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When the Board of Trustees scheduled its February meeting, another payday for Indiana University President Pamela Whitten seemed a fair bet. Four of the board’s past seven meetings have brought Whitten either a raise or a bonus. This time, the trustees bumped her salary to $1 million a year.
Trustees chair David Hormuth cited IU’s increased research spending and new industry partnerships as evidence of Whitten’s success. Yet during her tenure, IU has been ranked the worst public university in the country for free speech. A year before she took office, it ranked 13th best. In 2024, 93.1% of around 900 Bloomington faculty voted no confidence in her leadership.
The gap between the trustees’ assessment of Whitten’s presidency and the mood on campus is hard to ignore. But it is not surprising that the board rewarded Whitten for what it deemed a strong financial performance. IU is a public trust, and the trustees are responsible for resourceful stewarding of taxpayer funds. They employ Whitten to carry out the day-to-day tasks of that stewardship, not necessarily to lead the university as a community. This pay raise, however, provides Whitten with the chance to do exactly that.
It is one thing to receive a pay raise. It is another to accept it.
Presidents at the University of Notre Dame traditionally do not accept their salaries. In 2015, President Father John Jenkins was paid just over $1 million. He donated the entire sum to the Congregation of the Holy Cross, the Catholic order that governs Notre Dame. Jenkins’ successor, Father Robert A. Dowd, followed the same practice. In 2024, Dowd received $320,900 and gave it all to the same order.
These examples reflect another understanding of the university presidency. At Notre Dame, the office is treated as a pastoral as well as a managerial one. Jenkins, by many accounts, could often be found walking Notre Dame’s campus and talking with students. On one occasion, a student asked him to film her making a snow angel. I, for one, have not seen Whitten around campus except on the field in Memorial Stadium. Nor have I met anyone else who has.
Bear in mind, Whitten must manage a network of campuses, while Notre Dame’s president attends to just one. In some ways, the role of Notre Dame’s president better resembles that of Chancellor David Reingold, who is responsible solely for IU’s Bloomington campus and who does work to engage students. But if Whitten wished her presidency to be remembered as one focused on community, not just management, she could take a page out of Notre Dame’s book and spend more time among the members of the community she oversees. One such way to ingratiate herself with the campus before setting foot on it would be to gift her salary for campus service.
Granted, Whitten is not a priest who has vowed to live in poverty. Notre Dame’s presidents are. But choosing some personal sacrifice, even to a smaller degree, answers the call of leadership beyond the contract.
So, President Whitten, I have a deal. Keep your first $800,000. Treat yourself with the next $100,000. Then, give the remaining surplus to the campus. Below, I’ve started a list of some suggestions for where these donations could go.
1. Pay for bonuses to campus grounds crews and maintenance staff.
2. Fund student media. Wealthy donors have always supported public services.
3. Donate to Bloomington charities combatting homelessness.
4. Commission new campus art.
5. Sponsor an intramural competition.
6. Improve an accessibility ramp. Perhaps it should be heated.
7. Support students with housing lease gaps.
8. Provide childcare for nontraditional students.
9. Host a commencement speaker at graduation this year.
10. Cover the cost of international students’ flights home during break.
And that is only the beginning. I trust students and faculty can suggest plenty more.
While none would solve all the problems facing IU, that is not really the point. Problems will always exist, and no amount of routing money hither and thither will plug the hole in the ever-sinking ship of higher education.
The possibility of a university president giving her pay to her community, however, would show a kind of leadership measured more by the willingness to be transformed through service than by institutional outcomes.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
