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By Rose McIlveen(Editor's note: IU's 1998 Founders Day is March 1 on the IUB campus.)
You may not know that Indiana University's Founders Day used to be celebrated on or close to Jan. 20, because that was the actual date of the university's founding in 1820.
Why was the annual remembrance of IU's "birthday" changed? Perhaps the robed faculty and honor students on the Bloomington campus were obliged to make one too many yearly treks through snow from the Student Building to the old Assembly Hall for the exercises. (A huge gray frame building, the Assembly Hall used to stand south of the Indiana Memorial Union and served as a gymnasium, concert hall and auditorium.)
IU celebrated its last January Founders Day in 1924. (Actually, it was called Foundation Day in those days.) The last January Foundation Day was also a first, in a sense. The speaker, Mary Grey Morgan Brewer, Class of 1895, was the first female to speak on such an occasion at IU.
Brewer had two claims to fame as far as the university was concerned. First of all, she had been heavily involved in the women's suffrage and temperance movements, and IU President William Lowe Bryan was a staunch supporter of the latter. Second, and perhaps more important from the university standpoint, the woman had been the director of the IU Memorial Fund campaign in the eastern part of the United States. (The Memorial Fund was collected to honor IU alumni who had died during World War I. The money was used to build Wells Quad, the IMU and Memorial Stadium.)
Tucked away in a Founders Day folder in the IU Archives at Bryan Hall in Bloomington is the explanation for the moving of Founders Day:
"The more favorable weather conditions of early May led the Alumni Council to change the date of the general celebration to the month of the actual opening of the university."
That, then, was the rationale for the change. A 105th anniversary celebration was conducted on May 5, 1924.
Was the change a sacrilege? Hardly. After all, the queen of England has an "official" birthday, as well as a real one.