Some focused on building massive library collections. Others strove to lure the best scholars and create first-rate research centers. Still others sought to carve out a clear superiority in a certain discipline or subject.
The race to be distinctive helped make America’s system of higher education the envy of the world.
In those halcyon days, Indiana University’s calling card was a commitment to rigorous, even relentless inquisition. Every idea and every person were to be questioned without constraint, regardless of the idea’s pedigree or the person’s reputation.
When the renowned scholar Richard Ellmann—a Yale Ph.D., Rockefeller and Guggenheim honoree and author of “James Joyce,” perhaps the most honored biography of the 20th century—arrived in Bloomington for a six-week guest teaching stint in the 1950s, the vigor of the students’ queries stunned him. He spent hours in the library between classes preparing himself for the next interrogation by the IU students.
This determination to question everything and everyone vaulted IU toward the top tier of America’s universities.
It could have been otherwise.
Many colleges and universities in the Farm Belt were content to remain as bastions of mediocrity, content to move class after class of students through their campuses without ever forcing them to encounter a single unfamiliar concept or principle.
For that reason, they remained stuck in the middle of the pack.
IU, however, developed a national reputation in multiple disciplines—music, English, journalism, etc.—in part because it was so wed to the notion of challenging all ideas.
The school’s approach did not come out of nowhere. It built on classic European models that refined the Socratic method and saw persistent inquiry as the best path to wisdom.
But it did so with an American twist, an affirmation of values espoused by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, the architect of American liberty, believed that as long as truth and falsehood could joust on a level field, truth would prevail.
That was his argument in favor of free speech.
It was this sense that IU was a place where people could not only question each other but even their own convictions in pursuit of both the truth and their best selves that endeared the school to generations of alumni.
It wasn’t just a place where students found themselves.
It was a place where they defined themselves.
That was then.
This is now.
Embattled IU President Pamela Whitten doesn’t like to be questioned.
She has been on a campaign to purge dissenting voices from IU’s leadership and the campus itself. She earned the school dubious national notoriety by authorizing the placement of police snipers on a building rooftop during a campus protest regarding the war in Gaza.
Her thinking doubtless was that kids in Birkenstocks represent deadly threats to public safety.
Whitten’s deft handling of this and other incidents in which students or professors honor the university’s tradition of questioning both events and authority earned a vote of no confidence from the faculty.
Whitten and her allies have responded with more repression.
They sneaked into the state budget a last-minute provision that strips IU alumni of the power to choose any of the school’s trustees. Instead, the governor will select them.
Gov. Mike Braun claimed—disingenuously, it turned out—that he knew nothing about the maneuvering to spare Whitten the discomfort of being questioned.
Braun just removed the last of Whitten’s critics from the IU board and replaced them with appointees whose commitment to veracity is dubious.
Among those appointees was Jim Bopp, a conservative legal activist who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. His commitment to Jeffersonian jousting between truth and falsehood will not be to level the playing field but to tilt it in favor of his partisan and ideological interests.
This is sad.
Sad for IU and its alumni.
Sad for Indiana.
Sad for America.
But it’s also unfortunate for Whitten and her allies.
What they don’t realize is that they’ve made a damning admission by dropping the hammer in this fashion.
At the heart of IU’s commitment to inquiry was a profound respect, a belief that serious, thoughtful people could defend their ideas when challenged.
Without realizing it, Pam Whitten and her allies have just acknowledged they can’t do that.
