Whitten accepts new salary of $900,000 while cutting funds across campus

Recently, the IU Board of Trustees renewed President Whitten’s contract for 5 more years with a new starting salary of $900,000 a year—a 28% raise.

$900,000.

At the same time that Whitten makes more per year than any IU president in history, IU is facing a funding crisis. The ruthless and illegal cuts to federal research funding by the Trump administration and the billionaire oligarchs backing him have already begun to impact IU. Cuts and freezes to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and US-sponsored language grants, as well as state attacks on DEIA programs have left faculty and graduate workers in limbo or worse. All the while Whitten makes nearly a million dollars a year.

It’s table stakes to point out that Whitten is shameless—only someone so shameless would refuse to resign after graduate students and faculty voted “No Confidence” by a vast majority—but to accept a raise while the university faces direct attacks and illegal funding freezes from the federal government is a step beyond shameless.

It’s clear that, just like at the Federal level, billionaires and millionaires like Whitten see IU and other institutions as a way to line their own pockets. Graduate workers still earn far below the living wage for Bloomington: even with the new $24k minimum stipend for 10 months, graduate workers fall nearly $20,000 short of the $43,000 annual living wage in Bloomington. If graduate workers received a 28% raise from their minimum stipend like Whitten, we would still make $12,000 less than the annual living wage.

Given these conditions both nationally and at IU, It’s not shocking that departments across the university are struggling to recruit graduate workers, staff, and faculty. Staff turnover is high because wages are criminally low. “Budget pressures” are the explantation for the war of attrition on tenure lines across departments. Departments and programs like the Kinsey Institute (again) or the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society are facing intense cuts due to these same “budget pressures.” Where is all that money going? Not to these world-class programs and departments, or better lab equipment, or competitive pay for the people who make them work. It’s going directly into the hands of the most unpopular president in IU history and the administration surrounding her.

This administration gets rich from our labor while chipping away at our institution, but this isn’t their university—it’s ours.

But there is a way to fight back: join the union, organize your department, and stand up for ourselves.

This is our teaching, our research, our labor,** our university**.