Indiana’s Assault on Public Education

Purnima Bose

Godfather of Trump University, Trump is insisting on his rules for private and public U.S. universities.

RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANS such as Donald Trump and his MAGA minions drive their ideological and political agendas by inventing fictions. The Indiana state government’s assault on higher education, led by Governor Mike Braun and the Republican super majority in the gerrymandered legislature, is a perfect example of this strategy, as the passage of three bills in the past year illustrates.

SEA202 (Public Law 113), HEA1001 (Public Law 213), and SEA448 (Public Law 138) rest on four fictions. First, the view that conservative students feel unwelcome at Indiana’s colleges and universities. Second, the perception that most tenured faculty are lazy and unproductive. Third, the claim that low-enrolling majors, many in the humanities and sciences, drain universities of resources and represent a threat to their fiscal well-being. And fourth, the insistence that a direct line connects majors to jobs to incomes.

Combined, the legislation blows up the independence of Indiana’s public universities by micromanaging operations through the policing of course content and creation of onerous bureaucracies, abolishing the protections of tenure, and ordering the elimination of under-enrolled majors.

Pious invocations of “viewpoint diversity,” “research productivity,” and “workforce alignment” cast these legislative incursions as public goods meant to democratize universities, eliminate deadwood among the faculty, and prepare students for the marketplace.

In actuality, the legislation promises to accomplish the opposite: to restrict opinions and scholarship that counter ascendant conservative views, discourage innovative research, and train students for jobs that will soon be obsolete.

Destruction of Public Education

The endgame for the Republican supermajority seems to be the destruction of public universities in the state, aided earlier by the Indiana Department of Education’s transformation of secondary education through privatization and the state’s disinvestment in K-12 education over the last 15 years.

That story provides important context for understanding the current legislative assault on higher education. In their excellent podcast “Have you Heard,” Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider trace the history of public education in Indiana from the mid-1950s to the present.(1)

A rapid rise in the attainment of high school degrees in the state from the 1950s to the 1990s expanded education beyond the small number of privileged students of previous generations. High schools offered three tracks: general education, college preparation, and vocational education, the latter a dead end in terms of future income growth.

During this period, the curriculum was organized as a pyramid with the apex reserved for the few privileged students for whom advance placement classes were created, while the majority of students were served by general education and vocational training classes.

Even as student outcomes varied based on social class factors — economic background, race, and gender — fierce advocacy for educational fairness resulted in some progressive policies and the expectation   that many students would aspire to college admission.

Fast forward to 2024. Although Indiana’s high school graduation rate was 90.23%, the highest it has been since 2022, the state currently ranks 43rd in the country for educational attainment.(2)

Nationwide, two thirds of all high school graduates go to four-year college while only one half of all Indiana graduates are university bound with only half of these students successfully completing their college degrees.(3)

Economist Michael J. Hicks attributes the state’s mediocre record to its disinvestment in education beginning in 2010, when it underwrote an expansion of Medicaid coverage by decreasing spending on education. (In 2023, Indiana spent $13,121 per student(4) compared to the nationwide average of $16,526.(5))

Disinvestment and Privatization

Indiana’s disinvestment in public education was preceded by a decade of privatization, gaining momentum under “moderate” Republican Governor Mitch Daniels. “School choice” gave students vouchers to attend private schools including religious ones, and the right to transfer to charter schools and change school districts.

Initially meant for students from low income backgrounds enrolled in poorly performing schools, vouchers were expanded to middle and upper-income families. For the 2024-2025 school year, the maximum qualifying income for a household of four to receive these public subsidies was $230,880.00.(6)

Current Indiana governor, Mike Braun.

Such subsidies annually cost Indiana taxpayers between $439 and $500 million depending on the source consulted.(7) Governor Braun’s recent property tax reform — tax breaks for the uber wealthy — are projected to shortchange K-12 schools an additional $750 million over the next three years.(8) After 2028, public schools will have to share property tax revenues with charter schools.(9)

Equally appalling are recent revisions to the high school curriculum. As of January 2025, students will have the choice of three tracks: an academic (“Enrollment honors/Enrollment honors plus”), vocational (“Employment honors/Employment honors plus”), or a military enlistment (“Enlistment honors/Enlistment honors plus”) track.(10)

The military enlistment track has supplanted the general education track of the past; the school-to-prison pipeline has been replaced by the school-to-the-VA Hospital or the school-to-the-funeral parlor pipeline, e.g. training to kill, suffer psychological or physical injuries, or be killed.

