Indiana Budget Bill Contains Sweeping Higher Ed Changes

Indiana state lawmakers have sent their governor a state budget bill that goes beyond setting funding levels. If Republican governor Mike Braun signs it into law, House Enrolled Act 1001 will require faculty at public colleges and universities to post their syllabi online and undergo “productivity” reviews.

The bill would also—among other things—prohibit faculty emeriti from voting in faculty governance organizations, place low-enrolled degree programs at risk of elimination by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and end alumni elections for three Indiana University Board of Trustees seats by filling them with gubernatorial appointees. In addition, it has a provision that would let Braun remove the currently elected board members before their terms expire.

“I think overreach doesn’t begin to describe the actions of the Legislature,” said Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus of education at IU Bloomington. “This is really a sweeping takeover of higher education in Indiana.”

The Republican-controlled Indiana General Assembly passed the legislation—which runs more than 200 pages—less than two days after revealing it Wednesday, April 23. The state House approved it around 12:45 a.m. Friday, followed by the Senate’s agreement at about 1:20 a.m.

“I know a lot of legislators … simply didn’t have enough time to fully read it,” Skiba said. “There was no opportunity whatsoever for any sort of public input.”

Matt Pierce, a Democratic Indiana House member who’s a senior lecturer at IU Bloomington, said the conference committee report revealing the budget bill wasn’t even released until Wednesday evening.

“As people began to kind of go through it, they discovered all these higher education provisions that had never been discussed anywhere,” Pierce said. To have “provisions of this magnitude” pass in the budget bill “with no hearing or public input, that was pretty shocking,” he said.

The budget bill’s higher education provisions echo those passed, or at least proposed, in other red states. But Indiana’s General Assembly continues to be in the vanguard among even GOP-controlled legislatures in its fervor for regulating public higher education. Last year, state lawmakers passed, and the former governor signed, a law threatening the jobs of nontenured and tenured faculty who don’t sufficiently foster “intellectual diversity,” as defined by campus boards of trustees.

These bills follow pro-Palestine protests at IU Bloomington and tensions between faculty and university president Pamela Whitten. And with a further reduction of tenure protections looming in the new bill, a tenured professor at IU Bloomington says he’s under investigation for allegedly violating a policy the university wrote to uphold last year’s intellectual diversity law.

Ben Robinson, an associate professor of Germanic studies and a prominent pro-Palestine campus protester, told Inside Higher Ed that an anonymous student filed a complaint against him in October. The unnamed student, according to a copy of the complaint Robinson provided, wrote that Robinson “talks negatively about the state of Israel and describes the war in untrue and unfair ways” and has discussed being arrested at a pro-Palestine rally “on numerous occasions.” The student also complained that Robinson had spoken “against Indiana University on several occasions” and used class time to say the university was restricting free speech.

This complaint was filed in IU’s bias incident reporting system, which wouldn’t have involved potential discipline, Robinson said, but university administrators appeared to refile it as an intellectual diversity–related complaint under the policy passed after the General Assembly’s intellectual diversity law. He said he thinks administrators “want to overcomply on particularly this ideological issue, because that’s what they’re being told they have to enforce” by the federal government.

“How can a professor know what’s going to be called bias?” Robinson said. He also said IU Bloomington is “a campus in which the witch hunts are alive and well, and I, along with many others, have been an open target of them.”

IU spokesperson Mark Bode, in response to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for an interview and written questions about Robinson’s situation, wrote in an email simply that “IU does not comment on personnel matters.”

Accusations of IU Involvement

Multiple critics have accused IU leaders of backing one or more of the 11th-hour budget bill’s higher education changes. When asked about this, Bode provided a written statement that didn’t say whether IU was specifically involved.

“Throughout the session, Indiana University engaged with state lawmakers to shape meaningful conversations about the university’s commitments to making higher education accessible to Hoosiers and driving the state’s economy through life-changing research and innovation,” the statement said. IU “will be working over the coming weeks to understand the full impact of state legislation and ensure compliance.”

Before the bill passed, Pierce said, he texted an IU lobbyist asking the university’s position on it. The lobbyist replied that the institution didn’t have a position because it was still carefully reviewing the legislation, Pierce said.

“And right then and there I knew that IU was behind it,” Pierce said. He also questioned how lawmakers would have the “pretty esoteric” knowledge that emeritus faculty serve in some faculty governance organizations.

“You now have a convergence of the Republican attacks on higher education and the actual administration of Indiana University, and that’s a pretty shocking development,” he said.

The IU Board of Trustees currently has six gubernatorial appointees—including a student with a two-year term—plus three members elected by alumni. If Braun signs the budget bill, he and future governors will be able to appoint all nine members, the student member’s term will drop to one year and there will be no more alumni-elected members.

Braun has expressed support for this change, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

“I think it’s being done because the current process [has] not maybe yielded the proper results on the entirety of how you want that important part of our state to be run—from curriculum to cost to the whole way one of our flagship universities has been operating,” Braun said, according to the Capital Chronicle. “I want to get a board there that is going to be a little more rounded, that’s going to produce better results.”

Vivian Winston, one of the elected board members, who previously announced she’s not seeking re-election, said she voted against IU president Whitten’s contract extension and the university’s post-encampment protest restrictions. But she said she doesn’t know whether her votes were related to the board change part of the legislation—which, like the other higher ed provisions in the bill, caught her “unaware.”

“I found out through the media,” Winston said of the changes in the bill.

Rodric Bray, a Republican and Indiana’s Senate president pro tem, provided Inside Higher Ed a rationale for the part of the bill ending alumni elections.

“A very small fraction of the IU alumni have been participating in the election for the alumni seats on the IU Board of Trustees,” Bray said in an emailed statement. “Of the approximately 790,000 alumni around the world, only about 2.5% of alumni voted in the most recent election for trustee. Because the number is so small, it is not a fair representation.”

But some opponents of the provision don’t see it that way. Skiba, the IU Bloomington emeritus faculty member, said, “This is clearly payback for opposition of policies favored by the president of the university and the Legislature.” He said the change would “take those voices of opposition off the Board of Trustees and essentially give complete control of the Board of Trustees over to the governor.”

Over all, Skiba said, “this Legislature is following the Trump lead—wishing to put an airtight lid on free expression. And if you’re wishing to do that, universities are an obvious place to start.”