Anatomy of a Fall: The Case of Indiana University (Guest Post)

Indiana University on November 3, 2025   

by Johannes Türk

Chair of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington

 

Indiana University, one of the great American public universities, is currently melting down with a speed and violence unprecedented in the history of higher education. It is difficult to recognize the world-class institution that was founded in the idyllic city of Bloomington in 1820 and built over decades, most decisively by the long-term president and chancellor of Indiana University, Herman B. Wells. Beloved among residents of the state of Indiana and a destination for thousands of students from across the United States and the world, the public university gained its national and global reputation in the 1950s primarily on the basis of its humanities departments and one of the country’s best music schools.

 

I’m going to discuss unilateral changes in faculty governance, protest rules, research funding, instructional regulations, and legislative policy: these factors interact in degrading the campus ecology, perhaps permanently, in ways that shed light on national trends.  

 

The flagship campus of Indiana University in Bloomington teaches more foreign languages than any other US institution of higher education, offers a broad spectrum of area studies, and has provided the Department of State and other federal institutions and businesses with generations of qualified young minds. It is also the home of world-class PhD programs ranging from French and Italian, Germanic Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, and English, to Political Science, Sociology, History, and Folklore and Ethnomusicology – overall Indiana University leads in the US in the production of humanities PhDs. In addition, many doctoral programs in the humanities rank, according to the National Research Council, among the best 10, 20, or 30 PhD programs in the US. According to the US News & World rankings, which only assess departments in large fields, Sociology, History, English, as well as Psychological and Brain Sciences rank between 16 and 24 nationally.

 

More recently, in the wake of its innovative online-program, the Kelley Business School has risen among the best in the US as well. As recently as in 2019, university president Michael McRobbie led a highly successful fundraising campaign based in part on research showing that Indiana University contributes more than any business to the economic success of the state of Indiana. Under his leadership, the university also founded a School of Global and International Studies and a Media School as new windows into the humanities. It seemed well positioned to shape the next decades, in spite of the national trend of lower enrollments in the humanities.

 

Fast-forward three years into the presidency of his successor Pamela Whitten: On April 16, 2024, the Bloomington Faculty Council held a full-faculty meeting where 93.1% of the voting faculty passed a motion of no confidence in Whitten, and 91.5% voted for no-confidence in Provost Rahul Shrivastav. These numbers are astounding and unparallelled.

 

During the faculty deliberation, a large variety of concrete grievances were discussed, ranging from the lack of advocacy for the university, a failure to engage graduate students and their unionization effort, the suspension of a professor without due process, the cancelation of an art exhibit years in the making, the potential severing of the renowned Kinsey Institute from the university, and the impression that the Whitten administration was encroaching on shared governance and academic freedom.

 

The most weight, however, was carried by the pervasive impression that the university leadership was incompetent and either not informed about the institution or willfully ignoring its needs, introducing random or inappropriate and at times unprofessionally conducted initiatives while not addressing important problems.

 

In addition, the president on several occasions made derogatory remarks about the publication of monographs, a benchmark in which Indiana University’s humanities departments are leading in the nation among public universities. Overall it seemed that the upper administration was overwhelmed by the size and complexity of the university system, lacked the serious engagement with the institution necessary to make good decisions, and couldn’t appreciate many of its most prominent features.

 

This seeming inability was screened by an artificial rhetoric of disruption and innovation, more recently culminating in pronouncements about “the end of old IU.” The incompetence might have been enhanced significantly by high turnover in many leadership positions on the university and campus level where Whitten hired within a few years many colleagues she had previously worked with at the University of Georgia, at Kennesaw State University, and at Michigan State University. Some in this nepotistic network seemed too inexperienced for their new position, with catastrophic results.

 

How can, for example, an administration reduce the number of trustee meetings with the result that tenure and promotion decisions can only be signed by the board of trustees after the deadline for the reappointment for the following academic year has to be made? Many departments and units began to fall into disrepair, requests for faculty lines central to the pedagogical and research mission were denied without a clear rationale, hiring authorizations were all centralized and then delayed and often rejected, the centralization of IT support had catastrophic fallout, while at the same time some extremely costly initiatives and the hiring on the executive level of the university continued and expanded. It seemed as if the leadership followed a recipe written for a smaller, lower ranking institution.