The college preparation track no longer includes language requirements that are needed for admission to many colleges and universities. Berkshire and Schneider warn that Indiana’s vocational track prepares students for jobs of the past. Some middle schools are paving the way, they reveal, by encouraging sixth grade boys “to commit to careers as truck drivers.”(11)

It is difficult to avoid concluding that the new Indiana secondary diploma will deepen class divisions and curtail opportunities for social mobility among students. Potential first-generation college applicants will be more dependent than ever on conscientious college counselors for advice on which courses to take for college preparation.

By funneling students into the trades or the military, the state effectively discourages them from pursuing a college education and shrinks the pool of in-state applicants even as college administrators have been bemoaning the “demographic cliff” and the projected dramatic decline in the college-age population.

Axing the Academy

Against this background of dumbing down the high school curriculum and reducing the pool of college applicants, the state legislature has taken a blowtorch to Indiana’s public universities, not only policing faculty and curriculum ideologically, but also mandating tedious, time consuming post-tenure reviews, and shutting down low-enrolled majors.

In a page from the Trump playbook, the legislature introduced and passed the three bills mentioned above within a compressed time period, a year, delivering shock-and-awe education style. The legislative assault either ignored widespread public opposition to proposed laws, in the case of SEA202, or circumvented it by attaching reactionary provisions to a rider to a budget bill the night before the vote, in the case of HEA1001.

The combined legislations’ impact on higher education in Indiana will be devastating, as will its consequences for Indiana’s economy and quality of life, already ranked the second worst in the country in 2024.(12)

Here is a rundown of the legislation, beginning with SEA202, signed into law by “moderate” Republican Governor Eric Holcomb and in effect as of July 2024. The key provisions of the law tie promotion and tenure at Indiana’s public universities to “intellectual diversity.”

The law prohibits the granting of tenure and promotion to faculty members who are: “(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution; (2) unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; (3) or likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.”

The bill additionally mandates post-tenure reviews every five years based on the criteria above. Institutions are required to “establish disciplinary actions” against faculty who fail to meet these criteria, including: “termination, demotion, salary reduction, other disciplinary action as determined by the institution.”(13)

Other noteworthy aspects of this legislation consist of prohibiting DEI statements during admission, enrollment, hiring or reappointment, tenure and promotion, and barring institutional statements “on political, moral, or ideological issues” under a neutrality policy. (The BLM and Gaza solidarity statements issued by departments after George Floyd’s murder and Israel’s invasion of Gaza are examples of prohibited speech.)

SEA202 also requires public universities to create “Expressive Activities Policies,” ostensibly to protect student expression by specifying a “range of disciplinary actions” against employees, students, student organizations and contractors who “materially and substantially disrupt” the protected expressive activity of other members of the university community.

Such policies appear designed to limit speech deemed unacceptable by the university and state, namely critiques of police violence and Israel’s military brutality against Palestinians.

While the law neglects to define “intellectual diversity,” the phrase is clearly code for conservative and right-wing views. Senator Spencer Deery, who served in former Governor Mitch Daniels’ administration when he was president of Purdue University, cooked up the legislation, as he righteously explained, because he believes that conservative and Republican students feel unwelcome on Indiana college campuses.

In a hearing on the bill in February 2024, Deery declared that “There is an elephant in the room that we need to address. That is the increasing number of students who just don’t feel like higher ed is a place for them.”(14)

Without offering evidence, he asserted that their speech is being stifled by woke students and professors determined to indoctrinate students with liberal ideology. (I am reminded of a tweet by a professor that circulated several years ago: “People accuse me of indoctrinating my students into Marxism but I can’t even get them to do the reading.”)

Fictions and Freedom

Deery’s explanation that conservative students feel uncomfortable on Hoosier campuses is a fiction that does not correspond to students’ actual perceptions of free speech and academic freedom.

In 2021, the Indiana General Assembly charged the Indiana Commission for Higher Education [ICHE] with conducting a survey of all full-time undergraduates at public institutions in the state “to determine current perceptions about… free speech and academic freedom [in relation to] the expression of different opinions and ideologies.”

