Hello Kind and Curious Human,
In August 1983, I walked up to the fourth floor of Boisen Hall and met people who are still my friends and my chosen family forty-three years later. The rooming lottery did that. I did not choose them and they did not choose me, and we have been choosing each other ever since.
That is the version of Indiana University I fell in love with. An institution that put strangers in a hallway and trusted what would happen next.
I want to tell you what it costs me to write the next part. I have been carrying this for two years and writing it for weeks. I lost sleep over it. I rewrote it. I argued with myself about whether to publish it at all. The question every leader eventually has to answer about something is whether speaking publicly is worth the cost. I am answering mine here, because we are living through a divisive moment, and I have committed to using my platform to shine a light on what is unjust, even when the institution involved is one I love. The alternative is to disappear quietly. That is not what I ask of any of the leaders I work with. I will not ask it of myself.
I worked my way through IU on scholarships, grants, loans, and a deal with my Dad. I left Bloomington in 1987 with a degree, a network, and a debt I am still trying to repay. Not the financial kind. The other kind.
When I came back, I came back as a donor and a builder. Scholarships in the College of Arts and Sciences. Contributions to Dean’s budgets. The Queer Philanthropy Circle, which I helped form in 2019 and have chaired through this final term. Service on the Black Philanthropy Circle and the Women’s Philanthropic Leadership Council. In 2020, the President’s Medallion for meritorious service. Alumni of the Year from the LGBTQ+ Alumni Association. In Fall 2025, Distinguished Alumni of the College of Arts and Sciences. Book events on campus and in town. I bleed cream and crimson. Go IU.
I joined the Indiana University Foundation Board in 2017 because of a sentence I have said more times than I can count. May we leave our corner of the world better than we found it. That sentence is why I funded scholarships. It is why I built and served on the philanthropy circles. It is why I served three full three-year terms. It is why I was eligible for, and considered, a fourth.
It is also why I am saying no.
I left the October 2025 board meeting angry, sad, and concerned.
Not for the first time, and that was the point. In that meeting and the June 2025 meeting before it, we were discussing what was happening to higher education in real time. Department of Education guidance. Federal executive orders. State legislation. The dismantling of the architecture public universities have operated inside for decades. The question on the table was what Indiana University was going to do about it. The answer, meeting after meeting, was a version of the same answer. Fly below the radar. Do not rock the boat. Wait it out.
When some of us pushed, the response was clarifying. We were told to be on the team or not be in the room. That is not a governance philosophy. That is a loyalty test. A board exists to ask hard questions of an administration. A board that is asked to stop asking is not a board anymore. It is a rubber stamp with a name plate.
I had raised concerns through the channels that exist for raising concerns, and I had watched those channels narrow. I have lost the will to keep fighting from inside a room where the fight no longer moves anything. That is not a failure of the sentence I came in with. That is a recognition that the sentence requires me to spend my time, my talent, and my philanthropy where they can still do work.
There is a version of this essay where I tell you I am leaving the institution worse than I found it. I will not write that version, because no single board member built or broke this place. What I will tell you is that I am leaving with the institution in a state I cannot reconcile, and I have decided that reconciliation is not my job to perform in public on its behalf.
Let me be specific about what cannot be reconciled, because vague concerns are how institutions get away with what they get away with.
The federal pressure is real. The state pressure sits closer to home. Three actions by the State of Indiana in the last two years have changed what Indiana University is permitted to be. The legislature has cut public university budgets by five percent. It has passed SEA 202, which requires faculty to teach “intellectually diverse” ideas or risk losing tenure, and followed it with budget language that makes faculty governance bodies purely advisory. In May 2025, language slipped into the final pages of a 215-page budget bill stripped IU alumni of the right to elect three of nine trustees, a right alumni had held for over a century. A month later, the governor used his new power to remove all three sitting alumni-elected trustees, Vivian Winston, Jill Maurer Burnett, and Donna Spears, by one-sentence letter. Their profiles disappeared from the Board of Trustees website. Three people who had given years to this institution were erased from it overnight. That is the climate in which I was being asked to renew my own service.
