AN OPEN LETTER

Although I have good reason to believe that many of my colleagues share the sentiments
expressed in this letter, and even though my position as President the IU Bloomington Faculty
does afford me the right, under the terms of Section 10.J of the Bylaws of the Bloomington
Faculty Council, to speak on their behalf, the opinions expressed in this open letter are mine
alone.
Since her arrival at Indiana University three years ago, President Pamela Whitten has repeatedly
answered criticisms of her actions by claiming that the changes she is seeking to make to the
structure and culture of the institution are driven by increasingly pressing external realities
whose implications for higher education IU has somehow either managed to evade, or simply
failed to address. When asked to explain the rationale behind her own approach to addressing
the challenges these new realities present for our university, she has routinely cited novelty of
circumstance or examples of similar actions taken by other universities as proof that such
changes are both necessary and sound. Rarely, if ever, has she indicated much openness to the
idea that IU might have something important to teach her or its peer institutions about how to
handle anything. A recent case in point is the Whitten administration’s handling of protests in
Dunn Meadow.
While President Whitten is fond of citing certain provisions of IUB’s “Policy for the Use of
Indiana University Assembly Ground” (BL-ACA-I18) as guiding principles for the actions her
administration has taken over the past several days, she seems to ignore others that are crucial to
understanding the profound commitment to freedom of expression enshrined in that document.
Among these is a statement that appears in Section 1 of the policy under the title “Basic
Principle,” which reads, in part, “when a demonstration becomes violent or represses the rights
of others, it has no place on a university campus. But the mere fact that some find a
demonstration distasteful is no more reason to ban it than to ban an idea the listener finds
distasteful. We [the Trustees in 1969] have reviewed the history of demonstrations in the
Assembly Ground. Many of us as individuals disagree with the points of view which have been
expressed there. Many of us who agree with the substantive views expressed in individual
demonstrations have found the form of their expression sometimes distasteful, or worse. Taken
as a whole, however, this history shows us a lively and vigorous commitment to the exploration
of matters of public concern: the vigor of that commitment is to us one of the measures of
greatness in a university.”
Another important provision is Section 2.D which reads “We believe the University should not
use physical force to enforce these rules [emphasis added]. In cases of non-compliance, the
University should use the legal process to enforce its legal rights. This commitment might
involve some cost to the University and would probably entail more serious consequences for
violators; we believe these costs are an appropriate way to mark the weight the University
community attaches to both the rights and responsibilities it recognizes in the Assembly
Ground.”
It is difficult to reconcile the events we have witnessed over the past week with the measured
statements of principle expressed in the sections of the policy quoted above. Beyond the fact
that the only violence that has occurred in Dunn Meadow has occurred at those moments when
members of the IUPD and the Indiana State Police have been directed by someone to advance on
protestors, the very fact that physical force was used as the enforcement mechanism at all is an
affront to the (now blatantly) obvious wisdom reflected in the language of that policy as it was
originally crafted. That physical force was used as a first resort, on the very first day of the
protest, rather than a last resort, constitutes an even greater affront to that wisdom.
Indeed, it is important to recall that the first forcible conflict between protestors and law
enforcement officers occurred on the afternoon of Thursday, April 25th, many hours before
anyone would have been in violation of the original policy’s prohibition against unapproved,
unaccompanied “signs, symbols or structures” between the hours of 11 PM and 6 AM. These are
all facts the Whitten administration openly acknowledged in their communication to the IU
community last night: they did indeed decide to “stand down” for 24 hours following IUPD and
ISP’s first forcible encounter with protesters on Thursday afternoon. The only reason they had
do that, though, is because their first impulse was to stand up law enforcement assets as their
primary tool for defending the campus against potential threats posed by…whom? By its own
students, faculty, and staff, apparently, at least if the list of people who have so far been arrested
offers any indication of who those attempting to exercise their First Amendment rights in Dunn
Meadow are.
It is undoubtedly true, as President Whitten’s communication Sunday evening suggested, that
“our campus—like so many others—has experienced the escalation of a national movement on
numerous college campuses to erect encampment,” although it not clear that the actual goal of
such efforts is to “occupy universities indefinitely.” It is also accurate enough for President
Whitten to say that, like numerous other college campuses, IUB has an obligation to figure out
how to “support free speech and ensure the safety of the IUB community.” But here is a very
important point that is worth keeping in mind: every other campus in the country has not had a
designated free speech zone set aside since 1969 as a matter of policy for the express purpose of
mitigating precisely the sort of challenges we are facing now. Every other campus in the country
did not have the wisdom, born of experience, to acknowledge and embrace the inevitability of
public protest on a university campus in a way that safeguards the right of freedom of expression
while also minimizing disruption to other ongoing activities on that campus. And crucially,
every other campus in the country did not make these arrangements long ago precisely because
they sought to make unnecessary the heavy-handed and quite frankly dangerous use of physical
force against their own students, faculty, and staff to reconcile these competing imperatives.