 

Within three years, Indiana University became an exemplary worst case-scenario for how the confluence of administrative failures, political interference, and public misinformation can push a proud institution to the brink. Yet within an hour after the vote of no confidence, the chair of the Board of Trustees wrote a message of support for the president – as one of the elected trustees revealed later this was done without consulting all members of the board. The promise of “listening  sessions” followed, yet after just two meetings with faculty Whitten abruptly ended these due to a scheduled eye surgery. She never resumed direct contact with faculty at the flagship campus of the university.

 

Just eight days after the vote of no confidence, on April 23, 2024, the administration formed an ad hoc committee in response to a request by students to protest the war in Gaza beginning the following day.  As a result, the policy for a designated free speech zone in Dunn Meadows dating back to 1968, was changed overnight. The Whitten administration called in the Indiana State Police and the peaceful protests were met with what many perceived as a disproportionate response, including snipers on the rooftop of surrounding buildings as well as arrests.

 

In the days following these events, all of the professional schools from the Kelley School of Business, the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, the School of Education, the Media School, the Jacobs School of Music, the School of Social Work, and the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental joined the College of Arts and Sciences and voted overwhelmingly for resolutions that included the demand for the resignation of the president and the provost.

 

Whitten did not need to wait long for conservative political support. Jim Banks, at the time a Republican congressman from Indiana and now Senator, wrote an op ed in which he openly expressed his support for the president against the “immature faculty” of Indiana University Bloomington. He didn’t question the maturity of a president who publicly muses about what to do “once we’ve burned through all the money,” who makes derogatory remarks about core areas of achievement of the institution she leads, and who calls the faculty of IU Bloomington crazy.

 

Whitten commissioned Cooley LLP, a law firm, to produce a report on the police crackdown for approximately $400,000. On the basis of thin evidence, the law firm retrospectively found the administration’s actions justified and recommended millions in police raises, new surveillance capacity, as well as a new chancellor position. Following the script, David Rheingold was hired as chancellor in summer 2025 in order to provide an additional level of control over a campus Whitten smears as bonkers.

 

As a result of the initial vote of no confidence and the events at Dunn Meadows, which garnered national attention, the position of the president of IU – whose hiring resulted from a controversial search process in which she was not included in the list of finalists by the committee composed of trustees, faculty, and administrators – has become so weak that it is impossible to say if she has become a mere vessel for political interests or if she has orchestrated what has happened since.

 

On April 25, 2025, Indiana’s state legislature passed HB 1001, a last-minute budget reconciliation bill that included several revisions to state law that have accelerated the process of institutional erosion. Some of these seem so narrowly targeted that it is difficult for many not to see them as attempt to inflict damage on specific parts of the university. The legislation summarily removed three alumni-elected trustees from the board, deleted the provision for emeriti faculty to serve on faculty governance bodies or vote on their initiatives, among other intrusions into campus governance.

 

Separately, state regulators got involved in decertifying BA degrees it arbitrarily defined as “low-enrolling” if they graduate less than 15 majors per year. They did the same for PhD degrees if they graduate less than 3 students per year. All such degrees must to be eliminated or merged on the basis of falling below a quantitative threshold, regardless of academic quality or importance of mission. The new law also asks that costs associated with these degrees be eliminated. (While similar laws exist in other states, they have significantly higher thresholds: Ohio requires an average of 15 over 3 years, Arizona 24 for BAs.)

 

As a consequence, all language and literature departments except for Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University have been forced to merge their degrees (as well as a few STEM units, including Statistics and Atmospheric Science). This is happening in spite of the recognized value of the study of languages other than English for individual jobs as well as social benefits: a recent analysis by LinkedIn identified languages as one of the three standout areas that make IU graduates successful on the job market. Many of IUs language departments rank among the best in their field in the US, and many also stand among the larger departments in their national discipline.  And yet degree mergers are being marched ahead. the upper administration has dictated that the degree mergers be developed and implemented within the current academic year, which is a pace that undermines minimal professional standards and does not allow for a thoughtful restructuring. The law applies to all public universities in Indiana and includes the opportunity to apply for an exemption for degrees that do not meet the threshold, and yet the university administration at Indiana University refused to forward exemptions for degrees of such iconic departments such as Gender Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, which are among the oldest and most prominent in their field.

