The Sniper Man: Quinn Buckner’s Assault on Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Indiana University

When Quinn the Sniper Man gets here,
Everybody better duck and run.

Yes, this piece is about that Quinn Buckner – captain of the undefeated, 1976 NCAA champion Indiana University basketball team, NBA All Star and coach, long-time television analyst for the Indiana Pacers.

Buckner was appointed to the IU Board of Trustees in 2016, in one of Governor Mike Pence’s last official acts before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president. Today he is board president and senior board member. The six governor appointees and three alumni-elected representatives compose the Big 10 university’s governing body.

President Buckner and the trustees are responsible for everything that happens on every one of IU’s nine campuses, from website content to the deployment of state storm troopers last spring to silence free speech on the university’s flagship property.

Buckner’s hand-picked IU President Pamela Whitten, whom he says has his full support, “invited” the Indiana State Police onto the Bloomington campus to bust up peaceful pro-Palestinian protests last April 27.

***

On Buckner’s watch, the Bloomington campus made national headlines that spring day with a viral photograph of a state police sniper atop the iconic Indiana Memorial Union building overlooking campus war protests.

Three floors below the gunman’s sights, in the historic Free Speech Zone known as Dunn Meadow, armed Indiana State Police with riot shields advanced on peaceful protesters, evicted them, tore down their encampment, and arrested fifty six.

Two days before, I spent an afternoon in the Meadow observing and photographing the scene.

Pro-Israel students at the Chabad center directly across Seventh Street counterprotested by playing loud music, wrapping themselves in Israeli and American flags, and chanting their own slogans. An antiwar demonstrator paced along the sidewalk twenty feet from the pro-Israel contingent. A couple Jewish kids walked around the antiwar encampment perimeter with an Israeli flag.

It all seemed to me a refreshing, healthy sign that, fifty-five years after Buckner and Company’s trustee predecessors officially designated Dunn Meadow a Free Speech Zone – when I was a freshman protesting the Vietnam War – such civic engagement was still possible, despite twenty years of unrelenting intellectual degradation by ultra-right Republican Governors Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, and Eric Holcomb.

While confirming the sniper’s presence and defending this year’s show of force in the Meadow, the state police chief cited “disgusting, terrible, personal, hateful, vile comments made about other people.” Other than obliquely alluding to statements “encouraging the death of the Jewish people globally,” the chief refused to give examples.

The event was covered minute-by-minute by campus, city, and state media, and absolutely no one, not even antiwar Jewish students and faculty interviewed in the encampment, cited any hate speech or threats against Jews whatsoever.

Calling the university’s actions “constitutionally dubious,” the local prosecutor dropped charges against all but one protester, who allegedly bit a police officer.

+++

What Whitten and Buckner’s other underlings did on April 27 was literally orchestrated in secret, just hours before the sniper ascended the Memorial Union stairs. With the 1969 Free Speech Zone designation still in place, an ad hoc IU committee quietly changed university rules  to say temporary encampments were only allowed in Dunn Meadow with prior administration approval.

And far from being an exception or a defensible overresponse to a volatile situation, the episode is symptomatic of state Republicans unvarnished war on speech, tenure, and academic freedom under the Pence-Buckner-Whitten regime.

The Bloomington Herald-Times just did a series on the disreputable process the trustees orchestrated to hire Whitten in 2021.

“Whitten, who has a history of upsetting faculty wherever she goes, was seemingly handpicked by the Board of Trustees to lead IU,” H-T Editor Jill Bond wrote. “Her selection was done under a shroud of secrecy, with most aspects of how she was identified and why she was chosen sealed by nondisclosure agreements and hidden from public view by the use of private search firms.”

Buckner and the trustees departed from precedent by rejecting a short list of recommendations from a search committee composed of faculty, students, and trustees. Instead, apparently relying on a private search firm’s recommendations, they asked the board to consider Whitten and three others “for still unknown reasons,” the H-T series reported.

In July, the trustees approved a new Expressive Activity Policy that, the IDS reported, limits speech “to the hours between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. every day, prohibits camping at any time of day, prohibits impeding vehicle and pedestrian traffic and building entrances.” Signs and temporary structures must be approved at least 10 days in advance by the university.

Signs must now be approved by the university.

+++

Whitten’s reputation as an academic hatchet man, however, was public knowledge.

In October 2016, the University of Georgia student paper Red & Black reported that, when Whitten was provost there, a professor who had demanded the university acknowledge slavery said an administrator told him Whitten “was considering measures that would make it impossible for [him] ever to gain employment at other universities.”