Indiana University Bloomington did. Yet despite being handed a ready-made solution to the
supposedly intractable challenges that campuses across the country are currently facing that
might have allowed Indiana University Bloomington to serve as a model for those other
institutions, the Whitten administration decided instead to lean in to its own impulsiveness and
follow rather than lead on the theory that doing otherwise might result in the situation
deteriorating and potentially getting out of hand. At this juncture, I think it is safe to say
concerns about the current situation deteriorating or getting out hand are passé. It has already
deteriorated, and it is arguably already out of hand—if not in terms of what happening in Dunn
Meadow at any given moment, then certainly in terms of the outrage and sadness that is being
felt by students, faculty, and staff across the campus.
Despite her recent promises to listen and learn, I am very skeptical that President Whitten is
likely do either. Rather, I strongly suspect that what she will continue to do is what she has done
for the past three years, which is make one questionable decision after another resulting in one
terrible headline after another, and then blame the chaos she has played an integral role in
creating on somebody else, or on circumstances beyond her control. That is something, but it is
not leadership. In fact, it is the exact opposite of leadership. That is why I have reluctantly
arrived at the conclusion that there is no viable way forward other than for President Whitten to
resign from office or be removed.
That is the principled version of the argument I feel compelled to make considering this past
week’s sorrowful events. Now let me make a version of this argument that is likely to be more
persuasive to the people who are best positioned to respond to it.
Try as I may to envision one, I simply cannot imagine a scenario in which students, faculty and
staff who feel as betrayed by the Whitten administration as many of my colleagues and our
students clearly do will ever be able to look beyond the events of the past week, let alone the
generally frustrating and dispiriting events of the last of the past three years, and simply resume
their labors—labors which are, fundamentally, the most important work of the university. Indeed,
even if everything she and her surrogates have said about the unappreciated complications and
nuances of the current situation is true, which I am not sure I believe, President Whitten has
clearly become a liability to Indiana University. And not only in the context of this past week’s
events.
Just two weeks ago, the faculty on IU’s Bloomington campus made it quite clear through a
procedurally orderly vote that they had already lost confidence in President Whitten’s leadership,
as well as the leadership of IUB Provost Rahul Shrivastav. I do not see how any reasonable
person could make the claim that what has happened on the IUB campus since then is likely to
have increased anyone’s confidence in that administration’s ability to meet the challenges we
currently face with much success. Faculty are even more outraged than they were before. Our
students are absolutely, and quite rightly, appalled at having been targeted by their own
university on the grounds that their free expression represents a disruptive threat to the
functioning of an institution that is now, thanks to the Indiana Generally Assembly, required by
law to not only accommodate free expression, but actively encourage it. And elected officials are
openly characterizing President Whitten’s management of the institution’s affairs as
“amateurish,” which it is. I do not know what IU’s hundreds of thousands or alumni are
thinking, but I find it difficult to believe that seeing their alma mater’s good name routinely
dragged through the mud in national and international headlines over the past several years, and
especially over the past week, has filled many of them with a sense of pride.
Is it true that the challenges college and university presidents are facing at the moment are
profound? Undoubtedly. Is it also true that there are complexities and nuances to most
situations that institutional leaders are called upon to navigate that many people are not aware of
or do not understand? Almost certainly. Is it possible that history may eventually record that
President Whitten was unfairly made to bear personal responsibility for failing to manage
adequately a situation that no university president could have been expected to manage without
making some mistakes? Possibly. But at the end of the day, we do need to be pragmatic.
Corporate boards remove organizational leaders they have otherwise trusted for years all the time
because those leaders’ names become tainted, as President Whitten’s most assuredly has. Even
more commonly, organizational leaders preemptively resign from their positions because they
understand, or are made to understand, that it is not their reputation that is most significantly on
the line when controversies surrounding the real or perceived functionality of an organization
arise on their watch. It is the reputation of the organization itself that is at stake. In the case of
Indiana University, the organizational reputation currently at stake is one that has been more than
two hundred years in the making. It is a reputation that has not only included a stronger than
average embrace of freedom of thought and expression as foundational principles, but one that
has been built quite directly on the institution’s fidelity to those principles, in some ways almost
uniquely. And it is a reputation that is currently being trod upon and damaged in the most
distressing and abhorrent ways.
In my first public comments as President of the Bloomington Faculty to the members of the
Board of Trustees on August 25, 2023, I noted that “more than anything, what faculty and staff
need as eventual outcomes of the transformational work we are all about to embark upon is more
time—time that can be put where it truly belongs, which is at the disposal of our scholarly
ambitions, our obligation to serve our communities, and perhaps most importantly our obligation
to serve our students. We need freedom from distraction, which as any of my undergraduates
could tell you is necessary if one is trying to concentrate for the purpose of doing the very best
thinking and writing one possibly can. Finally, we need even more confidence in the near- and
long-term stability of this institution than we already have.” I cannot say that we have received
these things from the Whitten administration in any appreciable measure. In fact, it has
sometimes felt as if we have received nothing but time-consuming distractions and repeated
blows to our sense of the institution’s near and long-term stability, although I am willing to admit
that this may just be my sheer exhausting talking. Be that as it may, however, I am nevertheless
convinced that the time has come for the Whitten administration to end.

Colin R. Johnson
President of the Faculty
Indiana University Bloomington