BY JENNIFER RUTH

“The disaster that we fear will happen to us is happening to us. Our good deans aren’t holding back the worst; they are legitimating it.” – Associate Professor of Germanic Studies Ben Robinson

The IndyStar recently reported a story that contains lessons for us all about the overcompliance of administrators during this time of unprecedented attack on higher education. Let me frame this post by questioning the language I just used— “attack on higher education.” I regularly use this phrase, as we all do, but it unhelpfully conjures an image of two distinct warring entities (the government, on the one hand, and colleges and universities, on the other). More and more, that image is inaccurate. The administrative strata of our colleges and universities are acting voluntarily to align their actions with the ideology of the government, becoming another arm of federal and state government.

Elsewhere, I discussed the politicization of the federal civil service through the substitution of nonpartisan career civil servants with ones vetted and evaluated on political loyalty. I argued that the expansion of what are essentially political appointees under Schedule Policy/Career is likely to result in a dramatic scaling up of the government’s efforts to control higher education. The politicization of the civil service converts neutral compliance systems into strategic tools of governance, turning the rule of law into rule by law. Universities, in too many cases, are already operating according to rule by law, finding ways to discipline speech they feel the federal or state government wouldn’t like through tortured interpretations of their own institutional policies.

The IndyStar reports on the sanctioning of professor Benjamin Robinson. Robinson is an associate professor of Germanic studies at Indiana University Bloomington. He was targeted by an anonymous complaint for having criticized Indiana University (IU) and also “speaking negatively about Israel” in the classroom. The complaint was submitted through an IU website that expressly states that complaints will not lead to investigations and yet, in Robinson’s case, it did. As with the federal “investigations” that of late forego due process and appear to do little more than act on random accusations as if they are vetted facts, the dean at Indiana University used the complaint to sanction Professor Robinson, a sanction that if not reversed on appeal will remain in his permanent file. The details of this case illuminate the internal corruption of our universities and the impact this corruption has on our academic freedom in the classroom. Professor Robinson graciously agreed to answer some questions for me.

What do readers need to know about Senate Enrolled Act 202 to understand your case?

Ben Robinson (BR): The act, which became Indiana law in spring 2024, mandates that faculty at public institutions may not be granted tenure or promotion and may be dismissed if they fail to meet three new criteria for the classroom: fostering free inquiry; introducing students to a variety of frameworks; and refraining from subjecting students to political views unrelated to a class topic or the faculty member’s specialty. To enforce this vague mandate, the law required the creation of two mechanisms—a five-year post-tenure review process and a complaint system for students and employees to report failures of faculty to meet the new criteria. Senator Spencer Deery, who introduced the bill, is Special Assistant for Mitch Daniels, the former president of Purdue, and was earlier his Deputy Chief of Staff at Purdue. The significance of the Daniels connection to SEA 202 is brought out by a Washington Post column Daniels just published praising Dartmouth president Sian Beilock as a “heroine” for having reshaped Dartmouth as a place for civil discourse by summarily shutting down anti-genocide protests on her campus. SEA 202 is an instrument for enforcing such authoritarian zero-tolerance stances on civil disobedience and campus protest—blunt rule by a law, not of law, as you rightly put it.

The law’s proponents were explicit about its political intent, promoting it as a vehicle for reshaping instruction on campuses that Indiana’s Republican super-majority legislature perceived as too liberal. Imagining higher education not as a disciplinary process of discovery, analysis, interpretation, and communication, but as a battlefield between liberals and conservatives, the law’s advocates characterized it as a way to make room for conservative viewpoints. But since the premise of the law, that higher education is a political indoctrination mechanism, is chimerical, it’s no surprise that its effects have not been to open education to greater civility, but to shut down its mission to respond to facts, create meanings, and foster students’ capacity for sound judgment. Instead of welcoming free inquiry and resisting interference by the legislature and donor class, faculty members are vividly fearful of actions by donors and politicians, and of the threat of organized smear campaigns, as reported in the Indy Star. Far from protecting the university’s integrity, SEA 202, by enforcing a highly ideological phantasm of political neutrality, has invited onto campus the very idols of tribe, marketplace, cave, and theater from which Francis Bacon once sought to liberate knowledge.

What can you tell us about the anonymous complaint?

BR: The complaint was submitted anonymously through the “Bias Incident” reporting form, which does not allow for a complainant to be contacted, and explicitly rules out formal investigation and discipline, presenting its purpose as providing support, directing resources, and mediating conflict through dialogue. The complaint was passed on to the Policy Compliance officer, the General Counsel, and the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, who refiled it as an SEA 202 complaint and sent it to the dean for formal investigation. Only four months after being reported did the complaint come to my attention. And it took another four and half months from my response for me finally to receive the dean’s sanction, which went through five versions (as noted on the draft I received before the letter was sent to the Vice Provost) and whose verdict was reached without any investigation of the complaint—the only one I’ve ever received, I might add, in 27 years of teaching.

