For 2025, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Indiana University as the third to last college in the United States for free speech. This is devastating, especially as a journalist and a Bloomingtonian. IU has not been making smart choices recently and seems to have no clue how to run a universally prosperous school.  

The recent events with IU’s student newspaper, Indiana Daily Student (IDS), are shameful. Over the past couple of years, the IDS has been undergoing financial cuts, leading them to reduce their print editions to seven per semester just last school year. A statement from spokesperson Mark Bode was summarized in the Indy Star, as he claimed the university was making a shift to “prioritize digital media over print while addressing the publication’s financial deficit.” 

But as the IDS cut down their prints, IU administration started pushing for those prints to not contain any news-content, and rather focus on shallow IU events, such as homecoming. In the words of Stewart Mandel, the editor-in-chief of The Athletic, “[n]o printing news in the newspaper?” That’s just crazy. This is blatant censorship of the press, which completely ignores the right to freedom of the press. After refusing to censor the student’s voices, the director of student media, Jim Rodenbush, was promptly fired by IU. The next day, the university ordered the IDS to cut printing completely. 

IU’s treatment of IDS was so bad that the university’s rival, Purdue University, stepped in to help. Purdue’s student paper, The Exponent, delivered special copies of their papers showing their support for the IDS to IU’s campus as solidarity, calling it “Operation Clandestine Delivery,” showing that when you mess with one paper, you get the whole binder. 

But at least IU is finally good at football, right? Sure, Curt Cignetti has improved the team a lot and has brought back spirit to the athletic side of IU, including a new mascot, which I have still yet to figure out how a bison correlates to the Hoosiers, but I digress. Cignetti’s accomplishments led IU to offer him a new eight year contract in which he will earn approximately $11.6 million per year, according to the IU Athletics webpage. This would grant him about $92.8 million by 2033. He graciously accepted. 

Wait… $11.6 million a year? Cumulatively $93 million? If IU has all this money they are willing to spend on a football coach that may or may not still help the team in a few years, then why don’t they spend that money on empowering their students’ voices? The IDS’s “financial deficit” even got Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban’s, who is an IU alumnus, attention as he posted on X, “Not Happy. Censorship isn’t the way. I gave money to [the] IU general fund for the IDS last year, so they could pay for everyone and not run in a deficit. I gave more than they asked for.” Cuban is referring to his generous $5 million donation to IU, $250,000 of which was intended to go to helping pay off the IDS’s debts, and the rest went to support the newfound success of the football team. IU used this money to create the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology. 

So if Cuban donated money to help pay off IDS debts, and IU miraculously has $93 million to spend on Cignetti, then how is the IDS still in such a financial drag that they aren’t allowed to print anymore? It’s just not adding up. 

Now, it should be said that the money does come from separate places. The money for state universities to pay coaches comes from many things, with ticket sales and donations being a big part of it. IU football’s ticket sales accumulated a solid $10 million in the 2024 season. The university also loaned the football team $26 million to cover the transition from Tom Allen to Cignetti. But this means that IU athletics has a loan they must pay back to the university and just agreed to pay their coach $11.6 million a year. These don’t seem like very smart financial decisions. 

For programs such as the student newspaper, money is a little harder to come by as they don’t get as much media coverage or advertising as sports do and they obviously don’t have any tickets to sell. So this means that they are largely relying on donations from outside sponsors and alumni, like Cuban. These donations from IU alumni go into a fund managed by IU administrators called the IDS Legacy Fund. But even after Cuban’s donation, the IDS remained in nearly the same financial troubles. In an interview with the IndyStar, Rodenbush said that the Legacy Fund totaled almost over $400,000, but that he wasn’t allowed to touch it, even to pay the IDS’s debts. 

So basically, the IDS does have the money to dig themselves out of their financial troubles, but the administrative staff are preventing them from using the funds that are meant for the IDS. But if they aren’t allowed to use their own funds, surely IU could loan them the money to get out of their debt, right? No, because they already loaned $26 million to the football program. 

Furthermore, for the 2025 fiscal year, IU planned and approved a budget that would cut expenses by $100 million for the university. One way they planned to do that was by “scal[ing] back support for some non-academic programs,” according to IU Today. Since when did journalism become a non-academic program that doesn’t require attention or funding, but football does? Another  “non-academic” program that had their funding cut was the foreign language department. Not to mention IU’s decision to cut or consolidate degrees, resulting in a “net loss of 222 programs across all [IU] campuses,” WFYI Indy reported. 

These cuts happened across all Indiana state universities as a result of the requirements of the updated state budget, leading to about 400 degrees being cut. But “IU cut more programs than any other school,” according to WFYI, merging or suspending about 115 programs at the Bloomington campus alone. 

So IU allows a $93 million contract with the IU football coach, while in massive debt in programs across the board, and still decides to cut a colossal amount of academic programs, including the student newspaper, which takes away the voices of the students? I think IU needs to take some of their own classes at Kelley to learn how to manage a budget. 

Winning at sports, well, just football as our basketball team, what IU is supposed to be known for, has yet to make its comeback, is fun, sure, but when it comes at the expense of the students, their education, and their First Amendment rights, is it really worth it? I’m glad Cignetti will be sitting cushy for the next eight years and many to come, but at the end of the day, what matters most is that IU provides a good education for its students, across many academic areas, and gives their students a platform to express themselves without censoring their voices.