Indiana University Foundation board member James Fielding is walking away from the board after seven years, saying he can no longer stand behind the university in good conscience.
Fielding, an IU alumnus and three-term board member who first joined in 2017, said in a July 1 LinkedIn post that he will not seek a fourth term. In a longer blog post explaining the decision, he said he felt upset and discouraged after the board’s June and October 2025 meetings, where he said university responses fell short of concerns about higher education’s future under changing state and federal laws and guidance.
He also said some board members who pushed back against the university’s decision not to “rock the boat” were told “to be on the team or to not be in the room.”
“A board exists to ask hard questions of an administration,” Fielding wrote in a July blog post. “A board that is asked to stop asking is not a board anymore. It is a rubber stamp with a name plate.”
The IU Foundation is the fundraising arm for the university, handling donations that include scholarship gifts. Its board of directors serves as the organization’s legal governing body and helps the school meet its fundraising goals.
Fielding was also a founder of the Queer Philanthropy Circle in 2019, a giving group created to connect IU donors in support of LGBTQ+ students, staff, faculty and alumni. He said donors involved with the circle were told it was no longer possible to set aside emergency scholarships for LGBTQ+ students because doing so could jeopardize national grant funding.
He added that in 2025, after federal pressure on universities to end race-based scholarships, the IU Foundation urged donors to adjust scholarship language for marginalized groups and suggested including allies in scholarships for LGBTQ+ students.
“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,” he wrote.
Fielding also tied the university’s shifting climate to pressure from state and federal officials. He pointed to a policy written into the state budget in May 2025 that gave the governor full discretion over appointments to the university’s Board of Trustees, a change that led Braun to remove three alumni-elected trustees.
“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,” he wrote. “The administration’s posture has been to absorb federal and state pressure quietly rather than push back publicly.”
His post also took aim at Indiana Gov. Mike Braun and Lt.
Gov. Micah Beckwith after Braun declared June 1, the first day of Pride Month, “nuclear family month” and said a family made of one husband and one wife is “God’s design for the family structure.”
A version of the proclamation shared online by Beckwith also urged people to “take back the rainbow.”
Fielding included multiple photos from his wedding in the online statement.
In his closing remarks, Fielding said he still values IU as his alma mater and hopes to keep supporting the university through other philanthropic efforts. He is one of 50 board members.
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