Vivian Winston, a former Indiana University Board of Trustees member, spoke publicly Wednesday about her experience as an IU trustee for the first time since Gov. Mike Braun removed her from her position.
At a Bloomington Press Club meeting, Winston discussed the decline of her confidence in IU President Pamela Whitten, her concerns about the administration’s transparency and the “culture of fear” she said has developed at the university.
Braun removed Winston from her alumni-elected position May 31, around a month before her term was set to expire. He was enabled to do so by a last-minute addition to the state budget that altered the board’s structure, giving Braun the authority to choose all its members.
Winston said she has reached out to Braun via email multiple times to discuss the state of the university but received no response.
She also said she had not been in active communication with Whitten since April 2024, when IU Bloomington faculty members passed a 93.1% no-confidence vote against the president.
Though she was the sole dissenter against Whitten’s reappointment in February, Winston said she fully supported Whitten at the beginning of her term in 2022 and met with her often.
“I was so impressed with her,” Winston said. “I don’t know if you’ve seen this side of her, but she can be so very charming.”
Whitten called Winston immediately after she was elected as a trustee and scheduled two two-hour meetings with her, Winston said. Up until the no-confidence vote, they met monthly for coffee.
However, IU's response to the pro-Palestinian encampment in Dunn Meadow that began in April last year dismayed Winston. An overnight change to IU’s expressive activity policy enabled police to arrest 57 people who were protesting, including students and faculty, which Winston said raised concerns about transparency.
After the Dunn Meadow arrests, the BOT released a statement announcing it would conduct a campus climate survey, a decision Winston said she did not support.
“I didn’t have anything to do with the statement coming out,” Winston said. “If I had been involved, I would have wanted something besides a campus climate survey because I think we already had a pretty good idea what the climate was — angry.”
From unforeseen dismissals to sudden policy modifications, Winston said faculty and students received little notice or justification for major changes on campus. She said she knew of three IU faculty who had been abruptly fired and never informed why.
The Indiana Daily Student could not independently verify that statement’s validity.
“One person I know was fired by email,” Winston said. “They gave her one day’s notice. They said, ‘don’t come in tomorrow, we don’t need you anymore.’ No help in getting a job in another department, another area. She was just fired.”
She said this type of dismissal with no advance warning, in addition to updated tenure policies and decreased faculty emeritus rights enacted through the state legislature, has led to faculty feeling insecure in their jobs.
“There’s such a culture of fear on campus,” Winston said. “I don’t ever recall having seen that before.”
An IU representative did not reply to a request for comment on these allegations by the time of publication.
These conditions, Winston said, have led to other universities poaching IU faculty.
“It puts us in a very bad position when we are competing for the best and brightest faculty,” she said. “You think of a potential faculty member that’s considering us or University of Michigan, the University of Michigan could take two minutes and say what I just said, and then they could throw in the fact that the president got a 93% vote of no confidence and the board did nothing.”
Winston calls for improvements
Community engagement and accountability were at the heart of Winston’s recommendations for improvements.
“The governor, one of the things he said he wanted was transparency, and the other was accountability,” Winston said. “We are not getting that at all from Indiana University.”
She outlined several questions that are yet to be answered by the university, including why the review of Whitten’s alleged dissertation plagiarism has not been released and why Whitten’s reappointment contract is not public.
In reference to Whitten's plagiarism allegations, Winston said The Indiana Promise, which new students learn at orientation, seems to apply only to students.
On the IU admissions page, the promise reads: “I promise that I will be ethical in my academic work. I will take personal responsibility for what I say and what I do. I will respect the dignity of others, treating them with civility and understanding.”
To remedy the issues she laid out, Winston suggested that trustees interact more with other stakeholders at the university.
“The trustees need to make it a point to go out and talk to vice presidents, deans, faculty, students,” she said. “They need to be talking to everybody.”
