At this month’s Feb. 29 Board of Trustees meeting, board members will vote on a proposal from the Indiana University administration that will determine whether the Kinsey Institute remains under the operations of IU.
Researchers at the Kinsey Institute say they still haven’t seen the administration’s proposal.
“We have no idea what is being proposed to the Board of Trustees, and we don’t know what they’ll be voting on,” said Zoe Peterson, a senior scientist at the Kinsey Institute. “We would like more transparency.”
The Kinsey Institute, among the country’s foremost sex and gender research institutions, has been at Indiana University since its inception in 1947, pioneering the popular Kinsey scale of human sexuality and amassing one of the largest collections of materials related to sex, gender, and reproduction.
The institute has “been under attack since it started,” researchers say, for its controversial research on sexuality, and its founder Alfred Kinsey’s work, which involved psychological interviews with sex offenders. But last year, Indiana Republicans passed a bill that barred the institute from receiving state dollars through IU, taking aim at a 2016 change that transformed the institute from a nonprofit into being part of IU’s official operations.