An American Tune

and Hoosier Football Fever

I love Indiana University; my real life began when I arrived on campus in the fall of 1965. I was there in 1967 when the chronically inept football team made it to the Rose Bowl—the last time an IU team made it to the Rose Bowl until this season.

Naturally, I’m getting a kick out of the hoo-ha surrounding this year’s undefeated team and the escalating excitement in the run-up to Monday’s championship game. And who doesn’t adore the Mendoza brothers?

I was also at IU when protests against the government’s actions in Vietnam threatened to tear the university apart.

My novel, An American Tune, explores that troubled time.

While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name—her real name—a name she has not heard in more than twenty-five years. Not even her husband knows that back in the ‘60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. Now Jane, and her radical past, are about to come into the light.

Shuttling between the present day and the turbulent 1960s, An American Tune tells the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who flees when she becomes complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she becomes: a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An American Tune is both a poignant story of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, and an evocation of a country struggling with its own violent legacy.

I wrote the book in the aftermath of 9/11, struggling to understand how politicians of my generation could be so easily drawn into a war as ill-conceived as the war in Vietnam had been.

I still don’t understand it. I never will.

But it’s clear to me how the blatant lies that led to the war in Iraq established the culture of lies that has brought us to this moment in America in which voices are silenced and Ice agents threaten our lives.

Sadly, the Indiana University administration has fallen into step with MAGA policies in its attempts to control the curriculum and limit the free speech of students and faculty.

While eyes are on IU for its remarkable football program, it seems important for those of us who care about our school to share our concern that its reputation for academic excellence is at risk.

Check out the trailer for Freedoms Under Assault, a powerful full-length documentary that chronicles the systematic destruction of a world-class university and the politically motivated culture war against its faculty over a two-year period. A perfect storm of an autocratic university president collaborating with a supermajority reactionary state legislature following the cultural wars agenda of the White House has effectively curtailed the institutional autonomy of Indiana University as well as shared governance structures, academic freedom, free speech and assembly rights, tenure, and the viability of arts and humanities programs.

The film shows the extent to which a university administration conspired to silence, intimidate, scare, persecute and even exile faculty members accused of violating , absurd, and mean spirited “new rules.”

Co-directed and produced by award-winning documentarians Jacky Comforty and Robert Arnove, the 77-minute film artfully assembles footage of daytime demonstrations and nighttime vigils, in-depth interviews with key protagonists, and archival photos to provide a compelling view of how authoritarian regimes across the country and globe are bent on destroying universities as centers critical to the functioning of democratic societies. In turn, the documentary illustrates how repression leads to resistance. GO HOOSIERS!

Meanwhile, enjoy the game.

Go, Hoosiers!

It’s all true.