Across the globe, university students and faculty historically have opposed authoritarian regimes, of both the right and left. When dictatorships come to power among the first institutions to be attacked are a free press and autonomous universities. When serving as centers of unbridled inquiry and advocacy for more democratic and just societies, reactionary governments have responded with a heavy hand.

Conversely, there are example of higher educational leaders who have had the integrity and courage to defend their institutions against oppressive state authorities.

Indiana University, Bloomington has been a stellar example of a president, Herman B. Wells, who resisted efforts by a conservative state legislature 1950s to close down the university’s internationally Kinsey Institute of human sexuality research. Yet, at the beginning of 2025, IU again faces efforts by extremist legislators to cut all funding to the university unless it severs any ties it has to the Institute, including the right to rent property on the Bloomington campus.

In recent years, a combination of an increasingly reactionary state legislature, an autocratic university president, and a board of trustees uninterested in faculty concerns, threatens to destroy Indiana University as leading public Research 1University. Under assault are traditionally protected norms of academic freedom and tenure for faculty to conduct their research, teaching, and service engagements without external partisan interference. Concurrently, faculty, staff, and student constitutional rights of freedom of speech and assembly are met with threats and punitive sanctions to terminate employment or enrollment. The story of what is happening at Indiana University Bloomington illuminates epochal struggles that are now playing out from the local to the international.

Initially, conceived of as a single, full-length film to document what is transpiring on the Bloomington campus, it soon became apparent that this was not feasible. The number of issues to be covered, the hours of insightful commentary by various protagonists, and the dramatic footage of various demonstrations required a different format. We decided on creating a web site to support activism -using our entire collected interviews and video footage to inform and inspire action. We include entire interviews as well as individually tagged excerpts on specific topics. Doing so captures the unfolding and expanding number of critical issues that make Indiana University a valuable case study.

We view “Protect Our University: The Struggle Continues” as a center of activism for parallel struggles nationally and internationally. Our website can serve as a place where other film projects and documentary evidence can be archived. We invite other involved in similar struggles to send their ideas for effective ways to counter the extraordinarily harmful agendas of those determined to undermine the creative and critical role of higher education institutions in society.