Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) – Association of University Professors (AAUP)

IUB-AAUP

The IU Bloomington Chapter of the AAUP advocates for faculty and graduate students and advances academic freedom and shared governance. AAUP exists to stand up for your rights as faculty.

Our local chapter is only as strong as its membership.

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IUB AAUP Newsletter – May, 2026


Speakers at the recent Spring IUB AAUP Town Hall


Dear members,

As we transition from the academic year 2025-26 to summer plans, we wanted to touch base one last time to share our victories this year, our continuing struggles into next year, and a couple of action items we ask you to do before the next academic year begins.

Victories

We nearly tripled the number of members this year. The membership committee worked hard for the chapter and you responded. 

We elected a new BFC President and slate of AAUP members to serve on the BFC, so next year a majority of BFC representatives will be AAUP members. As allies in our struggle, they will defend  academic freedom and the integrity of our academic mission. You helped secure this alliance that promises to enhance our leverage with the upper administration. 

The newly elected leaders of the IU Student Government participated in the latest AAUP Townhall with a strong statement about their commitment to the same goals and to standing with us in our struggles. We have gained a great ally for 2026-27!

The newly elected leader of the Indianapolis Faculty Council, Kathleen Marrs, is active in the Indianapolis AAUP chapter and will be a great advocate for faculty interests in the University Faculty Council together with the BFC President. Faculty representation on behalf of AAUP has just become significantly stronger, because individual faculty made their voices heard.  

The Bunsis Report had a large audience at the live webinar and has seen coverage both locally and statewide. We encourage everyone to study the full report and our press release, watch the webinar, and read the reporting here, here, and other analyses. The Bunsis Report  provides a  factual, public data-driven foundation for understanding where the priorities of IU are now and into the future (spoiler alert: they do not include a focus on supporting students or instruction). It also calls into question the lack of transparency on the part of the upper administration in failing to provide a detailed public budget, something we hope the BFC will make a demand in  their work in the fall. 

Because so many of you wrote back on policy revisions,  upper administration has had no option but  to pay attention to our concerns. After receiving more than 400 responses to the BOT-11 (tenure) policy review, the UFC made significant improvements to the policy. After receiving almost 100 responses to the BOT-24 (post tenure review) policy review, UFC responded by making the policy less punitive and overcompliant with the law. After receiving 176 comments to the BOT-15 (faculty misconduct) policy review, the UFC reigned in some of the most egregious forms of overcompliance, especially relying on anonymous evidence. These are all significant improvements that we pushed; the policy difference we made means we still have some form of shared governance.  

Volume matters. That means that numbers, our numbers, also matter very much. The more of us respond to these policy reviews and flood the system with our responses, the more the upper administration must reflect on the policies they initiate. This is why we need to continue to grow our chapter. We are growing our leverage and it is already having results.

Continuing Struggles

The word of the academic year is “overcompliance.” Many new policies have done that, and we need to continue pushing back.

SEA-202 has no requirement to have an anonymous complaint online platform, but IU upper administration chose to allow for such a format, refusing to put it behind a secure log-in wall. Such an alternative  measure, fully in compliance with the law, would ensure that any complaint would have to come from someone inside the university, with credentials to sign in, as the law requires, and not from anyone who cannot be verified as student or staff. This is a major harmful form of overcompliance that we need to fight to remove, hopefully with the support of our UFC allies.

Our colleagues in the sciences continue to be harmed by the overzealous compliance of the IU upper administration with directives from the FBI and USDA. In March 2025 Xiaofeng Wang, distinguished professor in the Luddy School, and Nianli Ma, science librarian, were fired without cause after the FBI raided their home. The FBI never alleged any wrongdoing by either colleague. In December the FBI raided Roger Innes’ lab, followed by a USDA audit of that space. No wrongdoing was alleged, and none was found. Yet after Innes went public to defend several Chinese nationals working as post-docs at the  University of Michigan and in his own IU lab, the upper administration decided to again lock down Innes’ lab on Thursday, May 7, 2026, to supposedly comply with an order from the USDA. But the USDA denies ordering the closure of the lab. We are again faced with the upper administration lying about compliance. Whatever their reasons are for censoring his work, they have nothing to do with Innes’ actual research. A day later more workspaces in Myers Hall were locked down, preventing 40-50 people who work at IU (faculty, students, staff) from doing any of their work. It took a week of intense negotiation with the upper administration to get some of the spaces in Myers Hall reopened. This massive lockout is again overcompliance with no justification offered. 

In neither spring 2025 nor spring 2026 have IU upper administrators provided public criticism of abusive federal agency actions, which are not warranted by any action of our faculty. Other universities, like MIT, have stood up to such abuse. We need to continue pressuring our Chancellor and university leadership, especially Russell Mumper, the Vice President for Research, who enforces these actions, to challenge unreasonable federal edicts. Mumper has provided no support for the faculty in Biology affected by the most recent lockout, apparently keeping both elected BFC leadership and College administrators (e.g., the Executive Dean of the College) in the dark. In December, when Innes contacted the Chancellor regarding his lack of access to any computers that he needed for teaching and research, David Reingold stated he was not aware of the situation. On the current lock-out, the BFC President stated he had no knowledge of it. 

Our incoming BFC leadership is working to put pressure on the upper administration for transparency, accountability, and protection so that faculty and staff can access their workspace and conduct the research  that IU and external granting agencies fund. We will continue to monitor this situation and will keep you updated in the fall. Some of the reporting on the recent actions in the Biology Department can be found here:

What you need to do by August 2026

RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP here. If you did not opt for an automatic renewal, you will be receiving an email (or several) from AAUP national and/or  the chapter secretary to renew your membership. Do not ignore it. Better yet, get ahead of the game and renew it now, making it automatic. That way you’ll never have to see those emails again.

RECRUIT A COLLEAGUE into AAUP membership. The victories we have scored this year, the hope that our new BFC leadership brings, and the continuing struggles we are facing all mean that our growing numbers increases our power in the struggle for academic freedom and integrity. When each of us has a conversation with a non-member colleague about these issues, we have our best chance to grow and to be able to better pressure the upper administration to listen to our concerns. So be part of that solution!

Looking forward to next year

AAUP national elections are also coming up and our own Russ Skiba has put his name up as a candidate for the Midwest region (region 3 on the ballot). The vote will be held at the AAUP Biennial Meeting in June; given the size of our chapter, we qualify for two delegates to the meeting! 

Finally, we thank everyone who voted for the change in our by-laws that now require the presence of at least 2 NTT faculty on the Executive Committee. In the fall you will become better acquainted with the AAUP leaders you helped elect, but here is the full slate:

Officers

EC Members


It has been a great ride to write this content and help lead our struggle this academic year. I want to thank all my mates on the EC and especially the Communications Committee for all their work and support. Have a great summer everyone!

Maria Bucur, outgoing AAUP-IUB Vice-President

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May 2026 – IUB AAUP NewsletterDownload

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