A crowd came to the IU Board of Trustees meeting Thursday expecting a new policy regulating speech and assembly on campus. But when it came time to vote, trustees tabled the decision.
Trustee Jeremy Morris, Chair of the Academic Affairs and University Policy Committee, said board members have received a lot of input from the IU community and needed more time to consult with stakeholders.
Read more: The real Dunn Meadow policy
“The next academic school year starting in like five minutes, right? So it's going to require us to work over the next few weeks to get the job done,” Morris said.
Morris said he wants a university-wide “expressive activity policy” that is consistent across all campuses. Bloomington’s Dunn Meadow currently has its own policy ensuring a right to free speech and assembly in that space.
The board also delayed approving amendments to a campus policy that would limit the administration’s ability to impose severe sanctions on faculty. These changes to the policy ACA-33 were written and voted on by the University Faculty Council in an April meeting with President Pamela Whitten.
Morris says the trustees should be involved in creating those changes.
“They passed the resolution ACA 33, but also, in shared governance, we want to make sure that the committee is participatory in this,” he said.
The debate over what counts as a severe sanction came under scrutiny after an IU professor was suspended from teaching for a room reservation error last December.
