IU deserves a serious president. Pamela Whitten must go.

For a top-ranked public university with a $4 billion budget, home to Nobel laureates and NCAA champions alike, it seems reasonable to expect our board of trustees could have performed its legally required fiduciary duty by finding us a capable leader three years ago. We’d had 18 of them over 200 years, and very few are viewed retrospectively as screwups.

So, how did we end up with somebody who can’t do the job?

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Pamela Whitten faced calls to resign in May from every IU Bloomington school that voted, including the Kelley School of Business. These faculty actions follow growing concern over the past three years that neither our provost (a long-time associate of Whitten’s) nor Whitten can lead an institution they refuse to understand.

The IU Board of Trustees on May 15 announced an “independent review of the campus climate to better inform the path forward.”

But the board has it wrong. What’s needed is a full review of the university climate and of the process that resulted in this disastrous presidential hire. Centering the concerns on the Bloomington campus ignores the evidence that the toxic culture we are experiencing originates with Whitten and with trustees who are asleep at the wheel.

Whitten was a known entity when she arrived from Georgia. Allegations of verbal abuse and a toxic workplace culture followed her. Yet the trustees ignored the candidates brought forward by a selection committee comprising high-level alumni, faculty, and staff, and brought in somebody who had only led a university a fraction of the size of IU.

IU deserves a serious president. Somebody who will agree to be guided by principles of shared governance and will respect the thousands of people who came before them and performed the hard work of institution-building.

Serious presidents prioritize student rights to free expression of ideas regardless of their content or popularity. They do not practice viewpoint discrimination.

State politicians who play the culture war card by condemning IU faculty as political partisans are also not serious people. Those state leaders who vaunt their alumni status need to think ahead, because there will be a point where Whitten does permanent damage to the brand. The lawsuits will continue to accumulate (they’ve already started) and the donations will continue to diminish (also already happening).

And that’s why — independent review or not — Whitten has to go. And why our 20th president must be chosen with much greater care and a full understanding of how quickly one individual and a careless board of trustees can damage the institution they committed to preserve.

Beth Gazley is co-founder of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. She also is a professor of public affairs in the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.