Mideast War, Midwest Crisis

War-torn Syria and idyllic Bloomington, Ind., may not seem like a natural comparison.

But in late April, events at the flagship campus of Indiana University resurfaced painful memories for Ahmad Jeddeeni, a native of Syria and the president of the university’s graduate-student government.

Photos and videos on his social-media feed showed police officers in riot gear raiding a pro-Palestinian encampment, hitting and shoving protesters, dragging them across the grass, and handcuffing them with zip ties. Those officers had been called in by the university.

After seeing the images on social media, Jeddeeni rushed to the encampment, hoping to defend people from police brutality. It was too late. It was now empty of tents, though demonstrators would rebuild it the next day. He noticed a Jewish student crying on the sidewalk; the student told Jeddeeni his girlfriend felt threatened by the protesters’ chants of “intifada.” Jeddeeni believed that the university’s actions would only widen the divisions.

“I don’t want to see anyone get killed on this campus,” Jeddeeni said. “I do not trust the way that this is being approached.”

On the morning of April 25, students in Bloomington had joined their counterparts at dozens of campuses across the country protesting Israel’s response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas: They had set up their own encampment to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and demand that their university pull its investments from Israel.

Activists dropped their equipment in a grassy spot that the university had long designated as an assembly ground for demonstrations — Dunn Meadow. For 55 years, the Bloomington campus had allowed people to set up temporary structures on that green space without prior approval, as long as the tents were removed overnight.

That changed the day before students set up the encampment. On April 24, Rahul Shrivastav, Bloomington’s provost and executive vice president, assigned an ad hoc committee to revise the rule. The committee changed it to require people to get permission from the university before setting up structures. Signs posted on Dunn Meadow soon after explained the policy, but did not indicate that anything about it was new.

“The signs didn’t say, ‘We met secretly last night and changed the policy,’ which is what happened,” said Alex Lichtenstein, a history professor. “They just pretended that that was the policy, as if it had always been.” The change enabled police officers to clear the encampment on April 25 and arrest 34 protesters, some forcibly. Most of those arrested were students.

Two days later, the police returned to disassemble the restored encampment and arrested 23 people. Demonstrators rebuilt it yet again.

The conflict over the encampment is just the latest battle in a series of controversies over academic freedom, free speech, and faculty governance that have dogged Indiana and the presidency of Pamela Whitten.

In November, a professor was removed from the classroom over a room-booking mishap involving the Palestine Solidarity Committee, for which he was the adviser. In December, the university canceled a campus-museum exhibit by a Palestinian artist. In mid-April, at a session hosted by the Bloomington Faculty Council, those and other incidents led members of the Bloomington faculty to overwhelmingly vote no confidence in Whitten, Shrivastav, and Carrie Docherty, IU-Bloomington’s vice provost for faculty and academic affairs.

Then Whitten called in the police. A photographer captured an image of a state trooper with a rifle standing guard on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union. (The Indiana State Police superintendent confirmed the sniper presence in an interview with Indiana Public Media.)

“We believe we made the necessary decisions to balance campus safety and free speech during a dynamic and evolving situation,” Whitten said in an email statement to The Chronicle. Some Jewish students on campus agree.

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Since April, the campus has calmed down considerably. The university has not tried again to get the protesters to leave using police force. But that has not placated student and faculty critics, who accuse the university of viewpoint discrimination and endangering the safety of students and say Whitten and Shrivastav must go.

Yet the two leaders have hung on. Whitten answers to a board whose majority was appointed by the state’s two most recent governors, both Republicans. Conservative state and U.S. lawmakers have remained mostly mum on the blitz of arrests at Bloomington, with the notable exception of Rep. Jim Banks, who praised Whitten’s leadership.

The post-October 7 climate on campus has thrown into relief how Indiana University, like other flagships in red states, must now manage interventionist state politicians and board members while serving a left-leaning student body and faculty — as both camps grow increasingly impatient. The situation is so dire at Indiana, professors say, that the university should be worried about faculty members leaving the state for other jobs.

When I visited the campus during the first week of May, few signs remained of the chaos that had unfolded a week earlier. Young people stretched out on the grass around the encampment, soaking in the sun that hinted at summer. Every so often, an organizer would conduct a mic check, and the activists would repeat back a message, like “Free, free Palestine.” Signs calling for leaders’ resignations and demanding that IU sever any financial ties to Israel filled the lawn, and print-outs with the names of Palestinians who were killed in the war lined a nearby bridge. Communal tents offered food, first aid, and “24/7 drawing.”

