GOOD NEWS.

From the founding of Cold Spring Shops we have maintained two core beliefs about higher education.  First, the faculty are the proper stewards of the curriculum.  Second, administrative usurpations, particularly by failed scholars or by people with no faculty experience, contribute mightily to the failure of universities in the past forty or fifty years.

We therefore acclaim a development from Bloomington, Indiana.

Indiana University’s Bloomington faculty have declared no confidence in President Pamela Whitten, Provost Rahul Shrivastav and Vice Provost Faculty and Academic Affairs Carrie Docherty.

About 900 faculty attended the vote Tuesday at the IU Auditorium.

Faculty cannot remove a leader from the university, but Bloomington Faculty Council President Colin Johnson said the vote is “profoundly significant.” He urged faculty to vote thoughtfully and seriously.

I'll even forgive Professor Johnson that "profoundly," usually one of the faculty lounge worship-words we enjoy mocking hereabouts.

The response from an Indiana deanlet called Mark Bode illustrates, precisely, the way in which our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.

IU spokesperson Mark Bode provided a statement to WFIU/WTIU when the faculty council announced the vote:

"The current climate in higher education is uniquely challenging, with universities addressing and adapting to unprecedented new pressures and demands," Bode said. "Indiana University continues to evolve in ways that keeps it on a positive and powerful trajectory forward. As it confronts these new realities, IU remains driven by an unwavering commitment to student success and opportunity resulting from valued collaboration with our faculty and staff.”

It's the same sort of thing you'd get from the Mitt Romney type showing up at the steel mill to tell the workforce their jobs are being moved to Mexico, or the McKinsey type decrying the unwillingness of homeowners to buy electric cars or ride the bus.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, suggests that senior administrators lost the confidence of the faculty and the librarians for being insufficiently sturdy in defense of wokeness.

The petition to call the meeting said “the current IU administration is encroaching on both academic freedom and shared governance.” It then listed multiple incidents.

The first reference was to the university’s barring of Abdulkader Sinno, an associate professor, from teaching this spring and summer after he booked space on campus for a Palestine Solidarity Committee-hosted event. Docherty wrote Sinno’s suspension letter, which said he might also be fired following continued investigation. The second incident mentioned was IU Bloomington’s cancellation of a long-planned art exhibition by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American abstract artist. Both of these incidents occurred after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The petition also accused the IU administration of failing to “proactively and effectively stand against the Indiana legislature’s violations of academic freedom and faculty protections.” Recently, Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature passed, and its Republican governor signed, legislation diminishing diversity, equity and inclusion programs and tenure protections in the state’s public higher education institutions.

And the beat goes on.

After Tuesday’s votes, Whitten, the president, sent a lengthy email to the IU Bloomington faculty and faculty emeriti. Pledging to “listen and learn,” she said she will “weigh the guidance from faculty council and the participation of the campus community through shared governance to achieve our collective vision of a thriving campus.”

W. Quinn Buckner, chair of IU’s Board of Trustees, released an unequivocal statement. “Let me be absolutely clear: President Whitten has my full support and that of every member on the Board of Trustees.”

One part struggle session, one part George Steinbrenner expressing his full confidence in Billy Martin.