ICHE’s findings emphatically refute Deery’s claims about the suppression of conservative speech. Some of the report’s findings: 78.1% of respondents “strongly agree & agree” with the statement that “students can express their opinions freely”; 75.4% of students “strongly agree & agree” with the sentiment that “free speech is highly valued” at their universities; 70.1% of students “strongly agree & agree” that “instructors listen to people with different opinions.”(15)

Deery’s justification for SEA202 draws from the standard rhetorical practice of the right of double speak, hijacking vocabulary and phrases and employing them to mean their opposite.

DEI and pro-Palestinian speech are the real targets. In this lexicon, “free speech” means the freedom to voice opinions that demean others, particularly people of color and Palestinians. “Academic freedom” signifies the right to express ideas that are outside of scholarly norms, such as the representation of slavery as a version of vocational schooling or the disavowal of Israel’s status as a settler-colonial state.

“Intellectual diversity” describes the constriction of discourse to represent views ungrounded in fact, such as climate denialism or vaccine skepticism.

Here is Deery again: “Recent events and blatant antisemitism have placed a spotlight on the hyper-politicization and monolithic thinking of American higher education institutions, and many are warning that universities have lost their way. SB202 prods the leaders of these institutions to correct the course.”(16)

Suppression at IU Bloomington

Recent events on the Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) campus furnish important context for SEA202’s passage.

These include efforts of then Representative (now U.S. Senator) Jim Banks in October 2023, calling for the university’s suppression of peaceful student campus demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians; IU’s December 2023 suspension of political scientist Abdulkader Sinno, the faculty advisor to the Palestine Solidarity Committee student group — supposedly for filing an incorrect room reservation for an event featuring a pro-BDS speaker — and the university’s February 2024 cancellation of Palestinian American artists Samia Halaby’s exhibit, an event three years in the making.

In April 2024, students at IUB established an encampment in Dunn Meadow, the designated free speech area on campus, in solidarity with Palestinians, demanding the university divest from Israel.

The night before students pitched their tents, a hastily-assembled ad-hoc committee of university administrators passed a policy requiring prior authorization for encampments. (Previously, encampments had been banned from 11 pm to 6 am, but this ban was not enforced.)

Pamela Whitten, IU’s deeply unpopular president, invited the Indiana State Police to campus to clear out the encampment. ISP positioned snipers on the roof of the student union, training their guns on a Black student leader. They roughed up students, faculty, and community members, and hogtied some protestors before hauling them off for arrest.

Indiana University President Pamela Whitten talking to Indiana’s Public University Presidents on Nov. 27, 2023.

IU also banned protest and other expressive activities from 11 pm to 6 am on campus but rescinded this measure when Federal Judge Richard Young granted a preliminary injunction against the policy for potentially violating the First Amendment.(17)

SEA202 entrusted university boards of trustees to craft enforcement policies, which IU’s previous BoT delegated to deans and individual schools. Since 2025, with the help of the state legislature, Governor Braun has engineered a full-scale takeover of IU’s BoT, which has meant that whatever feeble voice faculty had in governance under the Whitten regime now is gone.

HEA1001 gives Braun the unique power to eliminate the three alumni-elected representatives on IU’s BoT; he now has the authority to appoint all nine members and fire any trustee at will. (HEA1001 does not grant him equivalent power over the appointment of BoTs at other state institutions.)

Braun lost no time in replacing all three alumni representatives with conservative ideologues such as James Bopp, Jr. (a lawyer who argued Citizens United and unsuccessfully challenged IU’s vaccine mandate, and crusaded against abortion rights and marriage equality) and Sage Steele (former ESPN broadcaster and Trump Instagram Booster).(18)

Braun has recently appointed three more trustees, two Republican Party donors and the third, the student trustee, a business major who serves as a “Special Assistant” to a Republican member of Congress.(19)

Ironically, the BoT exhibits an astonishing lack of viewpoint diversity, the ostensible concern that initially prompted Republican politicians to craft SEA202.

Squashing Tenure

Braun’s new board has proven eager to encroach on faculty affairs, creating policies without meaningful faculty consultation for the five-year, post-tenure reviews mandated by HEA1001. Its demand to quantify productivity is predicated on an assumption that faculty are lazy and unproductive and, moreover, reveals a shocking lack of knowledge about the nature of academic labor.

HEA1001 specifies that reviews include data on teaching loads, numbers of students taught and supervised, and the time spent on instruction. In fact, the BoT’s policies (BOT-24) exceed the requirements of the law and include reporting of effort allocation, quantified on a formula of 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% service.

