Hiroki Yokota went into the July 12 meeting feeling hopeful.
A professor of biomedical engineering, he had been a faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, known as IUPUI, for just over 25 years. After his usual lunchtime jog, he reported to the office of David M. Umulis, the senior vice provost. There, during one of a series of 15-minute conferences scheduled throughout the day, Yokota learned the outcome of his application for the transfer of his tenure from IUPUI to Purdue.
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Hiroki Yokota went into the July 12 meeting feeling hopeful.
A professor of biomedical engineering, he had been a faculty member at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, known as IUPUI, for just over 25 years. After his usual lunchtime jog, he reported to the office of David M. Umulis, the senior vice provost. There, during one of a series of 15-minute conferences scheduled throughout the day, Yokota learned the outcome of his application for the transfer of his tenure from IUPUI to Purdue.
It was more or less a formality — or so he thought.
The brisk meetings formed one of the latest twists in the strange demise of IUPUI. Last year, Indiana and Purdue Universities announced that they were ending their 50-year partnership in the state’s capital. (Purdue University’s main campus is in West Lafayette, about 68 miles to the northwest.) In the summer of 2024, the IUPUI programs long affiliated with Purdue, primarily the campus’s Purdue School of Engineering & Technology, will officially become part of the Purdue mother ship, although they will remain in Indianapolis. The remaining IUPUI programs will become Indiana University at Indianapolis and be fully part of the Indiana system based in Bloomington, which has managed logistics at IUPUI all along. (Bloomington lies about 50 miles south of Indianapolis.)
As the meeting got underway, Yokota says, he began to hear the word “unfortunately” a lot. That afternoon, he became one of dozens of tenured IUPUI professors who learned, one by one, that they would no longer be tenured — at least not as they have always understood it. Instead, many of them would be offered an unusual form of tenure that some faculty members and observers find confusing, if not worrisome — and potentially even harmful. In the process, the campus became the latest in a long line of examples of the steady erosion of tenure.
Last October, after the announcement of the split, tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the Purdue-affiliated programs at IUPUI were invited to request a new departmental home base at Purdue. A document released by the office of Jay Akridge, then the provost, specified that professors should submit “a CV and a teaching statement and research statement.” These few pages would be evaluated by the Purdue department at West Lafayette where the faculty member in question had requested to move their tenure home. (Indiana University has no plans to cut positions or change the tenure status of faculty members at IUPUI, according to a spokeswoman.)
Being effectively removed from his tenured position “was a surprise.”
If tenured or tenure-track IUPUI faculty members were not accepted by a new Purdue department, the document explained, they had other options. They could join Purdue on a contractual basis as a teaching or clinical professor. Or they could accept “university tenure” as a professor at Purdue, not affiliated with any academic department and reporting to the vice provost for faculty affairs. Faculty members 55 or older with 10 years’ experience could also choose retirement.
The Purdue-affiliated professors contacted for this story, most of whom declined to comment on the record, say they were baffled at the idea of university tenure. They had never heard of anything like it before. Almost no one contacted for this story had either, and never really in practice. The section of the document initially introducing and describing it was only 121 words long.
But few believed it would apply to them. Akridge, who resigned as provost in November 2022 and returned to the agricultural-economics faculty, told the professors in question before he stepped down that he doubted that many of them would have to worry about it.
But the change has brought disruption and uncertainty to professors like the soft-spoken Yokota, a native of Japan, who is the only tenured Purdue-affiliated IUPUI faculty member denied a departmental home at Purdue who agreed to speak on the record. As he recounts his experience over the phone, papers rustle in the background repeatedly, as if he’s consulting notes. “Initially, no IUPUI, we were all surprised — wow,” he says. “Then rehoming. It’s not our intention, but if you say so, OK, we’ll trust you guys.” Being effectively removed from his tenured position, he adds quietly, “was a surprise.”
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After the initial announcement about the IUPUI split, the departmental-rehoming process began to morph. A few weeks before the CVs and statements were due in February, says Brandon H. Sorge, an associate professor of STEM-education research at IUPUI and president of the Faculty Senate of IUPUI’s engineering and technology school, faculty members were told they could submit more documentation if they wanted. The cursory review began to seem more like reinterviewing for their jobs. (Sorge received a favorable vote in July toward being rehomed with tenure at Purdue, though his appointment is subject to further review.)
Officially, all IUPUI faculty members have been approved to work at the new Purdue at Indianapolis. But a closer look at the numbers, obtained by Yokota from an administrator at IUPUI, tells a more nuanced story. Virtually all of the non-tenure-track Purdue-affiliated IUPUI faculty members who applied to move over to Purdue at Indianapolis were tentatively approved to do so — 31 out of 33, or 94 percent. Most of the tenure-track professors who asked to move their appointments were given the green light to continue pursuing permanent tenure at Purdue at Indianapolis, too — nine out of 14, or 64 percent. However, only a quarter of IUPUI’s tenured faculty members, or 13 out of 52, in the Purdue-affiliated programs were tentatively approved to join Purdue departments. Yokota, who is 68, says that by his count, only one out of seven tenured professors with more than 20 years’ experience at IUPUI received departmental approval for tenure at Purdue West Lafayette. (All departmental decisions are subject to further review.)
