You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Indiana University at Bloomington faculty members voted no confidence in their president, provost and a vice provost Tuesday, following multiple controversies over academic freedom.
The vote of no confidence in Pamela Whitten, the IU system president since 2021, passed 827 to 29. The no-confidence votes on Rahul Shrivastav, IU Bloomington’s provost and executive vice president, and Carrie Docherty, IU Bloomington’s vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, also passed by wide margins.
According to the Bloomington Faculty Council’s website, its executive committee received a petition, signed by more than 200 members of the “voting faculty,” calling for a meeting of the entire voting faculty to express no confidence. The Council’s site said the voting faculty—a group that numbers more than 3,000—only includes faculty members and librarians who work nearly full-time or more, plus faculty emeriti.
The petition to call the meeting said “the current IU administration is encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.” It then listed multiple incidents.
The first reference was to the university’s barring of Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor, from teaching this spring and summer after he booked space on campus for a Palestine Solidarity Committee-hosted event. Docherty wrote Sinno’s suspension letter, which said he might also be fired following continued investigation. The second incident mentioned was IU Bloomington’s cancellation of a long-planned art exhibition by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American abstract artist. Both of these incidents occurred after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The petition also accused the IU administration of failing to “proactively and effectively stand against the Indiana legislature’s violations of academic freedom and faculty protections.” Recently, Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature passed, and its Republican governor signed, legislation diminishing diversity, equity and inclusion programs and tenure protections in the state’s public higher education institutions.
IU leaders were also criticized in the petition for not publicly supporting Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the IU assistant professor who provided an abortion to a 10-year-old Ohioan in 2022 after Ohio banned abortion six weeks into pregnancy. Bernard shared that story shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and it attracted national attention from President Biden, among others—along with public doubts from conservatives about whether it happened and backlash from Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita, a Republican.
After Tuesday’s votes, Whitten, the president, sent a lengthy email to the IU Bloomington faculty and faculty emeriti. Pledging to “listen and learn,” she said she 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.”
W. Quinn Buckner, chair of IU’s Board of Trustees, released an unequivocal statement. “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees.”
