Warren Vander Hill, Provost Emeritus, Ball State University, passed away on July 1, 2024. Warren had huge impact on Ball State, spearheading the creation of our Honors College and the University’s environmental commitments. He was also instrumental in the creation of the Center for Middletown Studies and remained a strong supporter of the Center during his time as Provost. Warren’s early research focused on the history of immigration, but over the course of his career, he also contributed to many research projects that focused on Muncie as Middletown.

Warren’s early contributions to Middletown research came while he was serving as a member of the History faculty and Director of the Honors Program during the 1970s. At the time, Ball State had made no formal commitment to capitalizing on Muncie’s role as the subject of the Lynds’ influential community studies. He was part of team that received funding from the Indiana Council on the Humanities for several research projects, including Middletown Man: The Human Side of Life in Muncie, Indiana: A Community-Centered Study Project (1974) and a study work experiences in Middletown modeled on Studs Terkel’s Working. For the latter, the project team interviewed local residents about their work lives, producing a book, Working in Middletown (1976), and an oral history collection. Warren also played a key role in organizing the celebrated Middletown Film Series, a 6-part film project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that aired nationally on public television in 1982.

Building off these projects, as well as his collaborations with Theodore Caplow and the team of researchers who conducted Middletown III, the re-study of Muncie on the 50^th anniversary of the Lynds’ first Middletown book, Warren helped launch the Center in 1980. The Center supported a wide range of research efforts tied to the Middletown framework, helping to develop social science and humanities research on campus. It’s Small Cities Conferences, for which Warren provided support while Provost, generated nationally recognized scholarship.

Most of Warren’s later involvement in the Center’s research came in the form of oral history projects, a method that uniquely suited his open and curious personality and his knack for finding common ground with a wide range of people. He served as an interviewer (along with former Center Director Dwight Hoover) for the first of two oral history projects focused on Jewish experiences in Muncie. These interviews were published as Middletown Jews (2000). He also served as the sole interviewer for the follow-up project completed in 2004. Later, Warren helped originate and conduct a series of oral history projects designed to document facets of deindustrialization locally. For these projects, he conducted interviews exploring the history of the city’s labor movement, economic development activities, church life, nonprofit work, and the merger of the city’s two high schools in 2015.

Warren’s other major work for the Center was helping produce Changing Gears (2010), a documentary film following the experiences of workers as Muncie’s BorgWarner plant, the last vestiges of a company founded in Muncie in 1901, shut its doors for good in 2009. He helped devise the project, recruited some of the team, conducted research, and narrated the film, which aired both locally and nationally on public television.

Warren’s Middletown work was just one part of his accomplished and productive career. He had a tremendous impact on many facets of Ball State as the founder of the Honors College and as Provost from 1986 until 2004. For more on his life and work, see here and here.