An Indiana State Police (ISP) officer wielding a “less than lethal” weapon stands guard as Indiana University (IUPD) officers and university employees dismantle a student encampment. A crowd of concerned onlookers stands behind (April 27, 2024) | Photo used with author’s permission
Instead of grading papers and preparing final exams last April, I was at Dunn Meadow, a public gathering space on Indiana University (IU) Bloomington’s campus. My aim, and that of my colleagues, was to protect student protesters from the violence sanctioned by IU’s top administrators, another possible intrusion by the Indiana State Police (ISP). A hot topic of conversation among faculty on the meadow was a letter President Whitten had sent out by email, in which she and Provost Shrivastav justified the ISP presence and violent arrests on campus. From various faculty, I heard things like:
We offer our thanks to countless faculty, staff and students who have worked tirelessly to support free speech and ensure the safety of the IUB community?!?!
This is just so patronizing.I didn’t read much of the letter. I would have loved to finish but it made me nauseous.
I think the administration is writing this way on purpose, to drive us out. It might work!
I too had a difficult time getting through Whitten’s letter, frequently interrupted by my own nervous laughter. Many faculty felt it to be mocking and alienating because it thanked them for their work to protect “free speech” while the ISP, supported by the administration, arrested those who did so. Whitten promised safety to the IU community while threatening more violence in stating, “the Indiana State Police provided the additional manpower needed to address heightened levels of potential threats … We will always prioritize safety for everyone on our campus.” I work in Hungary and my colleagues who work in places like it, including authoritarian states like China and Russia, were equally shaken, many of us struck by an all too familiar feeling. Just as the state can be an “object of emotional investment,” so can any institution. Many of us can recognize authoritarian discourse when we hear it—and can feel the threat of violence that may follow.
Authoritarian discursive strategies are just that: authoritarian. They are designed to make the hearer, listener, or reader feel restrained or powerless. In authoritarian systems, leaders claim power discursively by crafting a centrally controlled narrative, and official, approved power is concentrated in the hands of a very narrow central authority—in this case, IU’s Whitten and Shrivastav. Authoritarian leaders claim discursive power by constraining political conversation. They control both the participants allowed into it and its frame, limiting the way people can talk about a subject while maintaining conversational coherence. They do this because certain words and metaphors are connected to certain concepts, and can help any seasoned orator strategically limit and guide available responses. In other words, it matters not how many times IU’s faculty vote no confidence, how many times they protest in front of administrative offices chanting, “Shame!,” nor how many columns they write criticizing the actions of their administration. Because IU’s administration has chosen to communicate in this univocal, anti-democratic way, IU faculty and students have no centrally approved power, no voice. Their legitimate concerns will likely be reframed for the administration’s benefit—or ignored altogether.
Authoritarians of all types rely, like all politicians do, on written and spoken communicative techniques to deliver messages to their supporters and opponents. Silverstein defines “message” as “the complex, identifying description—the information structure—we achieve over the longer haul of paragraphs and whole disquisition-sized chunks of verbiage … ” A message can be likened to the sentiment one might feel after hearing, say, a political speech. Reading a stream of administrative university emails can also leave a reader with a sense of message. To send messages, political leaders harness different discursive strategies in different settings. For example, the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, relies heavily on metaphor, his reframing and retelling of Hungarian history, and his ideological division of political parties to send his message. For Orbán, if Hungary is not part of the nationalist right, it will become occupied by a “liberal” left that is somehow also communist and oppressive. His state, in this narrative, is a strong conservative island state fighting a liberal “ocean tide.” Orbán’s message is one of strength and stability in a place with a history of painful regime change. He alone, he suggests, can keep the island thriving. In a different setting, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin relies on state-crafted history to justify his war on Ukraine, claiming there is an irreparable rift between Russians and Westerners. His message is one of national strength, entwined with Russian moral and ethnic superiority. For both regimes, there is a semi-boundless, powerful enemy: liberals and the West. For Putin and Orbán a “liberal” can be anyone, except a true Russian or Hungarian. IU’s administration also has an enemy: faculty—especially those who openly disagree with IU’s administration. They are cast as disruptors worthy of arrest or members of IU’s community whose opinions will never be tallied. At best, they are misguided academics who will eventually conclude that their administration was right all along—but in their moral purgatory, they can never be real IU Hoosiers.