On the first day of Pride Month, Governor Braun declared June Nuclear Family Month in Indiana. The proclamation defines family as one husband, one wife, and any children, and calls that definition God’s design. The lieutenant governor’s response was an illustrated poster captioned “Take back the rainbow.” Joe and I are family. The students the Queer Philanthropy Circle was built to support are family. The friends I met on the fourth floor of Boisen Hall in 1983 became my chosen family. In one signature and one poster, the state told all of us that we are not what it recognizes as family. Indiana faces real and consequential challenges. This is what its top elected leaders chose to do with their platforms this week. These are also the men who now control the Board of Trustees of my alma mater. That is the climate in which I am choosing not to renew.
At the institutional level, I cannot reconcile what I have seen on free speech, on the dismantling of diversity and inclusion infrastructure, and on the protection of marginalized students, faculty, and staff. The administration’s posture has been to absorb federal and state pressure quietly rather than push back publicly. The people who pay the price for that posture are the students, the faculty, and the staff whose lives the institution is supposed to protect. I am not going to itemize. The people who need to know what I mean know. I will give you one example, because one is enough. Donors to the Queer Philanthropy Circle were told that emergency scholarship funds for LGBTQ+ students could no longer be designated that way, because designating them as such could be read as preferential and risk national grant funding. Sit with that for a moment. The mechanism was: we built a community of donors specifically to support LGBTQ+ students at IU, and we were told that supporting them as LGBTQ+ students was now a liability. That is the moment the covenant breaks. Not in a press release. In a sentence delivered quietly to the people who showed up to help.
I remain proud of the IUF and the colleagues I served alongside for nine years, board members and staff alike. The friendships I built in that room will outlast my service in it. The Foundation is not the source of my concern, and I want to be clear about that once and only once. My concern is with the wider direction of Indiana University and with the state and federal leadership that has reshaped what the university is willing to defend. I cannot in good conscience renew a board commitment to an institution whose direction I am no longer able to publicly stand behind.
The chairmanship of the Queer Philanthropy Circle is now in the hands of a younger, energetic alum whose leadership and vision I am excited about. That is how this is supposed to work. Older alumni do not hold these seats forever. We build the thing, hold it through the hard years, hand it to the people who will carry it next, and stay close enough to be useful when they ask. Intergenerational leadership is not a slogan. It is a discipline. This week, on Affinity Giving Grants Day, the philanthropy circles I have served and built alongside, the Women’s Philanthropic Leadership Council, the Black Philanthropy Circle, the Queer Philanthropy Circle, and the new Latina Philanthropy Circle, granted $600,000 across 38 awards. Since their inception, these circles have granted more than $4.4 million combined. That is what the work looks like when you build it well and hand it well. I am moving into the role of immediate past chair, where I will continue to give and to serve. I am continuing my support of the Hamilton Lugar School of International Studies. Copenhagen made me a global citizen in 1985. A country retreating from the world needs more global citizens, not fewer. I am continuing my scholarships. I am continuing my mentorship of students and young alumni. I am stepping off a governance body. I am not stepping out of a community.
There is a leadership lesson in this, and it is the reason I am writing instead of sending a private letter. Knowing when to leave any situation is an art and a skill. Leadership writing usually focuses on how to enter rooms and lead in them. There is far less written about how to leave them. Leaving well is a leadership act. Knowing when your continued presence becomes consent is a leadership act. Refusing to disappear quietly when you have been pushed to the margins is a leadership act. If you recognize your own situation in some other room, that is the only invitation I will offer. Look at your room. Ask what your continued presence is signing for.
Going forward, you will find me on stages, in nonprofit boardrooms, and in my writing, creating safe spaces, supporting authentic leadership, and spreading radical kindness. The work continues. The seat does not.
Here is what I am taking with me. Satisfaction in a job well done. Faith in the new chair of the Queer Philanthropy Circle, who will carry it further than I could have. Gratitude for the lifelong friendships, the laughs, and the memories that nine years in that room produced.
The boy who walked up to the fourth floor of Boisen Hall in August 1983 is still in this. He is still grateful for the lottery that gave him his people. He is still working off the debt he owes the institution that put him in that hallway. He is just doing it from a different room.
In community and conversation,
Jim
