Indiana University alumnus and three-term board member of the IU Foundation James Fielding announced in a July 1 LinkedIn post that he will not serve a fourth term and is choosing to step down because he “cannot in good conscience” continue to defend the university.
Fielding wrote in a longer blog post about his choice to leave that after the board’s June and October 2025 meetings, he felt upset and discouraged by university responses to board concerns regarding the future of higher education given changes in state and federal laws and guidance surrounding universities. In the post, Fielding alleged that board members who pushed against the university’s plan not to “rock the boat” were told “to be on the team or to not be in the room.”
“A board exists to ask hard questions of an administration,” Fielding wrote in a July blog post. “A board that is asked to stop asking is not a board anymore. It is a rubber stamp with a name plate.”
Fielding began serving on the board in 2017. The IU Foundation manages and seeks out donations for the university, which includes managing scholarship donations. The foundation board of directors serves as the organization’s legal governing body and works to meet university fundraising goals.
He helped found the Queer Philanthropy Circle in 2019, a philanthropic group that brings IU donors together to support LGBTQ+ students, staff, faculty and alumni. Fielding said that donors to the Queer Philanthropy Circle were informed that it was no longer possible to designate emergency scholarships for LGBTQ+ students, as it could risk national grant funding.
In 2025, following federal pressure on universities to end race-based scholarships, the IU Foundation encouraged donors to change the language for scholarships pertaining to marginalized groups, suggesting that donors include allies in scholarships for LGBTQ+ students.
“The mechanism was: we built a community of donors specifically to support LGBTQ+ students at IU, and we were told that supporting them as LGBTQ+ students was now a liability,” he wrote.
On June 1, the first day of Pride Month, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun declared it “nuclear family month,” issuing a statement that a family made of one husband and one wife is “God’s design for the family structure.” A version of the proclamation shared online by Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith also called on people to “take back the rainbow.”
In his online statement, Fielding included multiple photos from his wedding and criticized the governor and lieutenant governor’s responses to Pride month.
Fielding also pointed to state and federal pressure as drivers in changing the university climate. Among these drivers, he pointed to a policy written into the state budget in May 2025 that gave the governor full discretion over appointing the university’s Board of Trustees, leading Braun to remove three alumni-elected trustees.
“At the institutional level, I cannot reconcile what I have seen on free speech, on the dismantling of diversity and inclusion infrastructure, and on the protection of marginalized students, faculty, and staff,” he wrote. “The administration’s posture has been to absorb federal and state pressure quietly rather than push back publicly.”
In a statement that both expressed his appreciation for IU as an alma mater and criticized the university’s current climate, Fielding, one of 50 board members, said that he hopes to continue giving back to IU through other philanthropic efforts.
