IU’s sledgehammer approach to changing core values of the university is broader, deeper, and more impactful than many realize. Yet.
By Mike Leonard
Much of what is happening at IU is being carried out in the darkness behind the Sample Gates entryway of the Bloomington flagship campus. Photo by Mike Leonard
“What the hell is going on at Indiana University?”
It’s a question that pops up in Bloomington, across the nation, and, surely, in all parts of the world where the question holds relevance.
The cheery, flip answer frames the question in the context of how can the losingest football program in the history of big time college sports find itself with a record of 11-0 and be ranked the number two ranked team in the country?
How can this be possible in the era of supersized sports interest, fans ask.
If it were only that shallow or simple.
The “what the hell” reference here comes from a recent headline from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which wonders how the brave Midwestern university made history by defending the freedom of speech and controversial academic pursuit of the sex research launched by Professor Alfred Kinsey, to “the worst public university for free speech.”
The worst. In the United States of America.
What the hell, indeed.
Stories unflattering to IU have appeared recently in media including The New York Times, Inside Higher Ed, The Nation, NPR, Axios, the Poynter Institute, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and countless others.
Alumni and friends of the university have already made their feelings known by withdrawing plans for millions of dollars in donations now or previously arranged in estate planning.
Yes, it’s a cliché, but if you have any knowledge about IU at all, you understand why so many people are shaking their heads and declaring that Herman B Wells has to be spinning in his grave. The ex-president and chancellor of IU from 1938-2000 is sometimes called the architect of the modern university, and the man who built IU from a largely regional college into an internationally recognized research institution that today claims one of the largest living alumni bases in the country.
The IU Bloomington chapter of the Association of University Professors lists, on its website, issues and concerns about the state of Indiana’s recent assault on public education, and IU’s disregard for academic freedom, shared governance and due process, free speech, job security and tenure, and eager aggressiveness in wiping out Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.
And then there was the beat-down of protesters in Dunn Meadow last year in the declared campus “free speech zone” since 1969. The police sniper stationed over the scene engendered echos of the National Guard’s killing of protesters at Kent State University during a Vietnam War protest in 1970.
Here’s another “what the?” headline, the wording of which here comes courtesy of The Nation: “Why Did Indiana University Axe Its Award-Winning Print Newspaper?” That’s a story too long and sordid to even try to explain here.
Jewish Studies
Author Arno Rosenfeld wrote what he called an addendum to the lengthy and substantive piece linked here in the B-Town Bee with the permission of The Forward, a Jewish-American newspaper that’s been around for more than a century. He explained that his interest in the IU situation was especially piqued by its intellectual relationship to the atrocities of the Holocaust, where “non-Jewish Germans adopting a rigid belief that anti-Zionism – and even mild criticism of Israeli politics of – are vile forms of antisemitism that should be prohibited by the state.”
Rosenfeld said he never thought that philosophy would fly in the United States, where even repulsive speech has historically been knocked down by more free speech. But when IU fired the longtime director of IU’s renowned Jewish Studies program and placed a non-Jewish, German junior faculty member to take his place and flip the direction of the program, it caught the writer’s attention in a big way.
For example, Germanic studies professor Benjamin Robinson was arrested, sanctioned and threatened by the university for attending a rally wearing a T-Shirt that read “Not in Our Name” on the front and “Jews say cease fire now.” Robinson is Jewish, and simply calling for the de-escalation of the war in Gaza, but the words on his shirt were deemed to be antisemitic.
Rosenfeld’s reporting demands your attention, whether you agree or disagree. It adds to the “why” part of his main story, and why there is testimony from existing and potential Jewish undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members that IU is on longer among their recommendations for education, employment and contributions to the university.
The Forward’s writer’s story is linked below.🐝
The B-Town Bee 