All Saints Sunday: November 1, 2026, Bloomington, IN
Awakened early by a helicopter this morning, circling above. My heart sank. I feared I knew the reason. It turned out I was right.
Soon the news confirmed my fears – Seven people injured by gunfire nearby, on Kirkwood, only a few blocks away. I.U. had won an incredible football game over Minnesota — spirits were high — and alcohol (likely combined with other stimulants) was supercharging emotions in the night.
Two things entered my consciousness:
1) 80 years of experience, a little education and my seeing the flawed, inadequate civic approach of university for the community surrounding the campus provided a petri dish for such tragedies. Each year hundreds (sometimes thousands) additional students live off campus, placing stress on resources from housing to policing and cooperative approaches to civic life.
I am not suggesting these shootings were inevitable or the university’s recent practices are a direct causation, but I would argue they have become ever more likely as university ties to local governmnental, social and community services have been disintegrating. It was once the case that university leaders were regular participants in the ebb and flow of civic and social service life — thereby aware of the required interdependence, emerging challenges, or action needed and mutual responsibility.
2) This is a marvelous community, a beautiful part of God’s creation, blessed with a renowned center of higher learning. Still, I.U. AND the entire corporate, governmental, philanthropic and religious leadership of Bloomington need a re-think about approaches to life together. We need more than a university playing political games around “institutional neutrality” that ignores the value preparing persons of virtuous character as a primary goal, AND we need more than individualistic “case management” on the part of city and social service efforts.
Bloomington has been (and still is) a GRAND experiment in modeling for our nation the gifts of education that seeks the common good, values humane practices and builds “polycentric” structures of renewal and institutional vibrancy (as Nobel Prize winning I.U. professor Elinor Ostrom taught).
Not many years back, I visited with university leaders about this hope, for connectivity and imagining more welcoming and inclusive approaches to our civic life together — and my fears that the threats of racism, gun violence and bigotry were undermining the best of who we are. I learned later my hopes were “reported out” as “Phil wants the university to open a night club.”
Alas, sometimes, it takes a helicopter overhead to be reminded that we don’t need another night club — we need a university that has at its core, a commitment to teaching more than how to get a job and make money — we need a UNI-versity, where humane and constructive lives are demonstrated in a practiced way as it shares commitments, realities and joys with neighbors.