Benjamin Robinson, an associate professor of Germanic studies, zigzagged through the encampment, greeting students who seemed to regard him as a minor celebrity. Robinson had been arrested at the encampment on April 25. In photographs of his detainment, he dons a red baseball cap and a shirt that reads “Jews Say Ceasefire Now.”

Upon leaving jail, Robinson and his fellow arrestees were handed trespass warnings, most indicating that they were banned from campus for one year. Robinson appealed his and received a stay on the ban, meaning he is allowed to be on campus for now. Not everyone was given a stay.

“But even now, I’m deprived of rights because the appeal hangs over me as a chilling factor,” said Robinson, a former chapter president of the American Association of University Professors.

Robinson is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed against Indiana University by the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The suit calls on IU to dismiss the one-year campus bans, calling them “an unlawful prior restraint on the free-speech rights of the plaintiffs.”

The professor eventually reached Bryce Greene, a Ph.D. student and leader of the divestment movement. Greene, who had been warned after his arrest to stay off campus for five years, stood on a public sidewalk adjacent to the encampment and led activists in chants through a megaphone.

“The protesters are very concerned about their school’s role in genocide,” he told me. “And so the camp continues.”

A few days later, two lines formed near Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall. About 30 professors in robes and hoods stood silently on the sidewalk outside a vast parking lot. Inside the lot, graduating master’s and doctoral students aligned themselves to enter the building.

Same formation, different purpose.

The professors were holding signs of protest. One, referring to the strong police response to protesters with an allusion to the latest Taylor Swift album, read “the Tortured Students Department.” Another was a trifold with photos of people getting arrested at the encampment the previous week. The instructors passed out mock diplomas laying out Whitten’s “record of achievement,” including “endangering students,” “abandoning faculty,” and “censoring diversity of viewpoints.”

Faculty members there said the president and provost had lost the trust of the campus and must resign.

“I believed that we could continue to work with this administration until they called in the state police on perfectly peaceful protesters and beat them,” said Diane Reilly, a professor of art history. “And now I’m afraid someone will die.”

Others expressed the same fear: An officer confuses a cell phone for a gun, and a person is dead. The 1970 Kent State shootings, in which Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students during an antiwar protest, loom large in professors’ minds.

Since the arrests, multiple schools, including the Kelley School of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences, have held faculty votes to call for Whitten and Shrivastav’s resignations or removals. They’ve passed with overwhelming support, alongside demands that the tent policy be reversed and bans on arrested people be lifted.

An IU spokesman said the president and provost were too busy for interviews. He provided their answers to questions via email. When asked whether the university would restore the old tent policy or drop the trespass warnings, the spokesman pointed to a prior statement from the president and provost; it did not answer the question. Asked whether the president or the provost planned to resign, the spokesman provided a statement from Whitten; it did not answer the question.

The secretary of the Board of Trustees similarly declined to make the chair available for an interview, but referenced the board’s April 16 statement on the no-confidence vote. It stated that the trustees continue to offer their “full support” to Whitten.

Little support remains among the faculty, though. “Having state police and a sniper on campus has, I think, taken a lot of people over the edge who might have been hopeful before,” said P. David Polly, chair of the department of earth and atmospheric sciences. The escalation cemented his own conviction that Whitten and Shrivastav’s time was up.

But Polly, like many of his colleagues, had been unhappy with the administration long before the April 25 entanglement.

In mid-April, more than 90 percent of participating faculty members voted no confidence in the president and provost. Three-quarters determined the same for Docherty, the vice provost.

A March petition calling for the vote to take place accused the administrators of disregarding academic freedom and shared governance. It offered multiple examples of this, including the flouting of a faculty-review process to remove a professor from the classroom; the cancellation of the art exhibit; a failure to push back on the passage of a state law weakening tenure protections; and an unwillingness to publicly defend a faculty member whom state officials scrutinized for performing an abortion.

The petition also chided leaders for attempting to spin off the Kinsey Institute, known for its sex research and recently a target of Republican lawmakers, and for ignoring a 2022 faculty vote in support of recognition for the graduate workers’ union. The union went on strike for three days this April, demanding recognition and higher wages.