Progress and Safety Satirized
In a letter emailed out to faculty shortly after the no-confidence vote, at which 93.1 percent of present faculty voted “no confidence” in her, Pamela Whitten stated:
There is no going back to an earlier time. Demographic changes, resulting financial realities, and political developments are only accelerating. To combat the challenges that mark this new environment, I welcome thoughtful ideas and consideration.
Whitten often writes this way, framing her vision of the university as the only one that will allow progress, without acknowledging that there could be other ways forward. Many faculty felt this letter manipulative and misleading because they had tried so many times before the no-confidence vote to open a dialogue with the president. Phrases like: “As we plan our future together, I encourage you to suggest innovative opportunities within your department,” were interpreted as deeply patronizing. In a statement supporting Whitten after the vote, the Board of Trustees (BOT) further embodied the message of unilateral progress, citing Whitten’s “commitment to IU’s future,” stating she “will be serving as our president for years to come.”
In a column titled “Building Confidence” emailed out to Bloomington faculty shortly after their no confidence vote, Provost Shrivastav echoed Whitten’s letter and the BOT statement, reiterating that the only way forward was the administration’s. “We have the power to change tomorrow but only together.” He did not mention the vote. He did not apologize for losing the faculty’s trust, nor did he offer to begin talks with them to address existing grievances. Instead, he disciplined the faculty and reminded them that IU’s administration and “legislators need to connect about how we can best support the state, and how the state can best support us,” evoking an even higher authoritarian body to justify his “progressive” aims. His message is echoed by IU’s new “Bring on Tomorrow” campaign, showcasing an indeterminate slogan that promises “to transform the future for the better.”
The administration’s message of progress further suggests an aging, oblivious faculty utterly disconnected from and disinterested in all other citizens of the state of Indiana. In this narrative, faculty are unwilling and unable to adapt to change. To be clear, by appropriating ideals of liberal progress, Whitten, Shrivastav, and the BOT promote the ideals of a conservative state legislature. This is a type of appropriation, even satirization, that scholars of East European studies are familiar with because it is so much like the language of the Russian state (Dunn and Bobick 2014). Even today, Vladimir Putin calls for the “liberation” of Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizens, claiming he has invaded Ukraine to free it. As Putin states, “[Russians] respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous.” The Chinese Communist Party, too, satirizes safety by claiming it is protecting its citizens by “reeducating” them: imprisoning its citizens in camps, or killing them.
Although Whitten and Shrivastav have utilized the same discursive strategies as Putin, Orbán, and the CCP, I am in no way suggesting that IU’s administration has committed crimes of equal measure. However, Whitten and Shrivastav have used their messages to legitimize the use of violence on campus, and they purposely redefine ideologies of shared governance, democracy, and liberalism as things of the past. They suggest that people who represent liberal ideals either give them up or leave the school—and that is dangerous. It has already brought violence to IU faculty and students. The ISP were asked to come to campus by President Whitten. Yet there had been no protest-related violence on campus before the police arrived, and after the ISP raided the camps, no weapons were found. The ISP were the first to commit violent acts, which cast Whitten’s comment that “we will always prioritize safety for everyone on our campus” as insincere, at best, because she meant that “we will prioritize safety for those on campus who agree with us.” In July, the administration further reiterated its commitment to “safety” by raising salaries for the IU Police Department. Now, officers starting on the force without prior experience can make more than some tenured faculty. And so, as IU’s administration satirizes the liberal ideal of “progress,” it also satirizes “safety.”