In April 2019, the Kennesaw State University student paper KSU Sentinel reported, a student group there accused then-President Whitten of refusing to publicly condemn racism.

Before Whitten left KSU for IU, her provost and senior vice president chaired a committee that, according to a December 2021 post from the American Association of University Professors, ultimately “eviscerated” tenure in the University System of Georgia, the first in the nation to do so. The process started when Whitten was still in Kennesaw.

As I reported in CounterPunch in September 2022, IU President Whitten laughed out loud when asked on a public radio program why the faculty might be concerned she was coming after tenure. She said they might have been “conflating” talk in the Georgia legislature.

In March this year, NPR reported that Governor Holcomb signed a bill that allows state universities to “revoke tenure if profs don’t foster ‘intellectual diversity,’” specifically citing conservative ideals.

Whitten issued a boilerplate, milquetoast statement opposing the bill when it was before the Indiana General Assembly. But she will enforce it.

Buckner brought her to Bloomington to eviscerate tenure.

+++

Whitten’s two-year stint at IU has been marked by the same turmoil and animosity that characterized her career in Georgia, a performance for which Buckner and the Trustees have awarded her an annual $650,000 base salary – plus travel, business, and entertainment expenses. In her first two years, they gave her bonuses of $162,500 and $175,500.

In Spring 2022, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition went on a month-long, end-of-semester strike, which resulted in yearly teaching salary minimums rising from $15,000 to $22,000. They failed to receive approval to form a union.

At that time, Whitten’s salary/bonus totaled $812,500 – before benefits. According to university salary data,103 professors and administrators at the IU Kelley School of Business earned more than $200,000, averaging $270,000 apiece.

Noting that the cost of living in Bloomington is an estimated $41,441, the grad student coalition last spring held a three-day strike called “Three Days for a Raise.”

“This year, the IGWC delivered 1,300 signed union cards and a letter to IU President Pamela Whitten, urging a union election, negotiation and a living wage minimum,” the Indiana Daily Student reported in April. “The IGWC said in a press release this week despite multiple follow-up attempts, there was no response.”

+++

Throughout her tenure, Whitten has moved several times to quell free speech on campus and has been reviled by practically the entire IU-Bloomington community for her actions.

This past January, her administration suspended political science Professor Abdulkader Sinno for helping the Palestine Solidarity Committee organize a public event on the Gaza War.

In February, for alleged security reasons, the administration canceled an exhibit of artwork by IU alumnus and Palestinian-born artist Samia Halaby, amid accusations they were censoring her pro-Palestinian views.

In March, the Trustees inched away from a plan to sever university relations with the seventy-seven-year-old Kinsey Institute, the world renowned, sex research institution that has come under attack from Penceian Christian Nationalists in the state.

In April, in response to these and daily indignities forced upon them by Buckner’s hand-picked administration, 93% of 948 faculty members passed a vote of no confidence in Whitten for “encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.”

In April, 77% of the faculty in the Kelley School of Business likewise passed a resolution calling for Whitten’s contract to be terminated. By larger margins, the business profs also called for repeal of the structure policy and for the yearlong campus bans imposed on the fifty six arrested protesters to be rescinded.

Buckner personally responded: “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees. … She is an extraordinary leader who is crucial to Indiana University’s success and will be serving as our president for years to come.”

+++

Before the first day of class for the Fall Semester, Quinn Buckner and Company erected a chain-link Trumpian Wall around Dunn Meadow – literally fencing out free speech altogether.

A sign says the “temporary fence allows for our dedicated facilities team to restore this location to its original condition, making it accessible to the entire campus community.”

In 2009, a Victoria Secret PINK Concert turned the Meadow’s west end into a mudhole, reminiscent of an Indiana pigpen in April. The company had it resod and reopened in two weeks.

+++

Since Buckner et al have effectively declared Dunn Meadow a No Speech Zone, campus protests have been reduced to late-night vigils at the nearby Sample Gates, intentionally held in violation of Whitten’s Expressive Activity Policy.

The ACLU sued after university police referred two protesters to their deans for speaking at the rallies after 11 on Aug. 25.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, IU now ranks 243rd out of 250 colleges and universities for free speech and inquiry.

All on Quinn the Sniper Man’s watch.

The post The Sniper Man: Quinn Buckner’s Assault on Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Indiana University appeared first on CounterPunch.org.