THE ACADEMY IS AN OUTDATED CONCEPT TO THE IU TRUSTEES AND STATE GOVERNMENT

By Mike Leonard

SUVs blowing through stop signs.

Cars going the wrong way on one-way streets.

Students playing drinking games with ping pong balls in their front yards.

It’s “Welcome Back” time at Indiana University. And if you’re new to town, listen up.

Bloomington is a great place to be. Or not to be, if you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at Indiana University.

The university is (cough, cough) unwell. Or to put it another way, going to Hell in a handbasket.

The road to perdition began in earnest with the choice of Pamela Whitten as the university’s president in July, 2021. The board of trustees, with no explanation, hired the unheralded Whitten from unheralded Kennesaw State University despite its own search committee’s recommendation of the lauded and best presidential candidate imaginable: former Bloomington campus provost and Mauer School of Law Dean Lauren Robel.

It’s been a shit show ever since.

Within a year, faculty members discussed passing a no confidence resolution in Whitten, which is a very short time to earn such a distinction. Maybe that’s what trustee Michael Mirro meant when the university awarded her a $650,000 bonus for what he described as fulfilling the goals set by her and the trustees jointly “(She’s) exceeded those goals by far,” he said.

Note that Whitten and the nine trustees is a very small and inclusive club.

Her management style from the beginning was baffling, to be kind. The Bee gave some examples in the link here, a year into her reign of ruin: https://thebtownbee.com/2022/08/17/is-ius-first-female-president-a-change-agent/.

And as a former higher education reporter for The Herald-Times, the Bee knew one thing very well about how these things work. The president doesn’t do anything of substance without taking the temperature of the bosses, the trustees. So while Whitten deserves the condemnation thrown her way, the decision makers have largely avoided public scrutiny.

The rotten cherry on top of that sundae is that Gov. Mike Braun removed the three trustees elected by IU alumni from the board of trustees and approved legislation targeted at IU to create a nine-member board entirely appointed by the governor. We can take that as a “double bird” to the approximately 800,000 living alumni of the university – one of the largest alumni bases in the country.

And that sadly leads back to the guy everyone used to love to love, Quinn Buckner. We sang “The Mighty Quinn” to the proverbial rafters when he was point guard for the basketball Hoosiers’ extraordinary 63-1 run across the 1974-75 and ’75-‘76 seasons. The ’76 team remains the last undefeated national champions in college basketball, 49 years later.

Buckner has served as the trustees’ chair since August, 2021 and was reappointed to that position when hard-right Indiana Gov. Mike Braun pulled off an end run (mixed sports metaphor!) and extended the basketball star’s tenure and leadership of the trustees. Over Whitten’s time at IU, which began one month before trustee Bucker became Chairman Buckner, we’ve seen:

*The exodus of talented and valuable faculty members who don’t recognize the glory of old IU anymore.

*The jaw dropping “Expressive Activity Policy,” also known as the war on freedom of speech, when a hastily composed and administration-friendly committee imposed a time frame when faculty, students, staff and Bloomington citizens could assemble on campus, and especially, Dunn Meadow. The sacred gathering space declared to be a free speech zone by the university since 1969.

*The “free speech according to us” edict backlash resulted in police with shields, batons and other weapons, and a sniper positioned on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union, all justified by the IU administration by the presence of protestors decrying the force used by Israel against Palestine.

*Germanic studies professor Benjamin Robinson arrested, sanctioned and threatened by the university for his presence at “antisemetic” protests, including his choice of a T-shirt worn when protestors, including faculty members and Bloomington citizens resisted the newly hatched rules governing speech on campus. The front of the shirt said: A “Not in Our Name” and the back said “Jews say cease fire now”.

Robinson is Jewish.

*The revelation that President Whitten may have plagiarized portions of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas. The hand-picked committee chosen by the trustees said there was no problem and nothing there to see. The trustees refused to release the results of the analysis of Whitten’s alleged plagiarism done by the law firm hand picked by … the board of trustees. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported “In more than three dozen instances throughout her 174-page dissertation, Pamela S. Whitten appeared to borrow language without using quotation marks from at least 15 other research papers and books.” IU students face everything from reprimands to expulsion for plagiarism.

And possibly more heartbreaking than all of that, the trustees and Whitten are overseeing the demolition of many things that comprise many of IU’s strengths, such as teaching more languages than any other university in the country, and awarding more Ph.D’s in the arts and humanities than any other university as well.

Trustees president Buckner may be stepping down from his position soon but his notoriety as a trustee should earn him an asterisk in IU lore (thank the sport of Major League Baseball for that reference).  But now that the governor chooses all nine of the IU trustees, expect another stooge to take his place. Most notable among the newcomers is James Bopp of Terre Haute. As the website for his Bopp Law Firm highlights: “Credited (by the New York Times) as being the intellectual architect of the arguments that persuaded the Supreme Court in Citizens United.”

Citizens United is the most consequential Supreme Court decision in our lifetimes, equating money to speech, and opening the door for floods of dark money overwhelming the power of the ballot box. Bopp for Buckner is like trading a stroke for cancer.

All is not lost, however. The IU that so many of us cherish is still alive in the faculty, staff and students who tread the magnificent 2,000 acre, limestone campus routinely cited as one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States. It still lives in the legacy of norm-busting sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the brilliance of longtime president Herman B Wells, and, yes, the glorious history of athletics, which has provided scholarships to many students who could not have afforded a college education, and spawned innumerable thrills, great memories, and teams, coaches and players to root for in our sports-crazed society.

As former IU President Michael McRobbie, an Australian by birth and education liked to say, college sports in the United States bond alumni to their alma mater in a way unseen and envied around the world. That allegiance can turn into donations to athletics, the business school or even the English Dept.

An ancient American proverb says simply: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” And I’ll add another hopeful nugget of Persian origin: “This, too, shall pass.” 🐝