 

The forced departmental restructuring escalates prior intrusions on academic freedom. In 2024, SEA 202, a law tying continued tenure to faculty members demonstrating “viewpoint diversity,” had passed without significant intervention from university leadership and without any demand or need: the Indiana Commission of Higher Education had surveyed students in the state in 2023 and found that only 6.4% of Indiana students disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement, “At (University) students can express their opinions freely.” The problems with the legislation are so glaring that the free speech organization FIRE has taken out billboards that read, “Indiana University covered up the truth. What are they hiding?”

 

While faculty, students, and parents are confused by the onslaught of measures directed at imaginary foes, the Whitten administration is silent. Not only do senior officials not defend the institution they lead against attacks they are perhaps in fact complicit in, but they aggravate the damage by remaining silent while the media impugn the institution.

 

In case these events were not enough, the newly emboldened trustees, now all appointed by the Republican governor, decided in June of this year to make all faculty governance advisory only. On the same day they announced a $224,000 bonus for President Whitten, they decreased the University’s retirement contributions for faculty from 10 to 9%. All in all, faculty are silenced and marginalized at a moment when their voices are more needed than ever.

 

Is there any strategy behind all this weakening of the institution?

 

Whitten’s administration has three discernible programmatic feature. She aims to enhance the status of the branch campus in Indianapolis, site of the IU School of Medicine. She seeks to push students into narrowing corridors of degree completion. And she has sought to hit an arbitrary benchmark of $100 million in annual research expenditures. 

 

This third goal is quietly destructive of the campus’s research culture. The campus’s highest ranking departments are generally in non-STEM fields, where extramural research funding is scarce and comes in relatively small amounts (IU humanities does very well at attracting these).  At IU, high expenditure fields in STEM are generally less recognized nationally. So to raise IU expenditures to $100 million, her administration has in effect decided to shift investment out of high-ranking units whose research expenditures are low--as in the humanities—and into lower-ranking units where expenditures are high.  As a result, many now-disfavored units have shrunk to a level where it becomes difficult to maintain their academic integrity.

 

Given the campus profile, research expenditure is historically not a strong measure at IU Bloomington at all. Data from the National Science Foundation shows that it has a quite low research expenditure for a high ranking R1 university. In 2023, the last year for which data are available, its total expenditure was roughly $853 million, compared to nearly $2 billion at the University of Michigan and $1.55 billion at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though reaching the $100 million research expense benchmark this year remains the main story the Whitten administration likes to tell, in addition to that of our Big-Ten-dominating football team IU remains far behind comparable public research universities on the expenditure metric.   

 

Another university with relatively low research expenditure and a very high ranking (higher than IU’s) is the University of Chicago, with a research expenditure of $628 million in FY 2023. UChicago resembles IU in one way, which is stature rooted in outstanding non-STEM disciplines, where research quality is not proportional—is rather unrelated—to expenditure benchmarks. All the more reason to think that investing primarily to spend more on IU research is not in accordance with the strengths of the institution and will weaken it.

 

To be fair, these developments did not begin under Whitten. But under Whitten the trend was accelerated and radicalized because now it was not just a lack of investment in some of the most prestigious part of the university but ruthless cuts in funding to institutional assets such as Indiana University Press, media outlets, special collections, and much else, in order to move money to subsidize high-cost research and an expanding administration.

 

Another model is possible. When some senior administrators at Duke University asked in the late 1970s how to elevate the university’s profile in the absence of the endowment wealth of Princeton or Stanford, they invested in the humanities. They hired prominent senior scholars like Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson to build major programs, recognizing that hiring the most prominent group of humanities scholars can happen at a fraction of the cost of hiring even modestly successful scientists. The increased prominence helped grow a budget to the point where it could then in turn support the sciences.

 

Ironically, IU’s Herman B. Wells built a very successful IU by leveraging limited funding to build strong lower-cost fields.  There’s no reason to see as inevitable Whitten’s push of IU towards becoming a second rank institution, a mere shadow of the proud Midwestern world-class university it has been over the decades. But that is the direction of her increasingly authoritarian and defensive administration as it invests resources int ineffective short-term initiatives with significant collateral damage.

 

 The only good path forward is a clear and sustained focus on what the mission of a public university is: not making money, not the production of a maximum of degrees in a minimum of time, not an alignment with short-term job-market opportunities, and certainly not advancing individual administrative careers with its benchmarks. The mission is the best possible research and teaching , and these depend on supporting and extending the knowledge and teaching ecologies of the university rather than unraveling them.

 

The author does not represent the views of Indiana University.