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WFIU

Published May 29, 2024 at 4:49 PM EDT

Who’s running in the IU Board of Trustees election?

The Indiana University Board of Trustees is the university’s governing body. They are responsible for policy and finances at all IU campuses. Members are not paid, but they receive “a small per diem when fulfilling their responsibilities, and all expenses related to board activities are covered,” according to the website.

The trustees serve on three-year terms, except for the student member that serves on a two-year term.

IU alumni are able to vote on three of the seats. Alumni can vote on one seat each year.

The other six are chosen by Indiana’s governor, including the student trustee.

The alumni trustees are Jeremy Morris, Donna Spears and Vivian Winston.

This year’s election is for Morris’ seat. He serves as the chair of Academic Affairs and University Policies and is running for reelection against 11 other candidates.

In order to get on the list of candidates, each person must receive 200 signatures from IU alumni, which is cross-verified in IU’s internal system with a government or student ID.

Alumni can vote online or request a paper form by contacting Amy Cope, alumni trustee election coordinator, at truselec@indiana.edu or 812-855-6610. Elections will open at midnight June 1 and close at 10 a.m. on June 28.

Each candidate was asked for some general information about themselves, as well as these three questions:

How will you represent the faculty, staff, and students and their concerns?
What is the No. 1 issue you want to address if you are appointed?
How do you give back to the IU community?

Here are their responses, edited for clarity. The candidates are listed in alphabetical order.

Smith

Jill Maurer Burnett

I'm married, almost 24 years. I have three children: my oldest just graduated from IU, my middle daughter is going to be a junior at IU, and my youngest today is her last day of her junior year of high school, so still deciding where she’s gonna go to college.

I met my husband at IU. I graduated from the Kelly School of Business and now I've worked in that field. And then once I started having kids, I shifted toward nonprofit and things like that.

Learn more: Candidate statement

My experience on many boards and being active in the community has definitely made me want to be more active, but I have a passion for Indiana University Bloomington since I went there, my father went there. My brothers each went there for undergrad and law school.

I'm very excited for the opportunity to run for this position. I'm excited to be part of IU in a more dedicated way and to learn what is needed, and hopefully make IU a better place than it already is. So I'm excited to hopefully get the chance to do that.

How will you represent the faculty, staff, and students and their concerns?

Well, that's a hard question to answer since I don't have any experience on this board or other boards in college universities yet.

I would say my first order of business is to figure out what is needed on each campus, what the faculty needs, what students need, and hopefully then learn from everybody and feel where my abilities will be the best help in fulfilling everybody's needs.

What is the No. 1 issue you want to address if you are appointed?

I do believe that there's a problem with safety on our campus, with everything that's been going on, with the things on Dunn Meadow and the camps and things like that. And I just want every student and faculty to feel like they're being heard, but at the same time abide by the rules and standards of not only Indiana University, but also Bloomington.

So I do feel like there could be a safety issue. That's my concern as August quickly approaches is that I want everybody to feel like there’s a safe place on campus.

How do you give back to the IU community?

We attend family weekend, we attend basketball games, football games and we've seen shows down at the IU Auditorium. We were there more the past couple years, since I had two children there. Now I only have one, but we go to events at the law school because the law school is named after my father. So we do that kind of stuff.

I also attend things that I'm invited to as much as possible through faculty and higher level administration.

So yeah, I would say that we try to get down there as much as possible, but at the same time as the mother of a child who attends school, we don't wanna overcrowd and make them feel like they're not far away.

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Ellise Antoinette Smith

I came to Bloomington in 2017, where I started my Masters in higher education and student affairs. I graduated with that degree and then began working on my PhD in urban education studies with a concentration in higher education and student affairs, where I worked out of both campuses of Bloomington and IUPUI.

And then I ended up getting the full time job as the Inaugural Assistant Director of Diversity Equity, and Inclusion for the O'Neill School. I was based out of Indianapolis, so I moved to Indy full time at that time, but then over the course of being in that position, I ended up having to do some work back in Bloomington, so I was back and forth.

Learn more: Candidate statement

After serving in that role for about a year, I then transitioned into the Inaugural Director position for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the Division of Student Affairs at IUI, where I am now.

So through that I have also been an adjunct faculty in the School of Education, teaching them diversity, equity, and inclusion. I did a lot of training within Bloomington and Indianapolis at different universities and different organizations, student organizations, organizations outside of higher ed related to facilitating and coaching, related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and learning more about the needs of constituents of these campuses, including faculty, staff, campus partners, and community partners both in Bloomington and Indianapolis, and then also I’m a doctoral student currently at the School of Education and I’m looking into research as well.

How will you represent the faculty, staff, and students and their concerns?

I have the unique position that in the IU system I was here not just one or two years, got my degree and left, but I’ve been in the system for eight years now. I started off as a graduate student, then doing graduate assistantship, and then became a staff member while still a student, and then became adjunct faculty. So I've held all three of these positions simultaneously.

And the reason why I bring that up is because I have been able to hear some of the concerns even prior to what’s going on, but then also being able to navigate those spaces and challenge our communities to say, “what can we do in our circles of influence,” and also speaking to administration, which includes our Deans and our Chancellors, Vice Chancellors across those different spaces. Although I have not physically been on the other campuses, I have had opportunities to work with them through the Indiana University Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leadership certification program, where I serve as a faculty member. In those groups I've had the opportunity to connect with people from other campuses and be able to talk to them through their concerns, especially through this lens of DEI. It includes race and gender, but it also goes beyond that to talk about other critical issues such as wages.

