The IU Campus is littered with commemorative benches donated to the school as a way for families and friends to remember deceased loved ones, for departments and university programs to honor former faculty members and their accomplishments, and for former students to celebrate their friendships and memories from their time at Indiana University. The bench pictured above sits amidst the trees between the Delta Gamma house and the IU Theatre and Drama Center, perched by the running (trickling?) waters of the Jordan River, just off of Jordan Avenue. The small placard affixed to the bench's front (pictured below) announces that the concrete seat is a gift of former fraternity brothers Bill Bennison and Mike Ferverda, affirming the friendship they forged while at IU and assuring potential occupants that neither donor graduated with a strong facility for the French language.
The bench is one of a pair (the other also donated by former SAE fraternity members, similarly recalling their previous stomping grounds) and mirrors (both in style and random arrangement) the numerous other honorary benches situated throughout the campus.
Like Roach's "benevolent managers" who perform "rites of memory in honor of the artificially superannuated," this bench (and other benches harking back to former glory days) displays the memories of those graduated from university life and asks coming generations of students to serve as the "anxious survivors" who step "Into the professional and social places [those gone] once occupied" and "feel obliged more or less to reinvent themselves, taking into account the roles played by their predecessors" (Roach 1). Of course, the bench's call for forming lifelong friendships and avoiding foreign language study is much less circumspect than the managers' appeals for employees to take on new office work.
Although short on details and somewhat inscrutable, the placard allows for Bennison and Ferverda to "[invent] themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others" (Roach 4). Both men are 'forgotten' in terms of most (all?) of the memories of those now present at IU. Their presence within the campus community now is based on these few words and the off chance that a passerby lingers long enough to take in the bench and all of its details. The bench itself is part of a long genealogy of performance, as it is just one of many benches on IU's campus, all with their own 'invented' histories. The performance of this bench is descended from a long lineage of IU bench performances. The IU benches, in turn, are part of a much larger tradition of 'bench giving' that occurs throughout American universities. Bennison and Ferverda's bench relies on this history, as the placard would be nearly meaningless without prior knowledge concerning the tradition of bench donation and its system of signs.
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