Vivian Winston prides herself on being someone who listens.
So, when Indiana University President Pamela Whitten’s contract extension was brought up at the Feb. 20 Board of Trustees meeting, Winston dissented. She was the only dissenting vote.
She heard about the vote for the renewal the morning of the meeting and said she wouldn’t have voted for a contract extension so quickly for any president.
“A decision that was that important, I should have had more notice,” she said. “That's the reason for trustees, and that's the reason we're there. When you get right down to it, the president reports to us. We don’t get involved. That’s not our job. Our job is just to really hire and fire the president.”
Winston is one of three alumni-elected trustees on the Indiana University Board of Trustees, the head of the university.
The board has the power to appoint the president, hire faculty, approve promotion and tenure, determine codes of conduct and disciplinary measures for students, faculty and staff, regulate tuition and fees, determine curricula, invest funds and award financial aid among other responsibilities.
Across IU’s nine campuses, the trustees oversee more than 88,000 students and over 21,000 faculty and staff.
Below the trustees sits the university president.
“A contract extension is something that should be done over a period of time,” Winston said. “I think the minimum amount of time should be six months.”
Winston said she thought there should have been an independent review before the trustees voted to reappoint her until 2031. The university was supposed to seek an independent review during the fifth year of Whitten’s term in 2026, according to her contract.
Along with an independent review, Winston said she thought the board should have gathered input from students, faculty, staff and alumni before approving the extension.
The Board of Trustees did not respond to a request for comment.
‘We have to deal with it if a faculty votes no confidence’
Winston said shared governance is on the decline at IU.
“It leaves people feeling they don’t have a voice,” Winston said. “I think the university thrives when faculty feel like they have a voice.”
Shared governance is the “shared responsibility for operating and governing the university that faculty and administrators share,” according to the Bloomington Faculty Council.
The BFC’s description also states shared governance depends on mutual accountability, collaboration, transparency and a relationship in which the faculty and administration are “answerable” to each other.
In April 2024, 93.1% of 948 faculty members voted “no confidence” in Whitten. Following the vote, the Board of Trustees issued a statement in support of Whitten, but it has since been removed from the trustee’s website.
Winston spoke out against the statement in June 2024. In a letter to Indiana Public Media she wrote she was not aware of it before its publication and would not have supported it.
She said the statement sent a message that the trustees were “ignoring” the faculty and did not want Whitten or the administration to do things differently.
“We have to deal with it if a faculty votes no confidence,” Winston said. “You can't ignore that. I thought ‘We at least need to talk to the faculty, get to the bottom of it. What could be done better?’”
Winston’s husband Wayne Winston, a professor emeritus of operations and decision technologies at IU, said faculty are told at BFC meetings they can email the Board of Trustees if they have questions — but he alleges the board either doesn’t get the emails, or doesn’t reply to them.
“There's no communication,” Wayne Winston said. “We need communication between the board and the faculty, staff and students. There's a culture of fear.”
Last May, Whitten held closed door listening sessions with the College of Arts and Sciences. In these meetings, faculty expressed their discontent.
Whitten and the attending faculty debated the justifiability for “police action” in Dunn Meadow and other grievances, according to a summary of the sessions written by IU Professor P. David Polly in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department and IU Professor in the English department Purnima Bose.
The summary said Whitten “refused” to answer several questions from faculty and didn’t express remorse for the injuries sustained by students and faculty resulting from the encampment and the way it was dealt with. It described some attendees who said it was too late for listening sessions and agreements to change. The administration, it said, should have tried to rebuild trust long ago.
Wayne Winston said he believes the administration has no desire to hear about faculty opinion.
“The way things are being run here, it’s just morally reprehensible,” Wayne said.
Wayne Winston also referenced Xiaofeng Wang, a tenured IU professor fired in March on the same day two of his homes were inspected by the FBI.
