On The Road In The 1970's--Part 39

Rather than being some kind of academic center of political subversion or non-conformity, Indiana University in 1963, at least to me, seemed be mainly a campus in which most students seemed to still be more into fraternity and sorority life and attending Big Ten football and basketball games, in big college stadiums and sports arenas, than into either their academic work, hanging out in academic libraries or being involved in some form of political activism.

But  the new and old dormitory buildings and the big student union building on Indiana University's large campus still impressed me in 1963 and caused me to feel that I was in a small city of large numbers of young people in their late teens and early twenties, whenever I visited IU's campus; and in a city that was filled with even more physically attractive female "co-ed" students than Broad Ripple High School was then filled with.

I assumed, between January and June 1963, that my family would remain living in Indianapolis during the rest of the decade and did not think, at this time, that I would develop any particular desire to apply for admission in a few years to a college in New York City like Columbia or NYU.  So I also assumed in 1963 that, especially because now being a resident of Indiana would enable me to be charged the lower in-state tuition fee, after graduating from Broad Ripple H.S., Indiana University in Bloomington was where I would spend my 4 years as an undergraduate. Hence, as early as the spring semester of my sophomore year in high school, I had started looking through the IU college catalog and begun to consider which courses I intended to take, when I eventually enrolled there; and what subjects I would want to major or minor in when I got there.

What's surprising, in retrospect, is along with considering a major or minor in subjects like history, journalism, music or theater, in 1963, at least, I also was thinking, for a brief period, that "police administration" might be an interesting major or minor subject for me to get into. Perhaps I had been influenced by watching too many cops and robbers shows on television, like Dragnet, during the 1950s as a child?

So, for a brief period, I thought being prepared at IU to become a "detective" for some police department, after graduating and fulfilling the then-required two years of U.S. military service for U.S. men under 26-years-of-age, was a possible road I might follow. But by the Fall of 1963--perhaps after viewing on the television screen more images of white cops brutalizing and arresting singing Civil Rights Movement demonstrators on the streets of Southern cities like Birmingham--I had completely ruled out forever the possibility that I might want to major or minor in "police administration" when, as I then expected, I would enroll at Indiana University in the Fall of 1965.