You say you want a revolution?

On Tuesday, in a historic special session of Bloomington faculty, a resolution was passed which demanded a complete overview of IU President Adam Herbert's job performance. After a swirl of accusations about President Herbert, including the still unfilled chancellor position, it appears to be high noon between a frustrated faculty and the highly criticized president.\nSome have painted attacks on Herbert as racist, a white faculty fighting a black president. Others describe it as an attempt by Bloomington faculty to retain control of a University that increasingly turns a blind eye to faculty concerns. Sounds like real drama. Too bad we don't give a damn.\nI've been keeping up with the news on Herbert and talking with professors about the situation, and honestly, I find it hard to take sides on the issue. How do you take sides on something that seems so petty? Assuming the faculty vote takes place, what outcomes could there be? Let's take a look.\nPossibility 1: College of Arts and Sciences Dean Kumble Subbaswamy is named IU-Bloomington chancellor. At this point, getting the job would be almost insulting. None of the tensions now inflamed by some of the faculty's drum-beating would go away, even if Subbaswamy took the offer, which seems doubtful at best. So this one's probably not going to happen.\nPossibility 2: The faculty votes that the board of trustees review President Herbert. Now, time and energy will be wasted in a comprehensive review of a president who's barely gotten the chair warm. If he stays, which is more likely, he'll have a revolt and a review hanging over his head forever. And if he's fired, IU has two huge positions to fill with no direction whatsoever.\nPossibility 3: There's no review. Faculty are still discontented. Nothing changes.\nWhere does this leave students? None of these outcomes help us with our everyday gripes and complaints, let alone more complex problems. Across higher education, including at our University, huge questions loom. How will college be made affordable? How can we give undergraduates a great education while promoting research among faculty and graduate students? Why should a university exist in the first place? \nAnd none of these questions can possibly be answered, so long as the faculty calls for a coup against President Herbert. It's not that I don't care about the issue, it's that I am repulsed by the effects of the process. If the concern with Herbert is that such questions haven't been tackled with enough initiative, what kind of initiative will he have now that the faculty has passed a de facto no-confidence resolution? It is unfair to students, and to the University as a whole, to continue the trivial, bitter turf wars over IU's bureaucracy.\nThe best outcome for this unfortunate turn of events is a fourth possibility: an opening of honest dialogue between the president and faculty about concerns in the IU community. While the Bloomington faculty are only a limited voice in the vast IU system, there are still channels through which such concerns could have been brought without aggressively attacking Herbert, a man who, while somewhat culpable, is not solely responsible for the challenges facing IU. You don't need to fight a war or start a revolution to enact real change. A continuation of this cycle of negative discourse will lead to regrettable settlements, negative publicity and no real answers for the questions that matter.