Reporter's Notebook

Our “local” paper, the Indianapolis Star … has very little coverage of what is going on even in Indianapolis, other than the occasional sensational crime, much less elsewhere in the state (as you know from your recent visit, Muncie is not that far away).

To be fair, the Star is doing a reasonably good job on some environmental issues, but it is telling that the environmental coverage is essentially funded by a grant from a charitable trust—without that grant, that coverage would not exist either. But coverage of local and state “meat and potatoes” issues is cursory at best.

I’m putting down a marker for ongoing coverage in this space: the crucial importance of local journalism, the economic pressures pushing it down, and the rapidly increasing experimentation in a search to buoy it back up.

Also: If you’re looking for an extremely skeptical local view of recent developments, which presents the Ball State University/Muncie Community Schools interaction as a “coup” and as the latest manifestation of “Muncie’s Oligarchy,” you can check out the Muncie Voice.

In my first Muncie post, I mentioned both Robert and Helen Lynd’s famed sociological study of the city, Middletown, from 1929, and a 2004 book about Muncie’s African American citizens who were largely left out of the Lynds’ work. That later book is The Other Side of Middletown, edited by Luke Eric Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, and Michelle Natasya Johnson.

A reader whom I’ve known for years, and who has family ties in Muncie’s African American community, writes to recommend the Other Side book, and to add:

The problem with those famous Middletown studies is that they did what Whi’ Peepo so often do: they erased/ignored us. They wished us away.

Po’ White Folk have found themselves in the same box of late. But instead of forming common cause with Black Folk, or asking us: “Hey, how’d y’all survive a couple of centuries of this treatment?” they lost their shit. (Sorry, it’s coarse language, but it’s the most precise way to convey the point, really.) They’ve become meaner. They’ve retreated further into those old, tired myths about “The True America.” Blech.

Anyway, Black Folk lived and worked in Muncie. Maybe y’all can wander over to “the other side of (middle)town” and see for yourselves.

I last went there decades ago … My father left for many good reasons. I’m glad he acted on them.

More to come on this front. Thanks to these and other readers.

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The axis of the linkage is the local public-school system, known as MCS, for Muncie Community Schools.

For decades, the schools had been a classic example of a distressed industrial area’s vicious cycle of decline. Over 35 years, the MCS enrollment fell by more than half. This chart, from a Ball State presentation on the future of the schools, shows the pattern.

Part of the change was from deindustrialization and a shrinking number of households with children in the area. But as the chart shows, about a third of students eligible to attend the community schools have chosen to go elsewhere: to private schools, religious schools, charter schools, or other options.

Since state funding for schools in Indiana depends heavily on enrolled-student head counts, the cycle of decline became self-accelerating. (Years ago, I wrote about the effects of the same pattern in Michigan, with the Holland schools.) Fewer students means less money; less money means cutbacks, school closures, and fewer programs; cutbacks (etc.) drive students away from the schools; even fewer students means even less money.

My story about Holland involved a public-school system whose leaders were then navigating the way out of the cycle. The MCS leaders seemed to be navigating their way right over the cliff. Starting with the financial-crash year of 2008, the schools operated with heavy deficits, totaling more than $35 million in 11 years.
In early 2017, the system’s CFO resigned after news broke that some proceeds from a big school-bond issue had been used to cover operating deficits, rather than for repairs and investments (as reported by StateImpact Indiana here).

Schools were closed; teachers were laid off; academic-quality ratings fell. Finally, in December 2017, the state of Indiana declared the Muncie schools (like those in Gary) to be a “distressed political subdivision,” and put them under direct state-government control, through an emergency manager.

The following month, in January 2018, Geoffrey Mearns, then less than a year into his Ball State tenure, made a surprising proposal on Ball State’s behalf. He said that the university would assume responsibility for the city’s schools, transferring them from the state’s emergency manager, if the structure of the school board could be reconstituted. The announcement was enough of a surprise that, in initial news accounts, many officials said they couldn’t comment, because they hadn’t yet seen the plan. (For instance, from the first-day news in the Ball State Daily: “‘I was caught off guard because I had no idea the amendment [authorizing the switch] was in the works,’ said Rep. Sue Errington, D-Muncie. ‘I think [Ball State is] making a very nice offer. But it has been sprung on us.’”)