Abdulkader Sinno, the political-science professor who was disciplined for improperly reserving a room for a Palestine Solidarity Committee event, said he was initially excited for the Whitten and Shrivastav administration. Whitten has been in office since July of 2021, and Shrivastav since February of 2022.

“I was delighted to have a first woman president,” Sinno said. “I was delighted to have a brown man as provost. … We had high hopes for them. They made mistakes along the way. We said, okay, they’re learning. They’re outsiders. But those mistakes added up so much.”

His own suspension “was mind-blowing.” But he says he lost all confidence when IU canceled the art exhibit by Samia Halaby, herself an IU alumna.

“For God’s sake, it’s abstract art,” he said. “It’s dots and lines.”

Halaby could not be reached for an interview. The university said it had canceled her exhibit over safety concerns. Organizers had been planning it for three years.

“These episodes feel to us like a pervasive pattern,” Robinson said. “They don’t feel like isolated instances where you could again say, ‘Okay, they can learn, they made a mistake, they made it better.’ It really feels like we’re not witnessing a learning curve.”

Critics say the glue that unites these trials is Whitten’s self-isolation from the faculty and Shrivastav’s disregard for faculty input.

“I’ve seen [Whitten] in person once in three years,” said one faculty member, who declined to give her name for fear of retaliation. “She shows up at sporting events. She throws hot dogs into the stands. But she doesn’t come down on the ground. She doesn’t come into our classrooms. She’s not talking to us. ... She governs largely by email.”

Others echoed this description of Whitten, saying she kept faculty members at arm’s length and had distanced them from the Board of Trustees, which has the power to remove her.

“Quite a few people I know, if you step back five years, would have actually known trustees and talked to them regularly,” Polly said. “Whereas right now, I don’t know anyone who knows any trustee.” Another faculty member, who declined to give her name because of “repeated, hateful messages and in-person aggression” related to her outspokenness, said she used to correspond with one member of the Board of Trustees, but that person stopped responding about a year ago.

“We used to have access to the trustees,” she said. “They used to come and have lunch with the leadership of the Bloomington Faculty Council, with the AAUP leadership, on the regular. … Not happening anymore.”

Whitten, in response to written questions about her leadership style, said she regularly meets with faculty members, usually in small groups, and participates in University Faculty Council meetings.

“I’ve also pledged to recommit to bringing in more faculty voices in decision-making and place greater priority on shared governance,” she wrote. Answering a question about reports that trustees are discouraged from interacting with faculty members, Whitten wrote that board members often interact with students, faculty, and staff, and that the administration welcomes their participation in campus life.

Professors criticized the provost, meanwhile, for not communicating policy and procedural changes properly with the faculty. According to Polly, this entails “a lot of conversation just trying to figure out what’s going on, why it’s going on, is it really going on, is there a reason it’s happening, and what is that.”

The canning of the longstanding Dunn Meadow policy was a key example of that, faculty members said. “They change the policy secretly, and then they arrest faculty and students for violating the new policy,” Lichtenstein said. “I mean, what is this, China? Apartheid South Africa?”

Shrivastav, when asked to describe his philosophy on shared governance, said he was “deeply committed” to it. “We are building toward a better day of academic excellence that will benefit this school and all who consider it theirs,” he wrote.

Some people have been pleased with the university’s aggressive response to protesters.

U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, urged state officials to support Whitten “as she takes on the radical and partisan faculty tarnishing the reputation of one of our state’s premier public research institutes,” in a May 2 opinion essay for the Indianapolis Star.

He laid the blame for the university’s discontent on its faculty members, referencing their opposition to the new law regarding tenure — which, when it goes into effect in July, will allow universities to revoke tenure for professors who don’t promote “intellectual diversity” — and their no-confidence vote. Republican officials, Banks wrote, “should make it clear that if the unlawful protesters at Dunn Meadow refuse to disburse [sic], the state will mobilize as many ISP officers and, if necessary, national guardsmen, as public order require [sic].”

In November, Banks had sent a letter to Whitten warning that Indiana University was at risk of losing its federal funding if it condoned or tolerated antisemitism. Whitten replied with a letter laying out what IU was doing to ensure the safety of Jewish students, including increasing police coverage around hotspots of Jewish life on campus.

Banks could not be reached for comment.