A spokesman for Purdue declined to confirm the number of initial departmental decisions. “Departmental-committee review is strictly confidential,” wrote Tim Doty, senior director of media and public relations, in an email. “It’s not appropriate to say much more beyond what we’ve already shared — that everyone has a home at Purdue.”
“University tenure,” it turns out, was recommended by Akridge, who is on sabbatical and could not be reached for comment. The initial 121-word description has been expanded to a three-page resolution through which the Purdue Board of Trustees officially approved the employment option in August. The resulting position, as outlined in the document, Doty wrote in an email, “honors their tenure and preserves their current disciplinary title, rank, salary, and ability to continue and build a research program (including grant submission, access to lab spaces, and graduate students).”
But Yokota and others who are apt to choose university tenure rather than face the even greater uncertainty of contract teaching — or leaving their jobs — still have questions and concerns. One of their biggest concerns lies in being cut off from being a voting member of a department, which might deny them the opportunity to have a say in curriculum, promotion and tenure, or even in larger institutional decisions through shared governance.
Hiroki Yokota, a tenured professor of biomedical engineering, didn’t receive traditional tenure at Purdue as a result of Indiana University’s and Purdue’s split after a 50-year partnership. Lee Klafczynski for The Chronicle
Some details of the designation are still being worked out, Doty wrote, including “the role and participation of Indianapolis faculty in shared governance,” which “will be developed with input from the Purdue University Senate faculty-affairs committee.”
But the uncertainty of the process, and the future it points toward, has shaken many of the Purdue-affiliated IUPUI faculty. “This evaluation process was not well organized,” Yokota says. “There are inconsistencies and probably some potential mismanagement.” Last month, Purdue announced that the initial department-level decisions on transferring tenure will now also be reviewed by committees at the college level this fall, and at the university level early next year, before going before the Purdue Board of Trustees next April for approval, as in a traditional promotion-and-tenure process. Yokota contends that Purdue may reject more tenure candidates at upper levels, so that even more professors like him may face a new and daunting future.
In response to concerns about a mismanaged process, Doty lays out a brisk timeline in an email: “Faculty submitted documents in March. The definitive agreements were signed by Purdue and IU in mid-June. Work for placement based on first steps of faculty document review was initiated less than a month later, and at Purdue’s next regularly scheduled Board of Trustees meeting in early August, we adopted a resolution laying out University Tenure, which ensures tenure, disciplinary identity, research, teaching, and service opportunities for transferring faculty.”
IUPUI’s situation may be unusual, but the challenges of integrating faculty members into new academic homes are likely to confront more institutions as they seek mergers and partnerships.
When the leaders of Otterbein and Antioch Universities, in Ohio, began exploring options to merge their two institutions in 2021, they began considering “a more unified faculty approach,” says John L. Comerford, the president of Otterbein, with consistent faculty contracts and policies for the private institutions’ campuses. “It was very obvious very quickly that these were different institutions serving different needs that needed different faculty structures,” he says. “Faculty on both campuses would have begun to freak out about, well, whose model are we adopting? And who’s inheriting who?”
But while united, Otterbein and Antioch remain separately accredited institutions, while the Purdue-affiliated programs at IUPUI are being managed by departments at Purdue at West Lafayette, Comerford says, which is a different situation. “Often schools have different standards and different hiring policies and different expectations for research and teaching and service,” he says. “From the outside looking in, I would understand why tenure wouldn’t just automatically transfer between schools.” Professors want the academic freedom and economic stability that typically accompany tenure. College leaders want the institutional stability and prestige inherent in being able to offer tenure, but they also want to be able to make changes in academic programs. “Tenure as an individual right versus tenure as a tool to meet the needs of students and the institution through stability of the faculty — neither side is completely wrong, but neither is clearly right,” Comerford says. “And they’re often using the same word to mean very different things.”
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While Purdue’s “university tenure” remains an ominous unknown for tenured Purdue-affiliated IUPUI faculty, the American Association of University Professors considers it a better option than some of the usual outcomes of mergers or program closures. As the AAUP sees it, tenure has always been held at the institutional level, not by academic departments, and professors being allowed to continue to teach and do research as Purdue proposes is “vastly preferable to the termination of a faculty appointment,” says Mark Criley, senior program officer for academic freedom, tenure, and governance. “All too often, what we see are institutions not making every effort to find another suitable position.”
That’s not to say the organization is sanguine about how Purdue has handled the process. IUPUI faculty members should have been involved in their academic departments’ restructuring from the outset, and they should be involved in any decision regarding how they can continue to do their professional work, including access to lab space, professional opportunities, and support. “If an administration just hands down this new criterion of university tenure without serious conversation about how these concerns might be addressed,” Criley says, “then that would be a failure of shared governance.”