A plan like this—for a university to run the whole local school system—had never been tried in Indiana, or nearly anywhere else in the country. The closest and best-known parallel would be Boston University’s management of the Chelsea Public Schools in Boston, from the late 1980s to 2008. (An Indiana Public Radio show examined the lessons, plus similarities and differences). According to the chairman of the Board of Trustees at Ball State, the Muncie project was the first time a public university had assumed responsibility for local schools. (Boston University is private.)

The plan’s acceptance in Indiana was the result of extensive deliberations through the first half of 2018. These were deliberations by the state legislature, which agreed to turn over responsibility to Ball State; by the Ball State trustees, who agreed to accept responsibility; and by a wide variety of groups within the community that would be affected. The legislative and budgetary details are more complex than I can begin to present here. (If you’re interested, I commend to you: Indiana Public Radio in January 2018; Inside Higher Ed in March; and then the Muncie Star Press; Indiana Public Media; and the Muncie Journal in May. Links in these stories will lead you to more.)

“I was talking with a state senator about the plan,” Mearns told me in Muncie. “After listening for 15 minutes, he said, ‘Don’t do this; run away; stay as far away from that school system as you can.’ After another 15 minutes, he said, ‘You’re still crazy. But you have to do this.’”

How is it all working? In the spirit of “showing our homework,” I’ll say that Deb and I haven’t yet been inside the schools, and we will return to learn more. I am sure there are complaints and contradictions, as well as progress.

But from the outside, here are two aspects of the project so far that seem worth broader notice.

One is the systematic process of civic engagement that led to the selection of the new school board, whose seven members you see below:

The legislation authorizing the switch-over said that two of the appointments would be made by the Ball State president—but one from a list of three candidates proposed by the mayor, and the other from a three-candidate list proposed by the city council. The other five would be appointed by the Ball State trustees, from nominees proposed by the university president.

The university put out a public call for these nominations. It said it would be looking for diversity in race, gender, age, and working experience, and that priority would go to people actually living in town. It received 88 applications, the great majority from people living in Muncie. The university winnowed them down to a panel of 20 finalists, who answered questions at a two-hour public forum last June.

The seven members eventually chosen are: a special-ed teacher with school-age children, the YWCA’s executive director, a lawyer and former head of the Ball State University Foundation, a local banker, a Ball State official (who directed the geothermal-energy project mentioned before), a pastor, and a former state-court judge. Five men, two women; five white, two black; six of the seven attended Muncie Community Schools.

I met with board members for an hour last month in Muncie, and asked each of them why they’d decided to apply for this post. “I couldn’t not throw my hat into the ring, because the challenge is so important,” the lawyer, Mark Ervin, said. “If you have a chance to make a difference, you take it. You don’t have that many chances.” Brittany Bales, the special-ed teacher, had taken her young children out of the Muncie schools but brought them back. “It’s a mirage that it’s better somewhere else,” she said. “It’s more diverse and interesting within MCS.”

The other striking initial aspect of the project is the tangible local support it has generated. The new university-led school structure has raised more than $3 million in local donations to the schools, starting with $1 million each from two different Ball-family foundations and around $250,000 each from three local banks.

To emphasize the obvious for now: I don’t know how this project will pan out, and neither do the people pouring their effort and money into it. The former judge on the school board, James Williams, told me, “We have a long way to go, but we’re all pulling in the same direction. We’re still in crisis, but we’re making progress.”

But even while the outcome cannot be known, the inventiveness and effort seem worth notice outside Indiana. (As a local-media point: Every stage of this transition has been covered by the Indiana press, but as far as I can tell, the Ball State/MCS project has never appeared in national papers like The New York Times or The Washington Post.)

I thought of what I heard from Susana Rivera-Mills, who came to Ball State last year as its new provost. She and her husband, a concert musician, had been in Oregon when recruited to Muncie. She is originally from El Savaldaor; her husband, from the northern California coast—in both cases, very far from central Indiana. But “we felt the sense of life, the energy, the anticipation for something new,” she told me. “We couldn’t imagine not being part of what was going on.” With all normal allowances for boosterism I can still say: discussions like this gave me a different view of life in Middletown than I had before going there.