As Putin’s fallacies are obvious to Ukrainians fighting and dying in Ukraine, so too do faculty and students at IU realize that Whitten allowing the ISP to point guns at students and have non-violent faculty hit in the neck with batons does not keep campus “safe.” Her message to the IU community is that abiding by the will of the administration is the only action that will protect students and faculty. If you are a member of the IU community who disagrees with the administration, you are not guaranteed safety—quite the opposite. Many authoritarian regimes share this practice.
“Liberalism” and the State
In a strongly worded op-ed in the Indianapolis Star, Indiana Representative Jim Banks echoed Shrivastav’s points on state authority. Like Whitten and Shrivastav, Banks chided IU faculty for being “immature,” saying IU professors “have more in common with Ivy leaguers … than they do with Hoosier families who pay their salaries and rely on them to educate their children.” He pegs IU faculty as outsiders and some as antisemites (an argument refuted by many of IU’s Jewish faculty members). His talk of the nefarious university professor has made it into policy. Banks recently introduced a new bill titled “No Tax Dollars for College Encampments Act of 2024” that calls for publicly funded institutions to “respond to incidents of civil disturbance occurring on the campus, including with respect to coordination of such response with State, local, and campus law enforcement” or lose state funding. Banks likely wrote about IU faculty this way to position himself as a conservative politician, to reiterate his support for Israeli policy and the Jewish community. Yet he earlier echoed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on “X,” claiming that “George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests.” His claims are tied to a wide-spread narrative, popular on the American right, that sees “universities” as an enemy of the (US) state, one that has been promoted by former President Trump’s new running mate, J. D. Vance. In saying that faculty should serve their state, Shrivastav carries the message of conservative politicians to IU faculty. As an authority figure spreading the message of state politicians, he also helps to “authenticate the value” of their ideas (Graan et al. 2020). This story that Banks, Shrivastav, and Whitten tell about IU protesters has a complex plot, both narrative and sinister, as stories of conspiracy and fantasy often do (Borenstein 2019).
In implying that IU faculty and students play a part in an international conspiracy theory especially popular in Eastern Europe and Russia, in which philanthropist and financier George Soros is an all-powerful, nefarious “liberal” force of change-for-the-worse (e.g. Pintilescu and Magyari 2020; Storey-Nagy 2021), Banks connects IU faculty to the trope of the outside agitator. His comments suggest that, although IU faculty are residents of and taxpayers in Indiana, and have every right to political representation as all citizens of Indiana do, they are not deserving of his representation. For him, IU faculty are not Hoosiers.
Denying citizenry to minority populations has been used to justify violence by many authoritarian leaders in the past; perhaps most notably by Hitler who claimed Jews were outsiders—that Jews and Roma could not be considered part of a group called humanity. Again, although the crimes of Hitler and Banks should not and cannot be compared, their discursive styles do have something in common. Both claim others do not belong in a group of citizens over which they have authority, because of what those citizens believe or who they are, and both have used this idea to suggest or justify violence against those groups.
Authoritarian leaders rule in different ways via different means, but their primary goal is often to stay in power. This aim can be especially harmful on college campuses. At IU, it not only disempowers faculty politically, it can also discourage innovation and collaboration. Brain drain, wherein talented professionals leave one place for another, often less authoritarian-leaning and more economically prosperous place, is a problem authoritarian leaders commonly face. Some even encourage brain drain because it can mute talk of opposition ideas and parties. However, it can also make regimes unstable because they lose the ability to govern with competency when they replace meritocratically appointed officials with party loyalists. These replacements happen, in part, because the discursive system does not welcome much-needed productive, regular criticism. In fact, I’m writing this now because I care deeply about IU and the people there, because there is a clear and urgent need for productive criticism.
