Indiana University has faced unprecedented challenges from the government and internal conflict. But despite changes affecting the lives of tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, the university continues to make most important decisions in secret and leaders routinely avoid interviews with informed journalists.
Since she spoke with WTIU in July 2024, President Pamela Whitten hasn’t given any interviews that might include tough questions. Her media appearances have been mainly on industry podcasts and small stations such as WAMW’s Morning Shakeup in Washington, Indiana.
Here’s part of how it went with the Morning Shakeup:
Host: “Go Hoosiers! We’re excited about the upcoming football season.”
Whitten: “You should be excited. We're going to be competitive, I tell you.”
IU received more than $633 million in state appropriations and $536 million in federal grants in financial year 2024, the last for which data is available. It received more than $183 million in gifts, many from its hundreds of thousands of alumni. It employs more than 41,000 workers and enrolls almost 90,000 students. With that comes obligations, said Ross Mugler, interim president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards.
“Especially at a state institution, we have a responsibility to the state to provide information in a timely, accurate manner,” he said.
President Whitten and Board Chair David Hormuth declined to be interviewed for this story. Mark Land, a former IU spokesperson and trustee candidate, thinks the university would benefit from being more accessible.
“To have the leader of the institution not be heard, to be heard very infrequently, I don't think it does the institution any good,” he said.
As a public institution, the university has an obligation to Indiana taxpayers who provide millions every year, to students and parents paying tuition, and to faculty and staff who seek reassurance in the face of political pressure and economic instability.
The board of trustees hired Whitten in 2021. That process itself was never openly explained.
Since then, the number of unexplained decisions and unanswered questions has continued to grow.
Silence on the statehouse
In the face of widespread attacks on higher education, IU isn’t telling its side of the story.
Many of the attacks are coming from the statehouse. When lawmakers proposed a bill that would cut hundreds of degree programs, IU remained silent. When they added last minute changes in the state budget ending faculty government and trustee elections at IU specifically, the university wouldn’t say whether it was consulted, let alone where it stood.
“Even if the answers are what they think somebody is not going to want to hear, just provide the answer,” Land said. “Right, wrong, or indifferent, if people ask a question they deserve an answer.”
IU’s status as a public university does put its leaders in a difficult position. It receives around 13 percent of its budget from state appropriations.
“It’s hard to disagree with the governor when you’re a university president, because you know they hold the keys to the funding,” Mugler said.
But IU leadership’s silence didn’t spare the university from a $60 million cut in state funding, and soon after the session Gov. Braun publicly questioned the worth of an IU degree.
“All the other universities seem to have more value in terms of the education they're giving us for the cost,” he told reporters.
IU declined comment. In June, Braun exercised his new power to fire the elected trustees. Purdue still has three.
When IU shuttered its DEI office after a new state law, it refused interviews but offered a general statement about ensuring every student’s success. And when lawmakers told institutions they could fire professors for not meeting productivity standards, IU stayed quiet despite Whitten’s earlier public support for tenure.
These are just events from this year. Since 2022, state politicians have defunded the Kinsey Institute, accusing it of harboring pedophiles, and suggested revoking the medical license of a faculty member who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old.
IU defended its faculty only after weeks of public attacks.
In the case of Kinsey, the university waited until after the state stripped its funding and it still did not refute the lawmaker’s unsubstantiated claims.
IU then announced it would sever Kinsey into its own nonprofit, two weeks before the Board of Trustees’ November meeting. Researchers were shocked and confused, saying the university was unable to answer their questions. Trustees postponed the vote after campus protests.
“I'm someone who has represented institutions, including IU,” Land said. “I think we are better served as a society when we communicate more, rather than less.”
Speech and security
When war broke out between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, IU began to identify security threats wherever activity related to the war took place on campus.
In December of that year, IU’s Eskenazi Museum of Art canceled Palestinian alumna Samia Halaby’s art exhibition, which was three years in the making. The university said it couldn’t guarantee security. A representative for Halaby said IU did not elaborate on those security concerns or take up her offers to discuss them.
That same month, IU suspended the faculty advisor of the Palestine Solidarity Committee for a room reservation error when he helped arrange a talk by Israeli anti-Zionist author Miko Peled. The university canceled his initial request and denied a second one, saying it needed more time to provide adequate security.
Despite suspending Abdulkader Sinno from teaching, the university did not show Sinno the complaints against him. IU responded to media requests with a statement about its support for academic freedom.
The university blocked pro-Israeli speech, too. In March, IU asked Hillel, a campus Jewish organization, to cancel a speech by Mosab Hassan Yousef, a Palestinian informant for Israel whose comments have drawn accusations of Islamophobia.
IU said it received credible information from the FBI involving threats from an unlikely combination white supremacists and pro-Palestinians activists. But the Anti-Defamation League accused it of caving to intimidation.
