretary of State of Kentucky convicted as an accessory to murder
★ Douglas Rich, recording artist
★ T. Marshall Rousseau, executive director (emeritus), Salvador Dalí Museum
★ David Ruprecht, host, ''Supermarket Sweep'', ''Real People''
★ Ray Scherer, NBC White House correspondent, 1948-75
★ Rene Steinke, novelist, ''The Fires'', ''Holy Skirts''
★ Lowell Thomas, writer and broadcaster
★ Frederick "Fuzzy" Thurston, All-pro guard for the Green Bay Packers, 1959-67
★ Jim Wacker, former football coach at the University of Minnesota
★ Emily Watkins, Margot and the Nuclear So and So's
References
1. America's Best Colleges 2007
2. The Ku Klux Klan’s invasion of Indiana in the 1920s
3. http://www.lowellpl.lib.in.us/kuklux.htm
4. http://www.valpo.edu/registrar/05-06studentguide.pdf
5. http://www.valpo.edu/vupd/crimestats.php
6. http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060425/LOCAL/604250570
7. http://nwitimes.com/articles/2006/04/25/news/porter_county/8b4f4eb2be8875518625715b0006e85b.txt
8. http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/local/14443307.htm
9. America's Best Colleges 2007
10. Magazine again cites Valpo for excellence, value
11. Valparaiso University
External links
★ Valparaiso University website
★ Official VU Athletics Website
★ Campus maps, directions, and virtual tour
★ Admissions
★ Alumni Association
★ Valparaiso University News and Events
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