The termination notice sent to Wang said it was Provost Rahul Shrivastav’s understanding that Wang had accepted a position at a university in Singapore and that Wang would not be eligible for rehire at IU.
Wang’s wife and IU Libraries analyst Nianli Ma was also terminated without being provided a reason.
Wayne Winston said the university is considering Wang “guilty until proven innocent,” and that faculty are “terrified” of the administration.
A year on from the encampment
Last year, during IU’s pro-Palestinian encampment in April 2024, Winston and fellow trustee Donna Spears visited the protest at Dunn Meadow.
“I'm important to the university, I should see what's going on,” Winston said. “If people are protesting in such a visible way, I think they deserve the respect of us coming down to talk with them.”
She said she would have preferred that the encampment had been handled by the university without the Indiana State Police.
Winston said she was impressed by how organized and clean the encampment was. She also said she was impressed by the faculty helping the students manage negative response to the encampment.
“I think they were respectful of what the students were trying to do and helping make sure they did it in a good, productive manner,” Winston said.
A year after the encampments began, Winston said the campus climate is no better.
“Honestly, I don't see much change,” Winston said. “I feel like the problems that caused the faculty to vote ‘no confidence’ a year ago haven't really been dealt with yet.”
Nothing is changing, Wayne Winston said, because most of the board likes Whitten.
“Pam realized, ‘Hey, I can govern this university through a majority of nine people. I don’t have to please anybody else,’” Wayne Winston said. “And I do think Pam thinks she's doing what's right for the university.”
Winston’s career history
Winston graduated from IU in 1978 with her bachelor’s in accounting and went on to earn her Master of Business Administration in 1991. After, Winston worked as staff and faculty at IU in the Kelley School of Business and retired in 2021 before being elected to the Board of Trustees in 2022.
Winston is nearing the end of her three-year term and announced in March she will not seek reelection.
“It was a difficult decision because it was an honor to have the opportunity to be involved with the university at that level, but I decided it's time for someone else to chip in,” Winston said.
Wayne Winston said he agrees with her decision.
“It’s been a horror show trying to do things when you’re the only person who has the guts to do anything,” he said.
Along with being the single dissenting vote against Whitten’s reappointment, Winston has often been on the losing side of board decisions.
In November last year, the board voted on a new section of IU’s controversial Expressive Activity Policy. Winston and student trustee Kyle Seibert were the only two trustees to vote against the section of the policy enforcing overnight restrictions between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. for prohibited expressive activities.
These activities include protesting, making speeches, circulating petitions and other unapproved conduct. Permitted activities include spontaneously assembling and distributing literature.
Six of the trustees are appointed by the governor and the other three are alumni-elected. This year’s election for the alumni-elected trustee opens June 1.
Winston endorsed John McGlothlin’s campaign. McGlothlin is a financial planner from Austin, Texas, and earned his master’s and doctorate from IU in English language and literature. He also served as Assistant Director of Composition in the English department and visiting lecturer in the Kelley School.
McGlothlin took second place in last year’s election, receiving 14.89% to Jill Maurer Burnett’s 19.06%.
Winston said he knows the campus well and that his time as a faculty member is a strength.
“I think he will be concerned about the strength of the university and the health of the university and will work hard to support the university,” Winston said.
She thinks it is important for trustees to have spent time in Bloomington and have experience at IU.
Wayne said to get closer to repairing relationships between faculty and administration, the board needs to come to Bloomington, reserve Whittenberger Auditorium and answer questions from faculty he says they’re ignoring.
“Answer questions like, ‘Why did you reappoint her without a survey?’ They won't answer,” Wayne said. “They don't respond to anything that's sent to them. There's no communication between the board and the Bloomington campus.”
Winston said from her term on the board, she was most proud of how she listened to students, faculty and staff and how doing so helped her make a difference.
“I hope I did what was in my heart,” Winston said. “I just feel so close to the Bloomington campus, having been here all my life and so I hope I did some good along the way. I tried.”
