HEA 1001
Indiana's GOP supermajority targets Indiana University and higher education's autonomy in the biennial budget.
The passage of most state budget bills is a relatively quiet affair. But Indiana’s new biennial budget, signed into law by Governor Mike Braun earlier this month, includes a series of sweeping changes to public higher education that deserve closer scrutiny. From new mandates regarding post-tenure review and publicly-viewable syllabi to the elimination of alumni-elected trustees and low-enrolled programs, House Enrolled Act 1001 (HEA 1001) represents a significant shift in how the state’s flagship university is governed. Moreover, the new budget appears to single out Indiana University, as it’s the only university affected by the specific trustee restructuring. This prompted the ACLU of Indiana to file a lawsuit claiming the law unconstitutionally targets a single institution.
IU is still hammering out a response to the new budget, but I don’t have high hopes. For one thing, our leadership is in shambles. At some point, I will have to write a long post about how terrible Big IU’s leadership has been in the Pam Whitten era, the questions surrounding her hiring, and how some observers believe Whitten is complicit in the state’s takeover of IU, with her silence over the last couple of weeks seen by many as a telling sign.
Regardless, there’s a lot of fear and anxiety on the ground. My own program, the English and Language Studies program at IU Kokomo, would fail the new budget’s mandates for low-enrolled programs, potentially putting our jobs on the chopping block along with several other programs in my school (the School of Humanities and Social Sciences). To sunset, by the way, is the preferred term for this phenomenon. Just think of all the shady connotations. (I prefer the swift and visceral connotations of “chopping block” or, even better, guillotine.)
If you look at the raw legislative language of Indiana’s new budget bill, you don’t see much subtlety. The language is dry, technical, often buried in dense financial appropriations. But read between the lines, and a very clear picture of just what Indiana’s Republican supermajority is up to begins to emerge. In essence, the budget brings to legislative fruition what many of us have known for years: the state of Indiana wants to seriously rein in Indiana University. For some reason, the legislators and governor view IU with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Purdue is the agriculture and engineering school, so they’re cool. Ball State and Indiana State are too small potatoes to matter. Notre Dame is private. The for-profits lack clout.
But IU, with its traditional liberal arts focus, its pro-Palestinian protests, its graduate student strikes, its Kinsey Institute, and other trappings of woke progressivism provides the perfect foil for the state’s ultra-conservative, MAGA Republican supermajority. It has been pointed out by more trenchant observers than me that Braun styles himself after Trump; his chest-poking of IU mirrors Trump’s attacks on Columbia and Harvard in microcosm.
Make no mistake. The new budget is a DOGE-style blunt instrument designed to be punitive, but masquerading as something banal, like efficiency measures or “belt tightening.”
Let me break it down for you.
The Gutting of Faculty Governance and the End of Alumni Influence
The most striking and controversial element of HEA 1001 is the restructuring of the Indiana University Board of Trustees. For over a century, IU alumni have elected three members to the Board—an unusual but important structure that symbolized the university’s public accountability and independence. HEA 1001 eliminates these elections entirely, transferring full appointment power to the governor. Alumni trustees are out; Braun and GOP loyalists are in.
But wait. Aren’t these gubernatorial appointments to state university boards of trustees fairly commonplace across the country?
Yes and no. While it’s true that in five states (Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa) the governor appoints the entirety of the boards of trustees (or “regents,” as they are called in Georgia), HEA 1001 not only centralizes appointment power with the governor but also allows for the immediate removal and replacement of current alumni-elected trustees. This provision makes HEA 1001 unusual even among red states. The law also bars university employees from serving on the Board (except for one student trustee), further limiting internal checks on state influence. It's hard to find a precedent for this level of direct gubernatorial control over the governance of a single state university. Most states—Indiana included, until now—have boards with staggered appointments, alumni involvement, or legislative oversight designed to prevent exactly this kind of centralization. Indiana now stands apart.
Post-Tenure Review as Punitive Oversight
The bill also mandates a system-wide post-tenure review process for all public institutions. Tenured faculty must meet productivity benchmarks or face probation and possibly termination. While that might sound like a straightforward accountability measure, the way it’s structured (using administrative—not peer—oversight) introduces new incentives to eliminate unprofitable programs and professors. Think of it as an academic version of performance-based budgeting, with tenure protections significantly weakened.
Starting July 1, 2025, all tenured faculty across Indiana’s public institutions—including those with existing contracts, like me—will be subject to a mandatory “productivity review.” These reviews will scrutinize everything from course loads to time spent advising graduate students, with faculty placed on probation (and potentially terminated) if they fail to meet new performance standards set by the institution's board.
What’s the big deal? Isn’t tenure dead, anyway? I don’t get tenure at my job, why should you?
Tenure may be the most misunderstood concept since the phrase “just friends.” While accountability isn’t inherently bad, this version is designed more like a corporate performance improvement plan designed by a bunch of people with no knowledge or experience of higher education (which it was) than a meaningful peer review process. Tenure was designed to protect academic freedom, and for the fewer than 24% of US faculty in higher education who actually have tenure protections, it has been hard earned. As I often say to people, I wouldn’t live in a place like Indiana if I didn’t have tenure in a large university system. Tenure is supposed to be the reward for a successful academic career, for hustling through your 20s while making poverty wages, for spending five years pursuing a degree that only 1.2% of Americans have, and for putting up with all the other nonsense that comes with a career in higher education: low pay relative to other professionals, low status (especially in the Trump era) among the general public, students, politics, etc. Tenure is also how you entice people to move to your state and stay there; how are you going to get top shelf academics to come to a state where (a) the legislature controls the flagship public university and (b) tenure protections aren’t really worth the paper they’re printed on.
