The Governance Committee of the IU Board of Trustees will meet virtually Tuesday to discuss several resolutions before their regular December meeting Thursday.
Among those is a move limiting the authority of the Executive Committee. Neither a trustee Governance Committee nor trustee Executive Committee has existed before, and no description of either one is publicly available.
The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Governance Committee itself is brand new, according to archived versions of the trustee website. No mention of it appears on past trustee agendas and there is no description on the trustees’ webpage. It did meet for a closed-door executive session earlier this week, according to the website, which cited conversations with a lawyer for an exception to Indiana’s open door law.
The board website still does not list an Executive Committee, but faculty government bodies do. They’re responsible for setting agendas, drafting legislation and nominating officers.
The statehouse stripped faculty councils of their policymaking authority in last-minute changes to the state budget this year, so limiting their authority further would be difficult.
It could also refer to the Policy Executive Committee, which the trustees created in February to act as a gatekeeper for faculty council policies and eventually replaced them as the university’s main legislative body after the law changed in April. Unlike faculty councils, it consists almost entirely of members of the president’s cabinet.
The committee will also discuss a code of conduct for trustees. A vote on the code was initially proposed at the June meeting, tabled after extensive debate and later pushed back to December.
Read more: Here's the trustee Code of Conduct proposal that IU wouldn't make public
The full board meeting will be in South Bend, two days later.
