I'm a former IU provost. Jim Banks should remember he represents professors, too.

My connection to Indiana University is deep. My late husband and I both received degrees from Bloomington, as did our children, my son-in-law and my brother and sister. I taught law on the campus to hundreds of students for 36 years and served as the dean of the Maurer School of Law and as the provost of the campus, for 10 years each.

I did not recognize the caricature of the brilliant faculty of that campus presented in Rep. Jim Banks’ May 6 commentary.

There are over 2,500 faculty members on IU’s flagship campus, and they represent a dazzling array of talent and expertise that includes physicists, biologists, chemists and scientists of all kinds, accounting, finance and business experts, historians and economists, public health experts, lawyers, poets, experts on every geographic area in the world, policy experts, statisticians, mathematicians, engineers, doctors, architects, musicians and many more. They work in departments that have produced Nobel Prize winners and many other major awards and prizes for their excellence, and in schools, like the Kelley School of Business, the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Jacobs School of Music, that sit at the top of the national rankings in their fields.

Collectively, they provide the education that allows IU Bloomington to graduate thousands of students each year, including many of our state’s nurses, teachers and entrepreneurs, and the research that last year alone brought over $154 million to the state. These are the faculty members who, working with their students and through the IU Bloomington Center for Rural Engagement, have brought their talent, research and devotion to our state through needed direct services in over 90 rural Indiana communities in areas ranging from treating opioid addiction and revitalizing downtown areas, to poetry and memory workshops for the elderly and music instruction for high school students.

Every one of these people and their families are citizens of Indiana who pay taxes here and deserve basic respect from their elected representatives, regardless of that representative’s assumptions about their political party affiliation. These talented faculty members have many options about where they can work. To our great benefit, they have chosen to be citizens of Indiana, contributing in myriad ways to the economy, the health and the quality of place of our communities. They deserve better than vilification and name-calling from an elected representative.

IU Bloomington is a state treasure. By and large, our elected officials — and the citizens of our state — understand this. I would ask that Rep. Banks show a bit of restraint and civility towards the dedicated professionals of one of the state’s largest employers and a modicum of serious curiosity about their actual concerns.

Lauren Robel is the Val Nolan Professor of Law Emerita and the former provost of IU Bloomington.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Jim Banks should listen to IU professors — he represents them, too