And here’s the real kicker: faculty, especially tenured faculty, are already poked and prodded and evaluated constantly. I’ve been tenured since 2018, but that doesn’t release me from having to compile a 50-page annual report called the Faculty Activity Report each and every year to satisfy our GOP overlords that they’re getting their money’s worth out of tenured faculty. Not only that, but tenured faculty also have to write another annual report, the ominous Capacity Model, which details how much research and writing you are able to do with the single course release that IU gives its regional campus faculty to do research.
But this is important to keep in mind: Braun and the Indiana GOP legislators aren’t doing any of this in good faith. There is no attempt here to make faculty more efficient or streamline programs or cut waste or any of that—no more than Elon Musk’s DOGE. This is purely punitive. That’s how the Indiana GOP operates. It’s not about governance, helping people, having political imagination, bringing the standard of living for Hoosiers up to that of our Midwestern neighbors (like Illinois, Michigan, or even Ohio); it’s all about punishing perceived political enemies, “liberal” professors, the same old conservative nonsense they’ve been peddling for years.
It’s performative austerity disguised as reform. Don’t be fooled. It’s not about improving education—it’s about degrading it, discrediting the people who do the work, and making it easier to dismantle public institutions under the banner of “accountability.” Tenure makes a convenient scapegoat because most people don’t understand it and most professors are too exhausted (or too scared) to defend it publicly. But gutting tenure doesn’t lead to better universities—it leads to hollowed-out shells where faculty are demoralized, research is devalued, and students get less of everything: less experience, less engagement, less education. That’s the point. Keep them distracted, keep them docile, keep the revolving door of overworked adjuncts spinning. And whatever you do, don’t let anyone hang around long enough to build something lasting, or start asking questions.
Degree Program Audits and the "Low-Enrollment" Guillotine
HEA 1001 mandates regular reviews—at least once every seven years—of all degree programs at public universities, focusing on enrollment, graduation rates, and institutional priorities. Programs deemed "unsuccessful" must submit corrective plans, which can include consolidation or elimination. While the bill doesn't specify numerical thresholds for "unsuccessful," the implications are clear. On many campuses, including mine, leaders are receiving abrupt demands to justify the existence of programs under review. For instance, my dean was recently given only 24 hours to submit a recovery plan for several low-enrolled programs or face their immediate removal from the curriculum.
On regional campuses like IU Kokomo, and especially in humanities or interdisciplinary programs that have long operated on tight margins (but that also don’t really cost anything extra), this creates impossible pressures. What looks like a neutral, data-driven accountability measure is, in practice, a tool for accelerating cuts.
Again, the consequences of this new budget will fall hardest on the humanities, interdisciplinary programs, and the regional campuses that have long borne the brunt of austerity—exactly the kinds of programs already under existential pressure in red-state higher ed ecosystems. The state wants you to believe these are simple “efficiency” reforms, but they’re lying. HEA 1001 is all about culture-war cuts dressed in technocratic language.
In other words, it’s designed to look like something banal, numbers-driven, and utterly common sense—maximizing efficiency, sunsetting low-enrolled or under-performing programs, etc.—but it’s political and ideologically-driven to the core.
"Advisory Only": Muzzling Faculty Governance
HEA 1001 codifies that all faculty governance organizations—faculty senates, councils, etc.—must hold open meetings, and that their decisions are “advisory only”. Let’s be clear: faculty governance has always functioned with persuasion, consensus, and shared responsibility. Faculty governance at IU Kokomo, for example, has always been advisory, but we still get a lot of positive benefits for our faculty. (I served as president of IU Kokomo’s Faculty Senate for three years, from 2019 to 2022, so I know firsthand the importance of shared governance, and I know what we were able to accomplish for faculty and the campus, even during the worst years of the pandemic.) At IU Bloomington, faculty governance has historically been handled a little differently, which may be why the law took shape this way. Insiders are saying that this provision in particular is retribution for the IU Bloomington Faculty Council’s vote of no confidence in Whitten a little over a year ago.
By legally rendering these faculty governance bodies powerless, the state signals a clear message: professors are no longer viewed as legitimate stewards of the university.
An Unprecedented Power Grab
HEA 1001 extends beyond setting a two-year budget; it orchestrates a politically directed restructuring of higher education in Indiana. Data is being used to rationalize the erosion of institutional independence. For faculty, students, and anyone invested in the future of public higher education, Indiana's developments are alarming. These legislative mandates represent an unprecedented consolidation of political power over a flagship state university, threatening academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and the role of higher education in a functioning democracy.
When you line it all up—the end of alumni-elected trustees, the stripping of faculty governance, the weaponizing of post-tenure review, and the mandated top-down program eliminations—what you see here is a Trump-inspired power grab, plain and simple. One that breaks with Indiana’s long history of respecting the independence of its flagship university system.
This is a case study in institutional capture.
In combination with last year’s SEA 202—which imposed a legislative review process for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming at public universities and instituted a complaint procedure against faculty—HEA 1001 makes clear the strategy: defund, defang, and dominate. It’s not about improving higher education. It’s about controlling it.
Stay alert, Hoosiers. The stakes are high. And the classroom might just be the next political battleground.