May 10, 2019
Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President
Indiana University Bloomington
107 S. Indiana Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47405
Dear Provost Robel,
Last fall, the university opened a Title IX investigation in which I was the responding party.
Since then, I’ve kept quiet in public, and I’ve done everything I can to cooperate with the university’s process. But the investigation is done now, and for the reasons I’ll explain in this letter, I
hereby resign my appointment as an associate professor, effective at the close of business today. I’m
choosing to forgo procedural rights that might (though I doubt it) preserve my job if I fought to the
Pyrrhic end, because the academic year is over and it’s time for this process to be over, too.
Why? Well, I don’t think I’m breaching any confidences by saying that the allegations in this
case describe me drinking to excess in a public place I shouldn’t have been, in company I shouldn’t
have kept, and treating the people present in ways they didn’t deserve. Those behaviors are totally
inconsistent with what any university expects of its faculty, of course, but it’s more than that. When
the investigation began, a few people I trust suggested that maybe it was time to take a hard look at
my life. They were right. Once I was ready to be honest with myself, I had to admit that the night
in question was the clearest sign yet of a problem that had been growing for some time, and which
was going to keep growing as long as I kept ignoring it. Although that admission didn’t solve anything by itself, it did beat denial.
The truth is that the university’s investigation, in addition to doing justice, probably had the
side effect of saving my life. More importantly, it’s given me a chance to live the life I’ve got
differently. I was becoming an ugly man, and I needed nothing so much as a clean mirror and
someone brave enough to make me look at it. Well, someone did, and they did it before my son
got old enough to start feeling ashamed of his father. Not everyone is so lucky. So I’d be a real
ingrate if I felt anything other than admiration and gratitude for the complainants’ integrity in this
case.
And that’s all fine, but words are cheap, as lawyers know, and being sorry isn’t enough. I hurt
people, and it’s pretty damned hard to imagine those people feeling the slightest bit better just
because I wish it hadn’t happened. No. Accepting responsibility means actually doing something, if
you can, to spare the people you hurt from any more harm. My sense is that the people most affected
by all of this would prefer it if I didn’t remain at the university, and I understand why. If I were in
their shoes, I think I’d want to live my life in Bloomington without worrying about crossing paths
with a person I’d rather forget, no matter what sweet song of reform he’s singing now. In fact, that
makes so much sense to me that I can’t see any honest basis for prolonging this process any further.

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 In addition to confession and contrition, in other words, sin requires punishment. Part of mine
is that I’ll no longer be on the faculty at Indiana University, and I cannot call that result unjust. Let
me use my last words as a professor here to say that it’s been a privilege to serve on this faculty and
to teach my students. What comes next, I don’t know. What I do know is that halfway through the
journey of my life, I lost—through my own grievous fault—the straightforward path, my sense of
right and wrong. It behooves me now to take another road.

Sincerely,
Ian Samuel

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