The Courier-Journal (Louisville)

How IU centraliza­tion is playing out

Changes, cuts spur concerns that school’s flagship status in jeopardy

Carl Ipsen and James Farmer thought they were going to a routine meeting with the associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Indiana University in March 2023. They were looking to pitch an increased budget for the Food Institute, which for eight years had provided a physical space on the Bloomingto­n campus for faculty and students to research food, cook and discuss.

Instead, they were told their budget would be zero. “The College (of Arts and Sciences) didn’t have the means anymore, but certainly the university didn’t step up and say, ‘This is a valuable resource and we should keep it,’” Ipsen, founder of the institute, said. “We didn’t have any champions in this regard.”

Faculty at IU Bloomingto­n have been questionin­g whether they have any champions among President Pamela Whitten’s leadership, and based on her history they may be right to wonder. Whitten has been at odds with the people she leads at both her previous posts, as president at Kennesaw State University and provost at the University of Georgia.

Ipsen said the Food Institute was just one of the cuts necessary to afford an increase in graduate worker stipends, which the administra­tion agreed to after the graduate workers’ strike in 2022. Provost Rahul Shrivastav raised wages, but did not provide the extra funds. Since the CAS has a large percentage of graduate students, its leaders had to scramble to find the money, though an IU spokesman said the university has helped the CAS subsidize the increase.

Ipsen wasn’t the last to have this experience. In the past three years, the IU administra­tion has pursued a campaign to centralize budgets, research and hiring while enhancing its focus on Indianapol­is and lucrative applied research fields.

These structural changes have prompted faculty to worry about CAS programs and budgets being whittled away and diminished discretion­ary decision-making, leading to widespread uncertaint­y and even fear that IU Bloomingto­n’s role as the flagship campus is in jeopardy. Several have expressed concern about degradatio­n in the idea of shared governance — where faculty and administra­tion collaborat­e on the direction of the university — and fear centraliza­tion of control is one more crack in that understand­ing.

In a statement, IU spokesman Mark Bode told The Herald-Times that IU is working to ensure the long-term sustainabi­lity of its liberal arts offerings in addition to its investment in emerging fields.

The H-T spoke to several administra­tors and faculty who see IU’s decisions differentl­y, acknowledg­ing a general decline in liberal arts enrollment while also expressing a fundamenta­l distrust in the administra­tion charged with solving the problem.

Money flows to the top

In recent years, faculty said they’ve noticed more and more taxes from Bloomingto­n’s CAS being collected by IU’s university-wide system, increasing the administra­tion’s ability to spend in its chosen areas of investment.

“The key difference that’s happened over the course of the last three years has been taking off the top more money from the campuses for central administra­tion,” Rebecca Spang, interim dean of the Hutton Honors College, said.

While a budget redesign is still underway, the current structure provides individual schools with funding based on enrollment under a model called responsibi­lity center management. Then the schools are taxed by both the university system and the Bloomingto­n campus.

These taxes are known as the indirect cost rate and are negotiated with the federal government, according to Bode.

“Many universiti­es correctly view (indirect costs) as a reimbursem­ent of these costs the university has already paid,” he said.

Bode said the increase in campus “taxes” on grants and contracts “is being used for research administra­tion, research services, infrastruc­ture improvemen­ts, proposal developmen­t services, and research IT technologi­es, among other (things).”

For the CAS, these assessment­s have hovered around $73 million in the past three years, while university assessment­s have increased by more than $12 million. The combined total the campus and university pulled from the college was $124 million in fiscal year 2024.

At the same time, a CAS budget line labeled “other revenue” — mostly campus investment, which Bode said includes a subsidy from the university to help cover graduate worker stipends — has shot up $19 million, contributi­ng to an increase in total income. Expenses increased the same, driven primarily by the increase in compensati­on.

Several people the H-T spoke to said they felt IU’s centraliza­tion, combined with an amplified focus on the Indianapol­is campus, signaled a shift away from Bloomingto­n. They pointed toward federal funds flowing into Indianapol­is, the site of a new biotech hub, and a correspond­ing investment from IU in applied sciences, whether it’s for faculty, infrastruc­ture or encouragin­g research.

While centraliza­tion itself is not a bad thing, several faculty said, many lack trust in the administra­tors guiding the shift of money and control.

“When nobody knows what’s going on, it allows for a power grab,” said Elizabeth Housworth, a mathematic­s professor who serves on the Budget Model Redesign Committee. “And the center has the advantage.”

Bode attributed some of the changes to the university’s need to evolve.

“While IU’s historical­ly decentrali­zed budget and operationa­l models have served us well in many ways, there are tremendous opportunit­ies, particular­ly in interdisci­plinary and emerging areas like health, life sciences, and AI, where we have to evolve our approach and collaborat­e differentl­y to take full advantage. We rely on the expertise and creativity of our talented faculty across discipline­s, particular­ly in the College (of Arts and Sciences), to make these strategic areas of opportunit­y come to life, both in meeting student interests and aspiration­s and addressing most pressing issues of the day through transforma­tive research,” he wrote in an email.

An uncertain future for the liberal arts

Part of faculty’s concern with a perceived focus on applied science — think patents and partnershi­ps with companies — is that it may take away from the research the CAS champions, which several said is essential for graduate student education and the university’s rankings.

“There’s no way that we can have a top-ranked research university, a university that belongs in AAU (American Associatio­n of Universiti­es), if we don’t have first-rate graduate programs,” Spang said.

Spang came to IU in 2007 as one of four tenuretrac­k faculty hired in the history department that year. The history department is down eight tenure-track faculty from 2020 and none has been replaced, Spang said.

The department is one of several discipline­s that have seen fewer majors, fitting with a national decline in liberal arts enrollment.

“If the idea is that we need to allocate faculty where the students are, and obviously there’s a lot of logic to that, then you’re just going to keep hiring people to teach accounting and finance or business law, and you’re not going to replace the Ottoman historian,” she said.

Spang argues higher education has a responsibi­lity to provide a robust liberal arts program for the students who do study it, as well as building a variety of skills that allow flexibilit­y.

“Fundamenta­lly, I think, university education is supposed to ‘prepare you’ for the future, but no one knows what the future will be,” she said.

Portuguese major slashed

Months ago, it was a rumor. Now it’s reality — the Portuguese major at IU is no more.

“While you still can study Portuguese, I think it really has a bad message to cancel the Portuguese major at the same time as we continue to use the decades-old advertisin­g line that IU teaches more languages than any university in the country,” Spang said.

The cut came even as Portuguese is considered a critical language by the U.S. Department of State.

Housworth said the provost and the state of Indiana are concerned about programs and majors with too few students — including certain languages.

The problem with enrollment­s has caused serious budget issues for the CAS, including a shortfall of millions of dollars in 2015. Declining enrollment­s are owed partly to an increase in dual-credit offerings in Indiana high schools.

In 2015, the former CAS dean tried to cut the doctoral theater program to save money, but alumni complained to then-President Michael McRobbie, prompting him to reverse the decision, Housworth said.

The administra­tion ultimately bailed out the CAS, lending credence to the idea that central funds and decision making could help prevent the need for a rescue.

While some view the cuts as necessary treatment for a declining program, Housworth said, others feel shock at the sudden changes and consistent chaos.

Other recent changes the H-T confirmed included the eliminatio­n of the study abroad program in Salerno, Italy, a merger of the Institute for the Digital Arts and Humanities with the Institute for Advanced Studies, and the rebranding of the Integrated Freshman Learning Experience, which involved six weeks in a research lab and an honors science course and now links to the IU 2030 Plan’s new Intensive First-Year Seminar courses.