Protesting IU faculty don't speak for me. I say give Pamela Whitten a chance.

Remember the movie "Hoosiers"? When the new coach changed everything, the crowd went crazy and demanded he be fired. He was saved by one player, and by the end of the movie he was a hero. Are we about to see a replay of the movie with Indiana University President Pamela Whitten in Bloomington?

If her contract with IU is the season, she is only partway through.

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Let’s quickly review what’s happened. Since being hired, Whitten made a series of executive decisions that angered many of the faculty, resulting in 827 faculty members voting no confidence on April 16. Then, nine days later, student activists decided to put up a “Gaza liberation zone.” The day before, Whitten had a committee of employees change the rule on camping from not allowing overnight camping to not allowing camping at all. When the activists put up their tents, they were now trespassing, and she ordered the police to remove them; when they put up more tents the next day, she waited a day and again called in the police.

In both days, there were 57 arrests, but nobody was seriously injured. The police handed out one-year bans from IU property.

The activists responded with more tents after the second removal. They were peaceful, and Whitten stopped calling the police. The tents stayed up during graduation, which went smoothly, and the activists are still camping. The president’s actions caused the Bloomington faculty to vote on her termination. In contrast, IU's faculty union, AAUP, has asked for an investigation.

April was quite a month for the president. Does she deserved to be removed?

Suppose you were the president, and you were told activists were about to set up a camp like the “occupation zones” at other universities. You know that the activists in some universities have been violent, interfering with classes and student activities. In many places, Jewish students and faculty are threatened.

The camps are essentially centers of violence that attract radicals from inside and outside the universities. They also attract funding from the Gates Foundation, Susan and Nick Pritzker and the Rockefeller Foundation. What would you have done? Let the camp develop at IU and hope there is no violence?

Furthermore, IU’s 1969 policy of no overnight camping that Whiten changed as the tents were going up has rarely been enforced. Police are no doubt reluctant to be viewed as storm troopers, even though they acted responsibly each time they were called out. A week later, we know that the best policy was to leave the students alone, but how could the president have known this before the camp was established?

Having the police clear the camp twice, helpfully referred to by some on campus as the “Dunn Meadow Massacre,” sent a strong message that any attempt to interfere with classes and threaten other students would not be tolerated. Whitten is not one of the many college presidents who have “negotiated” with the activists who are violating rules on many universities. She is not about to cave in to those who scream the loudest.

As you probably suspect, the battle over Whitten is about more than the Gaza Occupation Zone on Dunn Meadow at the edge of IU’s campus. It is about the change she is causing.

By all accounts, she has an understanding of budgets that eluded previous presidents. She realizes that some traditional departments are too large for their reputation and for the number of students who they serve. Some are too small. Her administration has been tougher on granting tenure.

She knows that there are significant funded research opportunities that are being ignored. IU has about $750 million in funded research, and she thinks it can go to $1 billion. She has created many opportunities for the new Indianapolis campus.

Like the coach in Hoosiers, her decisions are easy to criticize, especially from media reports, blogs and TikTok videos, which is all the information that the Bloomington faculty needs to reach a conclusion. The trustees need to be a little more serious and gather more reliable information. While there may be facts that cast Whitten’s decisions as worse than I am portraying, I’ll bet this “coach” could win games for us, and deserves the chance to do so.

Charles Trzcinka is a James and Virginia Cozad Professor of Finance at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IU's Pam Whitten is causing change. She shouldn't be removed for it.