Last-minute budget addition gives Braun full control over IU board

Language added to a presumed final draft of the next state budget would give Gov. Mike Braun full control over the membership of Indiana University’s board of trustees

The nine-member board serves as the governing body for the state’s largest postsecondary institution, overseeing major decisions related to policy, finances and leadership appointments. That includes budget approvals, setting tuition rates, green-lighting new academic programs and deciding on campus projects.

Most members are already appointed by the governor, but three are elected by university alumni.

If passed and signed into law, the budget would give Braun the power to make changes to the board’s makeup as early as July 1.

“I think it’s being done because the current process [has] not maybe yielded the proper results on the entirety of how you want that important part of our state to be run—from curriculum to cost to the whole way one of our flagship universities has been operating. I want to get a board there that is going to be a little more rounded, that’s going to produce better results,” Braun said Thursday.

“I think that we’re going to have a different configuration,” he continued. “That doesn’t mean that an alumni won’t be on it as one of the picks that you have to constitute the board. It would just mean that it’s not required for those three spots.”

House and Senate Republicans unveiled their 215-plus page budget compromise Wednesday afternoon.

Amendments on pages 181 and 182 aren’t related to spending, however. Instead, the new language stipulates that all nine members of the IU board are to be appointed by the governor. Another section gives the governor authority to “at any time” remove and replace a board member who was previously elected by the IU alumni.

If the governor swaps a member out, the new appointee serves until the expiration of the term of the replaced member. Otherwise, any of the existing members elected by IU alumni are allowed to serve out the rest of their term.

The bill sunsets those provisions on Jan. 1, 2028, near the end of Braun’s current term.

Other new rules require that at least five of the members appointed to the board must be alumni, and five must be residents of Indiana.

The provisions did not appear in previous versions of the state budget.

Mark Bode, an IU spokesperson, told the Indiana Capitol Chronicle on Thursday that the university “is currently reviewing the potential impacts of the proposed state budget” but did not comment further or specifically about the board of trustees provision.

The IU board and IU Alumni Association did not immediately respond to separate requests for comment. Indiana’s Commission for Higher Education declined to comment.

Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray, R-Martinsville, said Thursday that “the concept of having elections where alumni choose is good, practically speaking,” but emphasized that “only a fraction” of the university’s 750,000 were voting.

“So, that’s absolutely not working the way I think people originally … hoped that it would,” he told the Capital Chronicle. “The governor has lots of appointments on the IU board and many other boards, and it just made sense to move back to that space.”

How trustees are chosen

Under current law, Indiana’s governor appoints five members to IU’s board and picks one student representative with the help of a student-led committee. Three other members must be IU graduates and are elected by other alumni.

At present, all serve three-year terms, except the student member whose term lasts just two years.

New budget language shortens student terms to one year and sets a three-term limit on appointed board members.

No other university boards were altered by the latest budget language.

How trustees are selected at other Hoosier colleges and universities varies somewhat, but like IU, some have also traditionally allowed alumni to have a say on one or more members.

At Purdue University, for example, three of the 10 board members are elected by the school’s alumni association, one of whom must be a graduate of the College of Agriculture. The governor appoints the remaining seven members, including a student trustee.

At Ball State University, an alumni council nominates two people to its nine-member board. The same goes for Indiana State University’s alumni council, which also gets two nominees to the school’s nine-person board.

There’s no alumni input for Ivy Tech Community College’s board; it is made up entirely of gubernatorial appointees.

All 10 Vincennes University trustees—one of which is a student member—are also appointed by the governor. One of those must be a resident of Knox County, and one must be an alumnus.

The governor similarly chooses all nine trustees at the University of Southern Indiana, but an alumni “screening committee” helps pick one of the members.

In a Thursday afternoon statement, Monroe County Democrats called the budget provisions “absolutely outrageous.”

“This power grab doesn’t stop there—it attacks tenure, undermines faculty recruitment and threatens the core of academic freedom,” the county party said in an email release, which pleaded for Hoosiers to call on their legislators in the final hours of the session and demand for trustee language to be deleted from the budget.

“This isn’t just bad policy—it’s authoritarian, anti-democratic and not right,” the email added. “This isn’t just an IU issue. It’s a warning shot to every public university in Indiana.”

It’s the second time that IU has been “singled out by the Republican supermajority,” Democrats said.

In 2023, Republicans opted to strip all state funding from IU’s Kinsey Institute, which studies sex, gender and reproduction. Its founder, Alfred Kinsey, produced ground-breaking research on sexuality, including the Kinsey Scale.

Members of the GOP supermajority argued that the institute’s human sexuality research was not in line with the state’s values, and further pointed to reports that Kinsey solicited information from a convicted pedophile for an orgasm study.