Such accounting measures are a radical departure from how faculty are assessed in annual reviews, and absurd given that these activities are generally fluid and complementary. BOT-24 also makes the job of chairing departments even more onerous, requiring chairs to write detailed annual reviews of all faculty (these reviews are in addition to the ones already conducted by individual departments.)

Chairs must also categorize colleagues according to whether they exceed, meet, or do not meet productivity expectations. “Unsatisfactory productivity” is its own category.

Even more alarming, the chair’s review must note “violations of applicable state and federal law and/or Indiana University policies and procedures” that “are evidence” the colleague “does not meet productivity expectations.”(20) In other words, faculty can be evaluated for matters unrelated to their academic performance such as violating university policies that stifle free speech.

Last fall, faculty and staff organized weekly 11:00 pm Sunday night demonstrations to challenge IU’s Expressive Activities Policy. Some colleagues self-reported their violations of the policy to their deans and were issued reprimand letters.

Following these demonstrations and the preliminary injunction, the reprimands were withdrawn and the policy was rescinded. Yet the reprimand letters remain in personnel files. Colleagues have concerns about the ambiguous status of the reprimand letters. According to BOT-24, they can potentially be used as evidence of “unsatisfactory productivity.”

A participant in these protests, Deborah Cohn, observes, “the university is weaponizing the law [HEA1001] by including provisions that could terminate those who have spoken out against its policies and practices.”

Cohn, a titled professor who has received multiple teaching awards during her 24 years at IU, now has “a letter in [her] file for violating a policy that was likely unconstitutional and that is no longer on the books in the same form for that reason.”(21)

Purging Degree Programs

Five-year, post-tenure reviews are closely linked to the state government’s intervention in the academic mission of public universities, namely, its determination of the validity of specific degree programs based on the annual number of graduates during the previous three years and alignment with workforce development.

HEA1001 establishes minimum thresholds for degree programs. Programs that graduate fewer than ten students with an associate degree, fifteen for a bachelor’s degree, seven for a master’s degree, or three for a doctoral degree risk elimination, along with their associated costs, unless the Indiana Commission for Higher Education [ICHE] grants them special approval.

Given that universities had only weeks during the summer break, when many faculty were away from campus, to submit plans for low-enrolled degree programs to ICHE, faculty consultation in these decisions was spotty, dependent on the goodwill of individual deans to solicit input.

Options included requesting exemptions, consolidating degrees under existing ones, creating new umbrella degrees, and eliminating degrees altogether. Across the state, public universities pledged to eliminate, sunset, or consolidate 404 degree programs.

For IU system-wide, 245 degree programs are affected, including 116 at IU Bloomington, many in the humanities and sciences.(22) Particularly hard hit are language departments.

IUB currently offers language instruction in 70 languages, more than any other university in the country. This distinction has always been a source of pride for the university.

No more. Many language MAs will be eliminated outright, removing an important opportunity for earning professional credentials for teachers, private sector workers and government employees.

While the number of graduating majors in language programs may be low, the programs typically have high enrollments. IU’s strength in language instruction for flagship programs in Russian, Arabic and Chinese has been recognized through federal grants and the awarding of critical language fellowships, earning it a designation as a “top performing institution” by Boren Awards.(23)

Pending ICHE approval, language departments will be consolidated into a new umbrella degree in languages, literatures and cultures. Whether the new umbrella degree will be legible to students, potential employers, and admission committees for graduate and professional schools remains to be seen.

What impact the potential umbrella degree will have on IU’s national rankings in language departments is also an open question.

Faculty Fury

Faculty are furious at the state’s interventions in curricular matters. For one, the data that ICHE used to determine the fate of degree programs contains outright errors; three Social Work degree programs at IU Indianapolis, for example, are listed as slated for elimination even though they meet the threshold minimum.

Second, the initial trove of ICHE data relied on graduation rates for 2021-2023, a period when Covid negatively affected enrollment and graduation rates. (ICHE has subsequently adjusted the accounting period to 2022-2024.)