This is the fourth installment from the “vein of gold” road trip that Deb and I took along Indiana’s I-69 corridor last month, in the company of friends from New America–Indianapolis and Indiana Humanities. The previous installments are here: about Angola, about Fort Wayne, Part One about Muncie, and about the new Our Towns journey as a whole.

(“Road trip,” for a journey by small airplane? We’ll be back to airborne travel soon.)

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Muncie is another longtime manufacturing center in this most manufacturing-centric of all states. It has about 70,000 residents and is the subject of one of the most famous works in American sociology: Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, by Robert and Helen Lynd, which began in the 1920s. Middletown was Muncie; Ball State University, in Muncie, now has a Center for Middletown Studies, which among other projects runs a civic blogging site called Everyday Life in Middletown. (A book called The Other Side of Middletown, about the Muncie story from the perspective of its African American residents, came out in 2004.)

In the world of commerce, Muncie is associated with the Ball family, of glass-jar fame. If you’ve ever seen a classic American glass jar of jam or preserves, you’ve seen the swirly script Ball logo. What became the Ball Glass Manufacturing Company started in Buffalo, New York, in the 1880s. It looked for new premises after a fire destroyed its Buffalo factory in 1886.

In those days, natural gas was being discovered in Indiana, so the Ball brothers moved to Muncie for its cheap gas supplies (for their energy-intensive glassmaking business), and over most of the next century were the dominant business force.

The Ball Corporation moved its headquarters to Colorado more than 20 years ago, but the mark of the family remains all over town, from the name of Ball State University (which started out as a teachers’ college in the late 1800s and was recapitalized by the Balls around 1920) to a number of charitable foundations to historic structures, museums, statuary, and public arts. This brings us to the world of pop culture, where Ball State enjoys the glow of one of its prominent alumni and benefactors: David Letterman.

Here is the summary of what we learned in Muncie and at Ball State.

Specific local action toward a global goal: Ball State University is the biggest single enterprise in town, and also the biggest energy consumer. Starting 10 years ago, a Ball State official named Jim Lowe began exploring possibilities of geothermal energy as a power source for the campus. In the years since, the university has drilled thousands of “boreholes” on campus, and installed more than 1,000 miles of piping, for geothermal-energy transfers. (Earth’s baseline temperature heats water pumped through the system in the winter, and cools it in the summer.) The system is said to be the largest of its kind in the United States; Lowe told us that it would reduce Ball State’s carbon footprint by half.

“We find history repeating itself,” a Ball State publication wrote recently. “The Ball brothers came to Muncie to reduce costs for their glass business by using ‘free’ energy in the form of natural gas pulled from the ground. Now, the university they founded will save $2 million annually in operating costs by using a different form of ‘free’ energy pulled from the same ground in thermal energy.”

Universities as civic actors: Everyone knows about “town-gown” separations, where a college or university has a prickly arm’s-length relationship with the community where it happens to be placed.

Everyone also knows about the classic “college town,” a settlement that hangs on mainly thanks to the business a university brings in.

Deb and I have become more and more interested in the “university hall as city hall” model—that is, a relationship in which a university’s leadership decides that it shares responsibility for the surrounding community’s economic and civic development (as opposed to simply wanting to exercise control over local affairs).

We’ve seen examples of this, as we’ll describe, in places like Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire has become a major civic-convening force; in nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin, through the emerging convening work of Carthage College; in Wichita, Kansas, where Wichita State University is playing a central economic and technological role; in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, with the involvement of the University of Southern Mississippi; in the much larger city of Phoenix, where the efforts of Arizona State University have had an effect statewide and around the country; and in a number of other locales.

In Muncie, the town-gown relationship was historically separate enough that when the Lynds set out their criteria for a typical American Middletown, they said it should not be a university town—and they thought that Muncie qualified.

Now that is changing, in a dramatic way. The change involves the seven people you see below. In Muncie Part Two, coming tomorrow, more about the next big point: how a university has decided to involve itself centrally in civic affairs, and the surprising project it has undertaken within the town.