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A pair of Republican state senators have filed a bill that would reverse a controversial, 11th-hour move that gave Indiana Gov. Mike Braun full control over the membership of Indiana University’s board of trustees.
The nine-member board of trustees is the decision-making body for the state’s largest university system and has final say on major issues like academic policy, finances and tuition and leadership appointments.
After a last-minute change to the state’s budget bill during the last legislative session gave Braun the power to decide who sat on that board, the governor in June removed all of the alumni-elected members and made three appointments to replace them, despite initially saying he would let sitting board members finish their terms.
But now a bill filed by Sens. Sue Glick, R-LaGrange, and Greg Walker, R-Columbus, would reverse those dealings and restore three board seats to be elected by IU alumni.
Senate Bill 110 would revert the board’s makeup to what it looked like before the 2025 legislative session, with five members appointed by the governor and three elected by IU alumni. The alumni-elected members must have also graduated from an IU campus.
The ninth member would be a current student picked by the governor with the help of a student selection committee.
If passed as written, SB 110 specifies that alumni elections would resume in 2026 and the three alumni-elected trustees would replace the appointees Braun made to the board in June—former ESPN sportscaster Sage Steele; conservative attorney Jim Bopp Jr. and attorney Brian Eagle.
Spokespeople for Glick and Walker did not immediately return messages from IBJ seeking comment. An IU spokeswoman also did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Alumni advocates, however, feel the bill is a step in the right direction.
Vivian Winston was one of the three alumni-elected board members Braun removed in June, less than a month before her term would have expired.
“The alumni bring diverse points of view and make the board stronger,” said Winston, who was originally elected to the board in 2022. “I appreciate that two of our state senators recognized this, and then they took action.”
In defending his decision to replace all three alumni-elected trustees, Braun has said a very small minority, under 2% in some cases, of alumni participate in the board of trustees elections and thus those members aren’t representative of the alumni base.
Winston responded to this idea by saying over 16,000 people voted when she was elected in 2022, and the alumni electorate is highly engaged.
“Even though it’s a small percentage, it mattered a lot to those people,” Winston said.
Mark Land, the former associate vice president for public affairs at IU, was running for one of the alumni-elected trustee seats before the Legislature changed the board’s structure.
Land said he disagrees with the current structure, but he’s more upset about the way that language was slipped into the budget bill with no time for discussion. He hopes SB 110 gets a full debate in the General Assembly.
“If this [bill] goes through and gets a full and fair hearing and still doesn’t go anywhere—I mean, I would be disappointed, but I would feel like there was at least a process that was followed,” Land said.
Land also questioned the origins of the push to make all IU trustees gubernatorial appointees, given that two members of the supermajority party are carrying a bill to revert those changes one session later.
“Among the candidates, we asked [IU] President [Pam] Whitten. We’ve asked folks at the university if they were informed of this, did they have a hand in this? We’ve gotten no response,” Land said. “I’ve asked folks on the legislative side and got no response.”
Land and Winston both said they have not been in contact with the bill’s authors. The other two alumni-elected trustees removed by Braun—Donna Spears and Jill Maurer Burnett—declined to comment on SB 110 when reached by IBJ.
In addition to changes to the board of trustees, the 2025 legislative session saw lawmakers pass other items that impacted IU. That included language to specify that only members of a faculty governance organization who are employed by a university can vote on pending matters, and it stipulated that these organizations are advisory only.
That law is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by a group of retired professors.
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