Indiana University Bloomington Chancellor David Reingold spoke about free speech, research space and enrollment minimums during a Q&A with IU Student Government on Monday night.
FIRE rankings
Reingold brought up IU’s free speech ranking in his opening remarks, asking students about their interpretations of recent survey data.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked IU the sixth-worst university in the country for free speech Sept. 9, up from its ranking as third worst last year. The report cited several free “speech controversies” behind the ranking.
The controversies included the university’s firing of the Indiana Daily Student’s Student Media Director Jim Rodenbush in October 2025 after he refused to direct the IDS to exclude traditional front-page news from its print edition. The university later directed the IDS to cease printing entirely. In a subsequent letter to the IDS editors, Reingold backtracked on that decision, allowing the IDS to use its budget for the rest of the academic year “as the editors see fit.”
FIRE also mentioned IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in August 2025 and the pause it placed on 27 fraternities in November 2025 as examples of restricting expression.
According to the report, 54% of students polled said they have self-censored on campus at least once or twice a month. FIRE also reported 68% of students polled said shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases, and 31% of students said using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, at least in rare cases.
Reingold asked the room if they thought the violence statistic sounded right, and many shook their heads no.
“I’m just trying to understand the disconnect between, for example, the response that I just got from this group, which is very counter to, I think, what’s in this survey data,” Reingold said.
Some IUSG members questioned the sample size of FIRE’s poll, which surveyed 341 respondents; others pointed out they felt “shouting down” a speaker expressing hate speech was acceptable.
“If true, yeah, I mean I think we’ve got work to do on this,” Reingold said, referring to the survey data’s validity. “But that’s a big if.”
When asked how the university was maintaining free speech, Reingold mentioned IU’s adoption of the Chicago Principles in February, a set of free speech values developed by the University of Chicago. The principles permit the university to “reasonably regulate the time, place and manner of expression” but emphasize those restrictions as narrow exceptions to the general principle of freedom of expression.
Research space
Aryan Chander, the chair of the student life committee, asked Reingold about university research space. He said he was a part of research at the Gill Institute for Neuroscience over the summer.
“We actually had the provost come in and assess if we are using all the space in our lab, because if we weren’t, they were going to actually give that to Luddy,” Chandler said.
Reingold said the university is cautious about reassignments and made an investment in engineering last year, hiring 15 engineers in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering and adding degrees in computer engineering and robotics. Finding homes for those new hires meant reassessing existing research space, he said.
“Those were areas where we thought that some of the faculty members that were being hired would make the best use of that space in terms of the research productivity on campus,” Reingold said.
At the same time, he said, the university was trying to create more research space in other buildings on campus.
Enrollment minimums
One student asked what IU would be looking at going into next year’s Indiana General Assembly session. Reingold responded that while he didn’t think it was his place to tell members of the legislature which laws to pass, he did think a law that requires universities to eliminate low-enrollment degrees could “benefit from another look.”
House Enrolled Act 1001, which went into effect in July 2025, directed universities to request approval from the state to continue degree programs that had low enrollment. If the state does not grant approval, the university must eliminate the program. IU voluntarily eliminated, suspended or merged 249 programs across its campuses.
The law applied to bachelor’s degree programs with an average of fewer than 15 graduating students, master’s programs with fewer than seven students or doctoral programs with fewer than three students.
“Those are, I think, well intended, but I think that they can create all sorts of distortionary effects,” Reingold said about the enrollment minimums. “And I think that if you’re going to focus on low enrollment programs, it’s best to focus on the undergraduate side.”
Reingold said there are some doctoral fields where faculty may only have the capacity to mentor two students a year, and the job market may not be able to absorb as many students as programs meeting the current minimum enrollment threshold would graduate. He said putting incentives in place that push degree programs to get over the minimum threshold could create negative unintended effects, like limiting faculty’s ability to adequately mentor students.