The letter your dean wrote to justify investigating you is rife with tortured logic. Can you spell out a few of the more egregious moments?

BR: Given the five drafts the letter went through over the course of four and half months, its belabored reasoning is revealing. It goes to great lengths to explain that I am not being sanctioned for criticizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but for sharing personal experiences and criticizing the university too often in the classroom. These behaviors are held to violate the SEA 202’s requirement that faculty not subject students to “views and opinions concerning matters not related to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” The course in which the violation is said to have occurred was an introduction to the German philosophical tradition from Luther to Habermas and focused on freedom and the public use of reason—topics to which my earlier arrest on the campus’ free speech grounds and eventually successful First Amendment challenge of the university’s expressive activity policy seem quite germane. But even at the most general level, I know of no faculty member who has not appealed to personal experiences in class to illustrate a point with an example or to demonstrate bona fides regarding some particular judgment or even just to establish classroom rapport. Indeed, teaching is inconceivable without any personal dimension. But what is most striking about the dean’s characterization of the complaint as concerning my communication of personal experiences, rather than my having characterized university policies as targeting speech critical of Israel, is that it appears to have been reverse engineered over many drafts to give the appearance of content neutrality—to avoid, that is, the appearance of doing just what I held it to be doing in my classroom examples, namely, singling out expressive content critical of Israel for sanction. Instead, the dean reasons, I’m being disciplined for having spoken too much about personal experiences.

Really, there is too much absurdity to do justice to the dean’s efforts in limited space. Without any investigation, the dean takes the complainant’s words “repeatedly” and “on several occasions” to establish that I “exceeded the boundaries [of permissible criticism] outlined in SEA 202.” It is not clear what excessive criticism might be in a 40-hour class—is it a single minute out of the class’s 2400 minutes, or might a faculty member be allowed criticism as often as, say, a minute or even two every third hour of student contact? In any case, “several occasions” of anonymously alleged criticism is reasoned to have exceeded some undefined boundary outlined in the law.

Other absurdities are a touch more technical. So, to take one last example, in arguing for the standing of the complaint, the dean acknowledges that it was reported anonymously on a form that clearly states that there will be no investigation or discipline, but then he goes on to reason, with scalpel-like precision, that the complainant “did not indicate that action should not be taken.” Moreover, he explains, such assurance just means that there will be no investigation or discipline by the Bias Response Team but says nothing about the Team passing the complaint along to another party for investigation and discipline. This flies in the face of a 2025 Supreme Court decision (“Speech First v Whitten”) on a case challenging the constitutionality of IU’s Bias Response process. The Court denied the challenge precisely because the Bias Response Team has no enforcement power. It boggles the mind that the dean would interpret the Court to mean that an injury occurs only if the Bias Response Team enforces action on an anonymous complaint, but none occurs if the Team turns it over to the College for enforcement.

What lessons for us all do you see in your experience?

BR: Many colleagues are hoping to prevent the worst from happening by lying low and working with the administrators who tell us they are minimizing the harm of complying with the demands of the federal task forces, state legislators, and self-interested donors. “Best to remove a reference to DEI or a syllabus unit on Palestine than to risk losing grants for colleagues on the verge of curing cancer.” My experience—if I may talk about personal experience—is that more often than not even your “good dean” is on the other team, team compliance. Structurally, the dean belongs to a different community of interest than yours; that is, if your interest is in upholding what can be salvaged of the integrity of the university as institution after institution arrests its students, sanctions its faculty, bans its organizations, and turns on a dime from including diversity and championing equity to banishing them. The disaster that we fear will happen to us is happening to us. Our good deans aren’t holding back the worst; they are legitimating it. What matters now, I’ve learned, is that we coordinate ourselves to act on what we believe higher education should be and to subtract from our repertoire all the habits of deference to administrators who promise to save us from some future calamity that isn’t the one already stalking us now.

Because universities operate through progressive sanctions, any next alleged offense could lead to something more serious, including termination. What does this mean for you going forward? Are you likely to censor yourself in ways that you wouldn’t have before this?

BR: I wouldn’t want the example that this “show-trial sanction” appears intended to make of me to succeed in chilling my colleagues in their speech and actions. I want rather that instead of fear, my colleagues feel the sense of indignation that I feel. My response will not be to censor myself, but to keep speaking out against Israel’s US-enabled genocide in Gaza, whether I do so publicly or professionally, with regard to my academic discipline and duties. I am challenging the sanction through IU’s appeal process (a process from which I promise myself very little since the IU Board of Trustees have re-written our faculty constitution to specify that “faculty governance organization actions are advisory only”). And more broadly, I am working with the AAUP, the ACLU, and FIRE, to mount a legal challenge against SEA 202.

Jennifer Ruth is coeditor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom. She is the director, with Jan Haaken, of the film The Palestine Exception: What’s at Stake in the Campus Protests? which will be released in October with Watermelon pictures. She organizes with AAUP and CAHE.