The Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity prides itself on bringing together scholars and students from across campus to conduct research and has expanded since its founding in 2012. But that growth will be halted next year due to university budget cuts.
IU’s Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President has withdrawn support for the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity beginning fiscal year 2026, a move which will eliminate the Center’s Undergraduate Research Program and force the downsizing of its postdoctoral fellowship program.
For the 2024-25 academic year, CRRES is receiving $203,857 from the provost’s office, according to financial documents obtained by the Indiana Daily Student. The loss of this funding for next year means a reduction of the center’s yearly operating budget by almost half. Though it will retain funding from the College of Arts and Sciences, the loss of financial support from the provost forces CRRES to drastically downsize its offerings.
“We are viewed as a model on campus, the post-doc program in particular, in terms of our success in training and recruiting really promising faculty that are doing cutting edge research on race and ethnicity,” Dina Okamoto, former director of CRRES, said. “So we’re doing all this good work, and yet our funding is getting cut.”
The money from the College of Arts and Sciences will fund only one CRRES postdoctoral fellow per year, rather than the typical two. And it is not enough to fund CRRES’ Undergraduate Research Program. URP pairs students with professors to pursue research in any field, according to the Center website. Students receive guidance from professors through the whole process and have the opportunity to get research experience before pursuing graduate school or other paths.
“There’s so much scholarship within the Undergraduate Research Program,” senior Anna Sarpong, who has been a part of the URP for two years and works as the center’s social media intern, said. “There’s so much community, there’s so much encouragement.”
For junior Brookelyn Lambright, who is currently working in the URP program, CRRES is the only way she can undertake research.
“This was really the only opportunity I had to get my work in the humanities funded. Without CRRES, there is really no other opportunity for me at IU,” she said. “And so it’s just reinforcing the provost’s lack of willingness to invest in the humanities as an important place in IU’s academia.”
Associate Director of CRRES Sonia Lee said the first sign of the changes to funding came in 2022, when IU Research required the center to become self-sustaining, relying on external grants for funding. IU Research supports and funds research at the university.
“Centers were given the option to work with research leadership to pave new pathways for external funding or to maintain existing activities under new administrative oversight,” IU Executive Director for Media Relations Mark Bode said in an email.
However, CRRES leadership felt they were unable to adjust quickly enough.
“We knew that was quite impossible,” Lee said.
The center does not have enough staff or administrators to spend the time required to secure grants and other outside funding, she said.
The Memorandum of Understanding provided by Provost Rahul Shrivastav, which outlines how the center will be funded, promised financial support from the provost’s office through fiscal year 2025. But as the summer of 2024 passed with no new MOU allocating provost’s office money to the center for 2026 on, Director Sylvia Martinez became concerned. She emailed Shrivastav, emphasizing that she needed details on CRRES’ budget soon to post an advertisement for the postdoctoral fellows.
Finally, in the fall of 2024, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Rick Van Kooten, told Martinez that the Office of the Provost was withdrawing its funding for the 2025-26 academic year, following the guidance from IU Research.
Shrivastav cited the College’s large budget deficit as the reason for the decision.
In the past, Lee said, the previous provost, Lauren Robel, used discretionary funds to keep the center running despite the budget deficit.
“She would redistribute some of the discretionary funds that she had because she knew that the value of each of the units should not be measured by the revenue producing capacity, but by the value of the intellectual mission of each unit,” Lee said.
Director Sylvia Martinez noted that CRRES aligns with the IU 2030 Strategic plan, which lists "transformative research and creativity” as one of its three foundational pillars. “Commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion” is also listed as one of the seven core principles that shaped development of the plan.
“I think that the point of a university is to fund research, to fund ideas and to invest in academia and cutting things like the Undergraduate Research Program is counterintuitive to that,” Lambright said. “You’re going against the whole idea of what a research university is supposed to be.”
