Nobody knows what the origin of ‘Hoosier’ is. Party fun for visitors to Indiana includes recounting the many speculations on the label’s origins.
This year’s football season, culminating in the football Hoosiers’ undefeated 16-0 season and a national championship was delightful and remarkable. I was a grad student back in the day when the basketball Hoosiers won the national championship (1987) and the soccer Hoosiers won the national championship (1988). Fun and exciting times, and a complement to my academic focus.
Indiana’s Philosophy department was then heavily focused on logic, epistemology, and analytic metaphysics. Three leading journals — The Journal of Symbolic Logic, The Journal of Philosophical Logic, and Nous were edited by Indiana faculty. Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, was also at Indiana then, having been lured back from Michigan to head a new interdisciplinary Cognitive Science center. Across the quad, Indiana had a strong and separate History and Philosophy of Science department, where I took several courses. Intellectually exciting times.
Coincidentally, Jimmy Wales, who was soon to co-found Wikipedia, was then at Indiana pursuing a Ph.D. in Business, and Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobelist in economics, was also at Indiana in the Political Science department. In the decade before my time at Indiana.
Related: A co-written piece on a successful program founded by Professor Michael Morgan, which I taught in for four years at Indiana: Stephen Hicks and Monica Holland, “Teaching Philosophy to High School Students: Indiana University’s Summer Philosophy Institute,” Teaching Philosophy, Volume 12, Issue 2, June 1989, Pages 115-130, https://doi.org/10.5840/teachphil198912257