Third, the data also does not tally double or triple majors, many of which are in foreign languages and would have hoisted degree programs above the minimum thresholds.(24)

Faculty anger has been compounded with ongoing frustrations and distrust of IU’s upper administration. By overwhelming margins in spring 2024, Bloomington faculty passed no confidence votes in President Whitten (93.1%) and Provost Rahul Shrivastav (91.5%).(25)

Since then, upper administration has done little to repair relations with faculty and continues to operate in secrecy and to claw back shared governance. Neither the president nor the provost has shared information about their recommendations on majors to ICHE with faculty, who have had to rely on the media for information.

Allison Calhoun speaks for many faculty: “This is my job, and I want to hear from my bosses about what’s happening and how we’re facing it. I don’t feel like I am being treated like a stakeholder [who] matters.”(26)

Moreover, faculty suspect that President Whitten had a hand in creating HEA1001’s provisions regarding thresholds for majors, post-tenure reviews, and the governor’s takeover of the BoT. State Representative and IU faculty member Matt Pierce drew this conclusion based on his conversations with lobbyists and other representatives.

One lobbyist mentioned that the provisions were inserted at Whitten’s behest “without her fingerprints” to enable her to evade responsibility for restructuring, while another blurted out that a single university instigated the riders to HEA1001.

The Speaker of the House told Pierce that “universities” requested the provisions but did not clarify his use of the plural.(27) These revelations have fueled even greater distrust of Whitten, who was already widely loathed.

Faculty fear that elimination and reorganization of degree majors is the first step to shutting down departments and firing faculty. In fact, SEA448 layers another requirement on public universities to “assess and review the staffing needs of the institution” in relation to five-year post-tenure reviews.(28)

Conveniently, another stealth policy (BOT-26), passed by IU’s BoT without any faculty consultation, redefines “financial exigency” “to allow campus-specific crises, not just university-wide, to trigger exigency.”(29)

In the past, an unlikely declaration of university-wide financial exigency was grounds to terminate faculty. This revision makes it easier for Whitten to fire faculty system-wide and potentially shutter the branch campuses.

However the changes forced by the new legislation unfold, what is clear is that Indiana has assumed a leadership role in piloting regressive policies across all levels of the education ecosystem, from school vouchers to the destruction of the independence of universities.

HEA1001’s slashing of majors — an attack on the academic freedom of institutions — joins similar efforts in Ohio, Utah and Texas.30 On a recent tour of Purdue University, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon praised Indiana for its K-12 and higher education initiatives.(31) McMahon declared that Indiana serves as a “model for higher education” and “match exactly what the president’s goals are.”

The challenge for all of us — daunting to be sure but not insurmountable — is to mobilize widely and deeply across the state and nation in noisy advocacy of public education. The fight for democracy and our future demands no less.

