PSC IU Stands With IU Community Against Department Cuts
The Palestine Solidarity Committee joins our comrades and colleagues across the university to demand that IU do all it can to defend the degree programs at risk and preserve the academy as a space for academic freedom over market-driven productivity. Just as we call attention to the crimes in which IU is complicit abroad, we also must look at the harm that IU is overseeing against its own community.
Indiana House Bill 1001, the same budget bill which empowered Governor Mike Braun to eliminate elected seats from the Indiana University Board of Trustees and replace them with ideological appointed positions.
The bill also compels public universities in Indiana to dissolve degree programs that do not meet arbitrary requirements of “productivity” based on the number of degrees granted annually. At IU, this means the elimination or consolidation of 249 bachelor, master, and doctoral programs spanning natural and applied sciences, humanities, social sciences, and fine arts.
These degree cuts decimate our university and leaves it a shell of an institution.
IU must do more to protect itself against such blatant attacks.
PSC and the IU Divestment Coalition have continually fought for the university’s divestment from Israel and the Military-industrial Complex for moral and humanitarian reasons. These kinds of partnerships and investments make every IU affiliate complicit with the genocide in Gaza and the occupation in Palestine.
At IU, this complicity becomes intertwined with our own exploitation when the very things we expect from a great university, whether living wages for workers, student services, or secured support for research, are threatened through austerity measures and ideological attacks.
Though our goals remain centered on Palestine, our efforts for divestment speak to a desire for a better academic institution for ourselves and our successors. Students, faculty, and staff at IU have chosen IU as a space to study, research, and work based on what IU can offer as a public institute of higher education. In light of the impending program cuts, what IU has to offer is dwindling to nothing.
The academy has historically been a space for the exchange of ideas in and out of the classroom. The Palestine Solidarity Committee represents one of many student organizations in which IU affiliates may learn alongside each other as student and teacher. Our Popular University for Gaza program emphasizes informal education and engagement as an integral part of our collective.
IU has already preemptively capitulated to anti intellectual legislative pressure and serves as a canary in the coal mine of these newer large scale desecration of academia. We saw this with the suspension of Abdulkader Sinno, the cancellation of the Samia Halaby exhibit, and the adoption of the blatantly unconstitutional Speech Restriction Policy. None of these injustices would occur at an institution that genuinely values freedom of expression.
These are the very spaces in which the issue of Palestine must be freely discussed, and prevailing paradigms challenged. It is through the study of languages, arts, politics, history, literature, geography, and so on in which we first learn, continue to engage, or find the opportunity to change a mind or have ours change on the issue of Palestinian liberation.
Our ability to fight for the liberation of Palestine depends on spaces that defend such intellectual curiosity, stimulation and freedom.