Ian Arthur plays his bagpipe to welcome students to the fall session at Ivy Tech in Bloomington Monday morning. David Snodgress | Herald-Times

Ivy Tech classes open with Scottish flair

By Steve Hinnefeld
331-4374 | shinnefeld@heraldt.com
August 23, 2005

Fall classes started with a blast of sound Monday at Ivy Tech Community College of Bloomington.

Ian Arthur stood near the entrance playing Scottish and Irish tunes on a Highland bagpipe - you could hear it driving down Ind. 48. Ivy Tech Chancellor John Whikehart held the door for arriving students.

Why a bagpiper?

"I like bagpipe music," Whikehart said. "Why not?"

It was the second year that Arthur, wearing traditional Scottish garb, greeted Ivy Tech students with his pipes. But for new students, the music was a big surprise.

"I was like, what is going on?" Megan Vest said. "I was very surprised … I mean, it's nice."

"It's different," said Mandy Nicholson, as she and Vest chatted outside the Ivy Tech campus building. Both graduated from Bloomfield High School in the spring and are starting their studies at Ivy Tech, Vest in office administration and Nicholson in accounting.

Arthur kept playing nonstop for two hours - "my aerobic exercise," he said. An Indiana University graduate student in counseling and educational psychology, he's been playing the bagpipe for eight years and performs at weddings, the Bloomington Community Farmers' Market and the occasional opening day of school.

Students hurried past on their way to class, some smiling or looking befuddled at the unexpected sight and sound.

Neil Nicholson, no relation to Mandy Nicholson, used his cell phone to snap a photograph of Arthur as he played.

"It's nice. I like it a lot," he said of the bagpipe music.

Nicholson, with a shamrock tattoo on his left shoulder, said his ancestry is Irish, Scottish and English, and he enjoys the reels, jigs and strathspeys - a kind of Scottish dancing music - that Arthur was playing. Nicholson moved to Bloomington this summer with some friends from Valparaiso, his hometown, and plans to transfer to IU after taking some core courses at Ivy Tech.

Whikehart, the chancellor, said an influx of such traditional students is swelling the ranks of Ivy Tech, filling the parking lot and crowding the three-year-old campus building.

Students can still register this week, so enrollment figures won't be available for several days.

But Whikehart expects another record, topping last year's enrollment of about 3,400 students.

"I would think the numbers are up significantly," he said.