Alumni re-elect Talbot despite controversies

IU alumni re-elected Sue Talbot on Saturday to serve her third three-year term on the IU board of trustees. With a total of 8,586 votes, Talbot lead the election, with Ray Richardson, a former IU trustee and Indiana congressman, getting 7,409 votes.\nTalbot said before the results were announced, she was surprised Richardson gave her so much competition because of her victory over him in 2001.\n“When you run for any office, you take a risk, so you never know for sure what’s going to happen,” Talbot said.\nThroughout the election, Talbot said she received many e-mails and letters questioning her viewpoints, but said she stood by her decisions, even when they might have lost her votes. Some of the controversies the board of trustees faced last year were not placing an undergraduate student on the presidential search committee that selected Michael McRobbie, outsourcing the IU Bookstores and the IU Motor Pool, hiring a new basketball coach who already had NCAA leveled sanctions against him from the NCAA and raising University standards.\n“Maybe we haven’t done a very good job of talking about why we want to raise the standards at Indiana University and make this a world class institution,” Talbot said. \nThe U.S. News and World Report ranked IU 70th in their most recent report, raising many concerns for IU’s declining reputation.\n“The reason we are ranked 70th, among other variables, is because our admission standards weren’t very high, and that’s one of the things we are looking at – to raise the standards of this institution,” Talbot said. “We want to be one of the best public institutions we can be.”\nTalbot has great concern about how outsourcing will affect the faculty and staff at IU.\n“I cannot support it if we jeopardize our staff in any way at all,” she said. “These staff members are like family at Indiana University.”\nGov. Mitch Daniels will soon appoint four new members to the board of trustees, including one student representative. Votes were tallied Saturday in the Wells Library with a grand total of 29,402 valid ballots. Regulators threw out 1,866 ballots because they were considered invalid.