Notes

1. In the 19th century, Indiana was a “champion of public education” and had affirmed the value of “knowledge and learning” in its 1816 state constitution as “essential to the preservation of a free government.” Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider, Have You Heard?, Podcast. Episode #197 “Taking America Back (to a less educated past),” aired 25 April 2025. https://www.haveyouheardpodcast.com/episodes/197-taking-america-back-to-a-less-educated-past
   back to text
2. For Indiana’s graduation rates, see Casey Smith’s “Indiana high school graduation rate hit record high in 2024 — but some students still struggling.” Indiana Capital Chronicle. 3 January 2025. https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2025/01/03/indianas-high-school-graduation-rate-hit-record-high-in-2024-but-some-students-still-struggling/. Berkshire and Schneider cite Indiana’s overall ranking as 43, as does ConsumerAffairs: Journal of Consumer Research, which bases its assessment on US census data. https://www.consumeraffairs.com/movers/best-states-for-public-education.html
   back to text
3. Berkshire and Schneider.
   back to text
4. Berkshire and Schneider.
   back to text
5. United States Census Bureau, “U.S. School System Current Spending Per Pupil By Region: Fiscal Year 2023.” 1 May 2025. https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2025/comm/school-system-current-spending-per-pupil-by-region-2023.html
   back to text
6. Indiana Department of Education, “Choice Scholarship Program Eligibility Requirements: 2024-2025 School Year.” https://www.in.gov/doe/files/3-Choice-Scholarship-Eligibility-Overview.pdf
   back to text
7. The Indiana Coalition for Public Education estimates the annual cost at $439 million whereas Berkshire and Schneider put it at $500 million. See ICPE, “Leaky Bucket of Funding Updates.” 1 November 2024. https://indianacoalitionforpubliced.org/2024/11/01/leaky-bucket-of-funding-updated/
   back to text
8. Berkshire and Schneider.
   back to text
9. Berkshire and Schneider.
   back to text
10. Indiana Department of Education, “New Indiana Diploma Requirements.” 11 December 2024. https://www.in.gov/doe/files/New-Indiana-Diploma-Requirements-Approved-with-Unanimous-Support.pdf
    back to text
11. Berkshire and Schneider.
    back to text
12. Scott Cohn, “These are America’s 10 worst states for quality of life in 2024.” 15 July 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/13/10-states-worst-quality-of-life-america.html?&qsearchterm=worst%20quality%20of%20life
    back to text
13. LegiScan. Indiana Senate Bill 202. https://legiscan.com/IN/text/SB0202/id/2946990
    back to text
14. Kristin Bien, “Controversial Senate Bill 202 Could Impact How Professors at Indiana’s Universities Teach.” WSBT22, 26 February 2024. https://wsbt.com/news/operation-education/higher-education-college-republican-democrat-indiana-university-purdue-free-speech-expression-intellectual-diversity-professor-tenure-senate-house-bill
    back to text
15. ICHE, “Indiana Campus Free Speech Report 2023.” https://www.in.gov/che/files/Campus-Free-Speech-Report.pdf
    back to text
16. News Release, Senator Spencer Deery, “Higher Education Reform Passes Senate.” 6 February 2024, https://www.indianasenaterepublicans.com/deery-higher-education-reform-bill-passes-senate
    back to text
17. Nicole Blevins and Jonathan Frey, “Expressive Activity Policy Amendment Among Items Approved by Board of Trustees.” Indiana Daily Student, 12 June 2025.
    back to text
18. Staff, “Analysis: Braun’s New IU Trustee Appointments Draw Attention for Conservative Ties.” Bloomingtonian. 2 June 2025. In a January 6, 2025 Instagram Post, Steele gushed: “It’s been 2 months since the election, and I’m just now taking the time to reflect on what ended up being one of the most incredible experiences of my life. To be a surrogate for President Trump & his incredible team was something I could never have imagined… THANK YOU, @realdonaldtrump for fighting for us all, and for welcoming me along for the ride!”
    back to text
19. U Board of Trustees. “The Current Trustees.” https://trustees.iu.edu/the-trustees/current-trustees/index.html
    back to text
20. BOT-24, “Post-Tenure Faculty Productivity and Annual Review.” Folder Name: Policies: University Policies: Indiana University.
    back to text
21. Deborah Cohn, Email Posted to the Faculty Discussion listserv, 17 June 2025.
    back to text
22. ICHE, “Voluntary Early Actions Before HEA1001-2025 Implementation.” AA&Q Meeting, 30 June 2025. https://www.in.gov/che/files/HEA1001-Voluntary-Early-Actions-and-Commitments_UPDATED_7.10.25.pdf
    back to text
23. Audrey Wright, “IU Tops US Colleges in Federal Critical Language Scholarships.” Indiana Public Media, 18 June 2024, IU tops US colleges in federal critical language scholarships.
    back to text
24. Brian Rosenzweig, “Faculty at IU  Allege Lack of Communication, Errors in Degree Cut List.” The Herald-Times, 14 July 2025.
    back to text
25. Michael T. Nietzel, “Indiana University Faculty Vote No Confidence in President, Provost,” Forbes, 16 April 2025.
    back to text
26. Audrey Wright, “IU Foreign Language Programs Take Hit After Indiana Sets Degree Thresholds.” Indiana Public Media, 17 July 2025.
    back to text
27. Diane Henshel, Email Posted to the Faculty Discussion listserv, 30 April 2025.
    back to text
28. CHE, “2025 Legislative Session: Commission Update.” 15 May 2025, https://in.gov/che/files/3.-20250515_PRESENTATION_Legislative-Updates_Greg_FINAL.pdf
    back to text
29. Safin Khatri, “Breaking Down the Policy Changes Approved by the IU Trustees.” Indiana Daily Student, 3 July 2025.
    back to text
30. Ryan Quinn, “Legislatures Require Colleges to Cut Degrees in Low Demand.” Inside Higher Ed, 15 July 2025.
    back to text
31. Whitney Donard, “US Education Secretary Stops at Purdue University with Governor.” Indiana Capital Chronicle, 16 July 2025.
    back to text

September-October 2025, ATC 238