Levi Cunin, the 28-year-old rabbi of the Chabad House of Bloomington, said he was grateful to Whitten and her administration for providing “an educational moment to our community that this is not a place where you can break the law and violate university policy.”

He bounced a toddler on his knee during an interview at the house, his child contributing occasional squeals and raspberries.

“Some people, they back into pressure,” Cunin said. By contrast, Indiana University “has shown that it’s so important to do what’s right, not just what everyone around us is saying.”

Cunin may be especially aware of others’ dissent because the Chabad House, an outpost of the Hasidic Jewish organization, is directly across East 7th Street from Dunn Meadow. The windows facing the pro-Palestinian encampment are covered with posters of the hostages in Gaza, but looking out of them, a viewer sees Palestinian flags, kaffiyehs, and tents just a few steps away.

Chabad’s location “is an unfortunate accident of geography,” Lichtenstein, the history professor, said. But the encampment, he emphasized, wasn’t deliberately set up there to intimidate Jews at Chabad. Dunn Meadow has been designated an assembly ground since 1969; Chabad arrived at its current location in 2019, according to Cunin.

“We are probably a 10-minute walk away from where Hillel is,” said Anne Kavalerchik, a graduate student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who has been at the encampment. “This is clearly not targeting Jewish organizations.”

Regardless, to the rabbi and many other Jewish leaders on campus, the activists’ rhetoric is antisemitic and violent.

“It started off with what is happening in Gaza,” Cunin said. “Unfortunately, people have been killed in Gaza. And it moved from there to ‘Let’s eradicate Israel.’ And it’s moved from there already to “Intifada.” What’s the next step, like what happened at Columbia, where there’s people calling for the death of Jews?” (He was referring to a Columbia University student protester who was barred from campus after a video resurfaced in which he says, “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”)

Cunin said he was disheartened that fellow Jews would be a part of the encampment.

The pro-Palestinian activists were likewise annoyed with Cunin’s conduct, specifically that he sometimes played Israeli music loudly during the day. Sometimes, they blasted Arabic music in response.

Jeddeeni, the graduate-student-government president, has played peacekeeper as he has friends on both sides of East 7th Street. He said he asked the encampment leaders not to take over the sidewalk and spoke to Cunin about turning down the music.

“I don’t want to see my friends being mistreated,” Jeddeeni said, “whether I agree with them or not.”

Ahead of an anti-Hamas rally a few blocks east at Showalter Fountain, Greene warned people in the encampment not to engage with the pro-Israel protesters.

“You are going to hear some heinous, evil shit, but we hear heinous, evil shit all the time, and we will not react,” he said. “You know how much they want you to react? You know how much they would love to get somebody on video acting a little bit aggressive to delegitimize our movement? We all know that. That’s why they come here. That’s why they planned this right there.”

Participants in the anti-Hamas rally did not end up marching to the encampment. At the fountain, Jewish students and campus leaders tossed around a microphone and told stories about what it was like to be a Jew on campus post-October 7. Occasionally, attendees chanted “Am Yisrael Chai,” which translates to “The people of Israel live,” and “Bring them home,” referring to the hostages.

“It has been very, very, very lonely and very isolating to be a Jewish and pro-Israel student on campus,” said Mikayla Kaplan, a freshman. “I’ve been isolated from my community and my dorm. The only place that I can really feel like I can be myself is at Hillel or Chabad.”

Tensions briefly flared at the beginning of the rally, when Cunin interrupted the Hillel rabbi speaking and pointed out that Sinno, the suspended pro-Palestinian political-science professor, was recording the event.

“We have over here someone that’s taking a video because he doesn’t like that we’re against Hamas,” Cunin shouted. “And that’s terrible.”

Plenty of others were also recording the rally. Sinno said he thinks he was targeted because he had an “Arab-looking face.” He said he records various events on campus “to create … an archive that I can share with my students to show them how different sides have different perspectives” — once he is permitted to teach again.

Amid all of this — the protests and the arrests and the calls for resignation — was IU’s commencement.

On the eve of the undergraduate ceremony, students in crimson robes took pictures next to Indiana University landmarks, like the Sample Gates and red clocks. Vodka handles and bottles of champagne were familiar sights at photo shoots.

Off campus, young men moved a mattress across the street. Partiers crowded in the back lot of a house, blaring MGMT’s youth anthem, “Kids.” This, too, was college.