By: Mira Costello

Editor-in-Chief

In January, IU South Bend’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote a petition to Chancellor Susan Elrod and Executive Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Jill Pearon. Currently at 78 signatures, the petition outlined three areas of concern: the Academic Master Plan, threats to faculty governance and changes to IU South Bend’s mission statement. It was presented to the administration on Feb. 13. 

If you aren’t familiar with these terms, the AAUP is a national group of professors that advocates for faculty interests. On other campuses, AAUP chapters are faculty unions, but this is not the case at IU South Bend. The Academic Master Plan (AMP) is a process through which the university hopes to review all the academic programs IU South Bend offers – including majors, minors, certificates and more – and decide which to “develop, grow, sustain, revitalize or sunset” based on the university mission, according to the IU South Bend website. 

The AMP is different from Academic Organization and Design (AOD), which is the plan taking effect in fall 2024 that will restructure the university’s colleges into two schools: the College of Professional Studies (including business, education and health sciences) and the College of Arts and Sciences (including arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences). AOD does not involve the elimination of any academic programs, and the petition does not express opposition to it.

While the AMP is designed to “help improve enrollment, increase revenue and reduce cost,” IU South Bend AAUP member Jay VanderVeen said that the petition called for cessation and reevaluation of the plan because faculty have been left in the dark about what metrics the university will use to measure success of programs.

“Without being given numbers, we hear ‘we have too many programs on campus.’ I don’t know what that means, but we hear it regularly,” VanderVeen, a professor of sociology and anthropology, said. “That means somebody has a picture in their head of how many programs they would like to see, but that’s not being shared with the faculty directly.”

The text of the petition also states that faculty have not received evidence that eliminating programs would save significant money for the university. The petition reads that, at the time it was written, over 30 programs were “under threat of being cut” based on the original AMP. VanderVeen said this meant many departments were afraid that their programs might be eliminated without understanding why. 

“We never heard a metric that people understood,” he said, “because it was number of students, but also graduates, but also the contribution to the overall mission.”

He emphasized that many small departments feared for their futures, and that a small number of majors or graduates didn’t necessarily reflect the importance of the program to the university.

“A foreign language could have just a handful of students, but it could also be part of an overall, all-IU consortium of that language online, and – although it doesn’t have a lot of majors – it’s supporting education, or another department or another field, where those students do benefit from having good credentials of a lot of a language training when they go onto their careers,” VanderVeen said.

On Feb. 16, however, the AAUP received news that the AMP was “put on pause” to be revisited, according to VanderVeen. He said Chancellor Elrod introduced a “10 by 10” metric: programs with 10 current majors, “and/or” 10 graduates in the past five years, would be safe for this year and would be revisited in the future.

“This was unclear, because we weren’t sure if it was ‘and’ or ‘or,’” VanderVeen said. “There are still programs that are worried because they have less than 10 majors, and/or less than 10 graduates, and that doesn’t even talk about minors or just classes they’re teaching.”

AAUP member and literature professor Benjamin Balthaser also argued that regardless of how many majors or graduates they may have, small programs make an important contribution to the liberal arts philosophy of the university.

“While the threshold for program sustainability has been lowered, the new plan still runs on the assumption that low-enrolled programs need to be closed down or consolidated,” Balthaser said in a statement to The Preface. “In a comprehensive liberal arts college – the only public one of its size in the area – students not only need a wide ranging array of classes in the humanities to become educated people, they should have the option to major in anthropology or econ or philosophy if such classes spark a passion in them. Not only are such closures bad pedagogy, they are also bad for the long-term health of the college.”

Although more programs might be safe for now, VanderVeen said the threshold for which ones are considered low-enrolled may increase in the future. He also expressed that the administration has not yet addressed the other two parts of the petition: changes that have decreased faculty governance and changes to the mission statement that shift away from a liberal arts focus.

“Our campus and all the IU campuses have a long history of faculty governance, where the faculty have most of the legislative authority over all the student-facing things,” VanderVeen said, noting that the faculty’s Academic Senate are a legislative body that have historically had committees providing input and direction for all areas of academic affairs. “In the past, it has been that faculty has control of many things in our constitution.”

However, the petition notes that “there has been an increase in ad-hoc task forces, advisory boards and new councils” as well as a “decrease in transparency and reporting” between administration and faculty members. 

One example VanderVeen gave was the Campus Budget Advisory Council, an administrative board which serves a similar function as the budget committee elected by and operating within the Academic Senate, but is staffed primarily by administrators and is not elected by the Academic Senate. 

“We had this one track of a budget committee. But now there’s this separate committee, and they’re doing the same thing, and I think one of them gets the attention of the Vice Chancellor and one of them does not,” he said. “That’s one of those ways of the erosion of faculty governance; instead of using existing senate committees, new things are built that have new people in them.”

In the petition, the AAUP also expressed concern about the phrase “liberal arts” – a term describing multidisciplinary education that explores literature, mathematics, social sciences and other fields that are not strictly vocational – being removed from the most recent iteration of IU South Bend’s mission statement. The petition called this part of “an undeclared and imposed shift away from the longstanding comprehensive educational and research mission of IU South Bend.”

However, while faculty wait for clearer direction about the AMP and answers about the rest of the petition, something else has risen to higher concern: Indiana Senate Bill 202, which could threaten their careers as they’ve known them. 

The bill, which has passed the Senate as well as the House committee and, at the time of publication, was up for a potential House vote on Feb. 27. The legislation would create a new process for appointing trustees to the boards of public universities in which the state legislature would directly appoint most of the trustees. 

It would also allow tenured faculty to be reviewed and removed from their position by those trustees even after receiving tenure, primarily on the basis of complaints that could be filed by students who found a professor’s ideas “offensive and disagreeable,” according to an IU South Bend AAUP press release.

Balthaser said there is one word to describe the bill: “censorship.” 

“That is exactly what this bill proposes to do: to enable a state-appointed tribunal or star chamber to censor faculty and make sure that what faculty say and assign will make politicians happy,” he said in a statement to The Preface.

“Not only will this bill end the college classroom as we know it, it will make the college classroom, or what remains of it, very dull: faculty will teach only what they think will not offend anyone or get themselves in trouble,” the statement continued. “In short, classrooms will resemble more a public safety announcement than a site of inquiry, creativity and discussion.”

VanderVeen also expressed staunch opposition to the bill, which – according to the AAUP press release – also forbids state universities like IU South Bend from hiring, promoting or renewing faculty who include DEI-related materials in their curricula. 

Jake Mattox, IU South Bend AAUP President and professor of literature and writing, has also been vocal about his opposition to the legislation, which is currently being pushed through a short legislative session. 

“The bill imposes partisan review mechanisms, drastically altering an established system that has drawn students and faculty from around the world precisely because our classrooms have been largely protected from the influence of politicians,” Mattox wrote in a guest column for the South Bend Tribune. “The bill would install a chilling system of government influence and ideological surveillance limiting open discourse, discussion and debate.”

This legislation does not exist in a vacuum; VanderVeen told The Preface that similar bills are cropping up across the country and continue to threaten K-12 education and higher education alike.

If you are interested in taking action against SB 202, you don’t have to be a faculty member. Visit inaaup.wordpress.com/sb-202-resources to read the latest news, find fact sheets about the legislation and review a list of action items.