Dunn Meadow
Things came to a head in April 2024 when IU responded to a planned pro-Gaza encampment in Dunn Meadow by changing its expressive activity rules the night before, without inviting student and faculty representatives as required or providing the protesters adequate notice. President Whitten would later say she feared the encampment would become a “magnet for those making threats of violence.”
Over two days police arrested more than 50 protesters, mostly IU students and faculty, on trespassing charges that the prosecutor’s office called “unconstitutional” and even the Superintendent of the ISP admitted was largely for unpopular but constitutionally protected speech.
While images of a police sniper on a campus rooftop circulated in the national media and protesters dug in for a 100-day occupation, Whitten disappeared from public. Aside from appearing at commencement, she avoided events and social media. IU declined interviews from local and national outlets, preferring to communicate only through written statements.
Secrecy on the Board of Trustees
Bloomington faculty cited IU’s “failure” to stand up publicly against statehouse attacks, as well as its silencing of Halaby and Sinno, as grounds for a vote of no confidence in April 2024 against Whitten. The vote passed by 93 percent.
The Board of Trustees put out a statement supporting the president, saying: “We, the Board of Trustees, stand united in our confidence in President Whitten.”
Except they weren’t united. Trustee Vivian Winston found out only after the statement had been released and said she would not have signed off on it.
“A couple of hours later, they said, ‘Oh, Vivian, you wrote a statement,” Winston said. “I said, ‘No, I didn't. I've been right here.’ They said, ‘Looks like you did.’ And then then it went downhill from there.”
Two months later, Winston emailed a statement to WFIU-WTIU News disavowing the board’s statement. Without criticizing the president directly, Winston called on the board to address concerns about the “general lack of transparency,” saying recent actions by the administration had put the university’s reputation at stake.
Although Mugler thinks trustees should speak as one voice in public, he said, “It certainly is the right of individual trustee to speak out if they feel like something has gone awry like that.”
Winston thinks there were other trustees who weren’t consulted, but so far none have come forward.
It wouldn’t be the last time Winston said she was blindsided. When the board extended Whitten’s contract and raised her salary last February, it did so without notice. Winston only learned what she was voting on the morning of the meeting.
“I had the feeling that I was the one lone person there who had not been told beforehand,” she said.
The board has increasingly held closed-door executive sessions to discuss university business. While it is allowed to hold secret discussions on topics such as pending litigation and labor negotiations, the Indiana Public Access Counselor has found it in violation of Indiana’s Open Door Law twice in recent years.
Trustee agendas have shared little information about what will be voted on and discussed. One example: neglecting to mention the creation of a new leadership position for the Bloomington campus. In June, when the board updated IU’s expressive activity policy, it didn’t share the amendments until after the meeting.
At his first meeting as a trustee, Braun-appointed James Bopp Jr., a prominent conservative and free speech advocate, questioned the board’s way of operating and urged transparency.
“The proposals that came to the trustees should be made public so that people can look at them, comment, be engaged, and then we would have a committee system that would consider those,” he said.
‘I pledge to listen and learn’
After the 2024 vote of no confidence, Whitten told faculty in an email that the university could only succeed “if we communicate with honesty and compromise.”
She added, “I pledge to listen and learn. I will weigh the guidance from faculty council and the participation of the campus community through shared governance to achieve our collective vision of a thriving campus.”
Whitten announced listening sessions with faculty from the various schools at IU Bloomington.
“I have to give her a lot of credit for this, because this could not have been easy,” Winston said.
In audio leaked to the press, professors were direct, at times antagonistic, toward Whitten, voicing frustration at her administration’s lack of transparency, among other grievances. Some professors leaving the meeting described her responses as “vague.”
Whitten canceled the remaining listening sessions due to a planned eye surgery. They were not rescheduled.
At the next trustee meeting, Whitten announced changes.
Her solution was to create two new administrative positions to serve as intermediaries between herself and faculty in Bloomington: a campus chancellor and a faculty fellow. Trustees also announced an independent review of campus climate, which they never conducted.
Despite its promise of transparency, the administration became more secretive in 2025.
In March, the university fired tenured cybersecurity expert XiaoFeng Wang and his wife, IU libraries employee Nianli Ma, the day federal law enforcement searched their homes.
Neither Wang nor Ma was charged with crimes, but a colleague of Wang’s says IU fired him based on a relatively minor and inadvertent violation of research protocols.
In court, Wang said IU’s silence has irreparably damaged his reputation.
The trustees also passed IU’s new operating budget, offsetting $100 million in state and federal cuts with reductions to retirement contributions and unspecified other cuts. For more than three months, IU withheld the budget, despite the state requiring it to be public.
“Delays in areas such as budget disclosures and crisis communications or other board decision making can erode the trust and create uncertainty across the institutions,” Mugler said.
On Tuesday, IU finally released its official budget, but with far less detail than previous years. WFIU/WTIU News reached out to IU asking for a more detailed explanation of the changes. It is waiting for a response.