If faculty, for instance, do not have the sanctioned ability to verbalize institutional pitfalls only they can see, those pitfalls will not be addressed and may cause other problems. Administrative failures can leave faculty unable to carry out research, or without funding. In turn, they leave or talk about early retirement. They divest from the academy. Citizens living in increasingly authoritarian governments do the same. Many Hungarians in opposition send their children to college outside of Hungary because they no longer think their state is free or democratic under Orbán. Many have completely lost trust in their government. China, too, is experiencing brain drain in part because of a political climate of fear and authoritarian discourse. By striking the tone with IU faculty that Whitten and Shrivastav have, the administration has deeply damaged notions of institutional trust. IU is driving away innovative faculty members, potential and current students. It could take the university decades to recover.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Although it is the job of university administrations to speak with authority for their university, they should not regularly speak that way to their own faculty and students. Without productive conversation, all relationships falter. Both the President of the Bloomington Faculty Council (BFC) and the IU chapter of the AAUP have condemned Whitten’s actions or asked her and Shrivastav to resign. The ACLU of Indiana is suing IU for violating some protesters’ rights to free speech and for banning those arrested from campus. A letter from the IU Media School states: “The administration has crossed a red line by choosing an authoritarian stance that is antithetical to the mission of an institution of higher learning. In so doing, it has damaged the university’s credibility and moral center.”
Yet, Whitten and Shrivastav’s discursive strategy has not changed. During “listening sessions” held in mid-May, where faculty described Whitten’s responses as “vapid,” she told the faculty she would not resign. Faculty feared that Whitten would use their presence at these sessions to claim their input on new university policies. As predicted, in June, she sent out an email to faculty announcing two new administrative positions as the supposed result of these listening sessions: a Chancellor of Bloomington, who will lead the flagship campus and report to her to communicate faculty concerns, and another Faculty Fellow, who will help guide her through processes of IU’s shared governance. Many see this “result of listening sessions” as a way for the president to keep her position, strengthen the administration, and widen the protective bureaucratic gulf between faculty and administration. In short, IU faculty did not ask for this change but for Whitten’s resignation, and they rightly predicted that their demands would be ignored, their voices repurposed.
In late June, the BOT released a draft policy on “expressive activity” or “any public display of individual or group speech or other expression occurring on property owned or controlled by Indiana University or at University-sponsored events.” Among other restrictions, the policy restricts expressive activity within 25 feet of any entrance to a university building, and forbids faculty from hanging signs on any vertical surface owned by the university without approval. Although “expressive activity” is a legal term, it is vaguely defined, and some fear that everyday university activity could fall under its jurisdiction. IU students, staff, and faculty were not given ample time to comment on the policy which came out mid-summer, further evidence of IU’s administration ignoring norms of shared governance. Unsurprisingly, authoritarian leaders often do the same: enact vaguely worded laws, so that they can selectively enforce them, bypassing normal legal processes.
In August, IU implemented its expressive activity policy and released a paid advertisement in Bloomington’s Herald-Times, titled “What IU’s Expressive Activity Policy means for Free speech.” In it, IU claims their policy was “developed with input from students, faculty and staff,” and that it “protects and amplifies” the “voices of IU’s campus community.” A few days later, in a brief, the Indiana attorney general’s office under Todd Rokita suggested that faculty all over the state might not be protected by the First Amendment while teaching: “The curriculum used in state universities and instruction offered by state employees” is “state speech.” For Rokita, instructors “have no right to control how the State speaks.” Although IU’s position on the attorney general’s statements is not yet clear, one thing is. The discursive strategies of the state and the university have not changed for the better.
Although the claims made by Whitten, Shrivastav, and Banks may not have much truth-value, the sanctioned violence that faculty and students have faced as a result is real. Without drastic administrative change, there may be more. IU’s administration has made it clear that on IU’s campus, some are safer than others. Because faculty need to focus on research and teaching, not administrative misconduct, they have called for a new administration—one that will recognize their voice and the norms of IU’s shared governance, where “faculty and administrators share responsibility for operating and governing the university.” Faculty continue to ask Whitten and Shrivastav to resign, or for the BOT to dismiss them. Other college administrators can learn from IU’s mistakes. To encourage faculty and student innovation, they can actively utilize inclusive, productive discourse, and engage faculty as partners in conversation and governance.
This article was originally published on August 24, 2024, in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. A copy of the original article can be read here. Reprinted, with minor changes, by permission of the publisher.