I have experiences on campus with administration, faculty, staff and students, being in the classroom, being able to join virtual spaces, including conferences that have brought other people to spaces that have been involved in, you know, having constituents that are connected, that are faculty, staff and students at other campuses as well.

So when it comes to addressing both issues, I've been pulled into different rooms where people have asked me to consult and say, “hey, we're dealing with this type of issue.”

I've also been nominated to sit on the Executive Staff Council and also work with a lot of student organizations. Also working with leadership, where they tapped on me to say “we're noticing the disconnect with our community, especially our students from the Muslim population,” and I let them know, prior to October 7th, these students, faculty, and staff were dealing with Islamophobia well before then. We have to stop saying just because it's now in the media, that’s when the issues started. Some of these issues have been happening before, and I've been privy to engage in some of these conversations related to that.

So going to those meetings, challenging and asking questions as to why we can't move faster, because I've seen higher ed move slower in certain ways to address things, but I've also seen it move quickly to respond as well. So holding everyone accountable, including myself, to say, “are we actually addressing this or sweeping this under the rug?”

I've been fortunate enough to be in spaces where I've been able to connect with people outside of just my own circle of influence.

What is the No. 1 issue you want to address if you are appointed?

I wish I had more than just one that I could have answered, but I think it's experiences. The reason why I say experience is because there’s a spectrum of different things that fall under that.

Currently, we see the continuous divide between our constituents on campus, which includes administration, faculty, staff, students, campus partners, and community partners, related to what is happening to our students who identify as Muslim.

We know that after Oct. 7, the war took place and it put a lot of pressure on students who were having family and friends go through this, even just communities that they identify with. Our administration looked at these protests as if there is danger that can happen from those spaces.

I get it, people can misuse those spaces and actually create more harm for other individuals. But I think as a member of the Board of Trustees, asking those critical questions as to why we are not moving forward in a space to create safety, right?

Public safety is the biggest thing, and then when we turn and we have an administration that fears the same individuals who are part of this community, there's an opportunity that has not been addressed, of being able to connect with them. Understanding what’s the need they have, and explaining how much we can do as an institution as well, versus choosing silence and sweeping that under the rug.

I think those experiences also speak to our Black students. What does that look like when consistently we see that they are crying out with the same issues that we have seen for 10, 20, 30+ years? Addressing how we navigate the campus, especially with our faculty and staff who are shutting down these issues. That won't even address them because of fear. And then who are staff and faculty who are trying to address these issues, but they're moving in fear as well.

So the best way for me to sum this up is experiences, but knowing that they need to be parsed out because everybody doesn't have those same lived experiences. What can we do as an institution to be more intentional, to support it and address it, versus thinking there's a one-size-fits-all answer? That's not it, right? What happens in Chemistry is not going to happen over the Media School.

So if we can address that and recognize those differences, why can't we take the time to really hone in and look at the experiences of our different constituents that occupy our universities?

How do you give back to the IU community?

I would say for me, I do look at this work through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and DEI is currently up against a lot of pushback when we think about legislation, laws, and a lack of information. DEI is a triggering word for some people, they think it means anti-White people. They think it means we're building up a coalition to harm people, and I can honestly say that is furthest from the truth.

It's about accountability and recognizing historical events that have taken place and are continuing to take place and how they have shifted in order to continue to keep certain groups in a space of silence.

So for me, going into the classroom, I'm an adjunct professor in the School of Education as well as I'm over at First Year Experiences, and the courses I teach are multicultural global awareness, and I teach through that lens of DEI.

I've gone into the community and been asked to do trainings. I tell people all the time, although my job description is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Division of Student Affairs, my mission is not stopped because of my job description.

For example, I've had students from O'Neill, which is my previous position, who still reach out and say, “hey, can you come and train us? Can you come and talk to our group?”

I've had student organizations that are even in the Business School who have reached out and said, “can you come and have a conversation and have discussions about accessibility and bias?”

I've had larger organizations of individuals outside of higher Ed that have reached out. I have worked with different conferences, and I give you all that information in context to say for me, it's about getting the work done.

I've watched my grandparents, who moved from South Carolina to Detroit, where they started their family, fight the same battles they've been fighting since they were in that small area in the South where sexism and racism was at an all-time high.

And I have a goal to make sure that I complete this mission, if we can make change. I have not gotten to a point where I'm burnt out yet. Because there used to be a point in time where even being on the phone would be considered illegal because I'm a Black body, right? Where I wouldn’t be able to stand in front of students because I was a woman. My identities were illegal at one point in time, and now that I have the ability to talk to people, it's about, “hey, we all have struggles and challenges. How do we make sure we actually create resolution?”

So that's always my mission and what drives me forward, especially in this IU community.

That’s the reason why I want to run for the Board of Trustees, because I didn't just come here with one or two years of experience.

I've been heavily involved on the campus from leadership opportunities, the ability to see it from the faculty side, the staff side and student side, and I know there's change to be done. I think the biggest thing is miscommunication, and because I've had this opportunity to see it through multiple lenses, I want to be able to give back in that way and continue to give back in that way by being very intentional in the work that I do in those spaces.