From the outside looking in, I would understand why tenure wouldn’t just automatically transfer between schools.
Granting tenure without departmental affiliation may be highly unconventional and could have harmful outcomes for the faculty members to whom it’s applied, says Timothy Reese Cain, a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia. In addition to potentially being frozen out of the usual means of having a voice in academic matters and shared governance, being unaffiliated with an academic department may leave veteran scholars feeling “unmoored,” he says, “which could have some psychological and emotional harm.”
And while “university tenure” may not proliferate beyond the borders of Indiana, what’s happening with IUPUI is linked to something happening nationwide, says Cain — “the larger destabilization and minimization of the faculty.” Looking from the outside, he adds, the lack of IUPUI faculty-member involvement and the lack of clarity and transparency about the process “is part of this larger undercutting of faculty voice.”
Important improvements made to tenure in American higher education over the course of the 20th century were frequently related to improving the transparency of the process. One example is the now-standard seven-year tenure clock, which was first negotiated in 1940 between the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities). “One of the challenges we’ve seen in the past few decades is increasing administrative control over decisions,” Cain says. “And that’s not good for the faculty, and it’s not good for institutions of higher education, when the academic expertise on who should be making decisions is left out of conversations.”
IUPUI’s split has been sold by state and higher-education officials as a way for both flagships to better flourish in the capital, unencumbered by their prior partners, and play to their strengths for the benefit of Indiana. More cynical observers dub it a final power move by Mitch Daniels, the state’s former Republican governor and, until 2022, president of Purdue — a symptom of his ambitions to raise the stature of his former institution. A representative for Daniels did not respond to a request for comment.
According to faculty members at IUPUI, the current situation with the Purdue-affiliated professors is all about stature. Purdue is an R1 research university with a worldwide reputation for its engineering programs. (Indiana University at Bloomington is also an R1 institution.) IUPUI is an R2 university that, despite its affiliation with two flagships, has more of an access and teaching mission.
Just as many students admitted to IUPUI might not get into Purdue, many professors hired by IUPUI might not get a second look from the flagship if they had initially applied there. “Purdue is very interested in its rankings, and it wants to move even higher in those rankings and achieve a great deal of prestige,” says Stephen L. Fox, a professor of English at IUPUI and chair of its Faculty Council faculty-affairs committee. (He will stay with Indiana University at Indianapolis.) “They view IUPUI as a lesser institution, and these faculty, in most cases, they would think don’t meet their stringent criteria,” Fox adds, despite the fact that many are excellent professors doing good work in their disciplines, he says. Attempts to reach members of the faculty-affairs committee who represent the College of Engineering in the University Senate at Purdue’s main campus were unsuccessful. One did not respond to a request for comment. The other referred a request for comment to David Umulis, the senior vice provost who ran the July meetings.
Purdue was interested in getting our property and our programs. But they didn’t want our people.
Non-tenure-track faculty members at IUPUI contacted for this story declined to comment on the record because they feared angering Purdue administrators by speaking out, but they face uncertainties, too. Faculty members such as adjuncts or lecturers who work year to year or semester to semester will continue to teach a sometimes-unpredictable number of classes for modest pay and no benefits. Contractual faculty, the majority of whom will move over to departments at Purdue, have more long-term stability, but only so much. Many of them are on three-year contracts, says Sorge, the Faculty Senate head at IUPUI’s engineering school, which coincides with the length of the teach-out of IUPUI students enrolled in the Purdue-affiliated programs. “It’s just the standard time” for such contracts, he adds, “but there’s concern around that just because there’s been no reaffirming information” about their long-term fate.
Some Purdue-affiliated IUPUI professors are disappointed that their longtime host institution hasn’t offered more support. Indiana University at Bloomington manages IUPUI’s operations, and until the summer of 2025, “we are still IU employees,” Yokota says, “so we should be protected by IU. But IU is silent.”
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IUPUI released a statement in response to Yokota’s concerns about the university’s silence over the Purdue-affiliated professors’ fates: “We are committed to supporting all current IUPUI faculty through this year of transition and, ultimately, to growing the faculty ranks at IU Indianapolis as part of our mission to create one of the nation’s preeminent public urban research universities.”
Meanwhile, IUPUI’s Indiana-affiliated faculty members watch as their Purdue-affiliated colleagues’ morale plunges, says Philip Goff, a professor of American studies and president of IUPUI’s Faculty Council. “So many of them have built their lives around this place,” he says, “and now they’re just being shoved aside.”
He adds, “Purdue was interested in getting our property and our programs. But they didn’t want our people.”
Goff remembers when the split was first announced, some of his Purdue-affiliated colleagues greeted it “almost as good news,” intrigued by the prospect of more and closer collaborations with their West Lafayette peers. Instead, even if they were nominally promised an academic future similar to the one they’re leaving behind, many of them have been thrown into uncertainty and humiliated.