Herman Wells of Indiana

May 23


In Bloomington for a conference last week, I saw plentiful evidence of one man’s legacy, how much good a single man with vision and energy can leave behind. The man was IU’s longtime president, Herman B. Wells.

I do not know where Wells came from, or how he got to the top. I don’t even know his academic specialty. But I walked through the magnificent concert hall that he had built, and I toured the Kinsey Institute, whose controversial mission he stoutly defended, and I walked (and ran) the beautiful campus he planned and developed, with its distinctive limestone buildings and its copious, richly imagined greenspace, and I didn’t wonder that people spoke of him always with reverence and awe.

His portraits are numerous around campus, a stout, round-faced, pleasant-looking man in a tan, 50s-era suit. So are the stories: of how he used to attend weeknight student recitals well into his 80s, of how he .

Perhaps the most impressive story was this: that through the worst of the McCarthy era, this lifelong bachelor, who lived with his mother until she died in her 90s, whose sexuality was a well-guarded secret, had the courage to resolutely defend Alfred Kinsey’s right to conduct and publish his research.

Surely MyU has never had such a leader.