I don’t give a damn about Harvard or Yale. I care deeply about Buena Vista University. Leave the University of Iowa alone because that’s where the seeds for “Field of Dreams” were germinated. We should be more concerned with livestock disease research funding for Iowa State University than whether Ivy League presidents were too dull-witted to handle questions from congressional simpletons.
Republicans have set their sights on higher education in Iowa. They want to root out diversity brainwashing and stuff like that. They maintain there is a whole lotta liberal grooming going on in Ames, Iowa City and even Storm Lake. It is due for a leash in an election year. Banish the elitists!
Your bookkeeper might have attended Buena Vista. Your veterinarian no doubt went to Iowa State. Caitlin Clark is surely elite but not elitist — go Hawks — and it is a damn fine children’s hospital to which we wave on football Saturdays in Iowa City.
Such is the state of our politics. Pick a side: Palestinian or Israeli. Hamas is a terrorist organization that murders innocents. Israel terrorized Gaza, and intends to clear out the Palestinians. A college president worth her pay would say: “Each side is wrong. There is no place for calls to violence anywhere in America, including on campus. Otherwise, we will defend free speech.”
I could have come up with that line on the spot, and I barely earned a journalism degree.
From St. Thomas, at the time a small men’s college in St. Paul with a decent hockey team. Lucky for me, if you had a solid C average and an Irish name you were a lock for admission. Me and the boys thought Tommy Tech pretentious when it became a “regional university.” In our day, the rector of Ireland Hall who lived on the second floor for what must have been 100 years, Father Scooter Lavin, put out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at night for the stoners to feed on. You could say just about anything you wanted because nobody listened to you. None of us could have located Gaza on a map back then. I got out with a solid C average. We did okay. Oscar became a psychologist, Duffy a workers comp lawyer, Lentz a mental health care worker. We tried.
Harvard, meanwhile, fostered RFK2, Ted Cruz, Larry Summers and other weirdos who read all the wrong books and have not done much productive work.
Instead of pursuing their own course of political correctness, I wish politicians would increase funding into avian flu research through the National Animal Disease Lab at Ames and Iowa State University. Nobody is talking about that. Nothing nefarious is going on anywhere near the campanile. It is not anti-Semitic to question whether sending more arms to lunatics controlling the Netanyahu government is wise. The kids in Ames are okay.
It is not elitist to expect that your children will get post-secondary education. There was simply no question with our parents: You will go to college because that’s how you get ahead in America. You must learn a trade. Education allows you more control over your life.
Brother John attended what we consider an elite college, Notre Dame. Sister Ann went for a couple years to Mount Mercy in Cedar Rapids. She can write a funnier column than he can if she wants to, and John knows it. Their experience on campus had very little to do with their politics, which were in place by the age of reason, seven. Daddy bounced us on his knee extolling the virtues of Harry Truman, who attended business college for a year in Kansas City before dropping out.
Truman, by the way, was the first world leader to recognize Israel, within 11 minutes of its creation as a nation. Don’t blame him for the conflict, it was a mess handed off from the crumbling British Empire. You could learn that anyplace except Iowa, where it could be labeled a “divisive concept” and banned from the classroom. Seriously.
Joe Biden went to the University of Delaware, a land-grant school like Iowa State. Not exactly Ivy League elitist. He was a crafty running back who nearly flunked out. Biden should be remembered as a more consequential president than Yale baseball star George HW Bush. Biden was dealt an awfully bad hand with the pandemic and such, and has played it as well as a Fighting Blue Hen could. His mother would tell him to cut Netanyahu down to size but it’s probably not so easy with all the great Ivy League thinkers in his ear. Apparently it is not easy finding ways to fund soil health research, Storm Lake’s urgent and chronic water problems, or keeping rural Iowa from sliding off the map. These are not the concerns of the Penn or Harvard former presidents, nor of their Ivy League congressional interrogators, nor of the great East Coast opinion factories. They are the concerns of Buena Vista University, where education for service is the motto. Quaint, no?
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Have you explored the variety of writers in the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative? They are from around the state and contribute commentary and feature stories of interest to those who care about Iowa. Please pick five you’d like to support by becoming paid. It helps keep them going. Enjoy:
"We will take the banner of free speech and nail it to our masthead!"
--J.W. "Bill" Maucker, president, University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, 1968, on refusing to fire anti-Vietnam War English professor Edward Hoffmans, who was counseling male students on their options for avoiding the draft.
Yeah, we had subversive radicals at Iowa State like George Washington Carver (via Simpson College) and Henry Wallace (well, plenty thought he was so FDR dumped him for Truman). Then there was Nobel Prize winner and "Green Revolution" father Norman Borlaug of Cresco who went to school with those one-worlders at the University of Minnesota like Hubert Humphrey, who tried to brainwash kids teaching at Macalester College (just a Harmon Killebrew line drive from ever sprawling St. Thomas) before he got into politics..
I'm sure all those hippie clergy teachers I had at Waterloo Columbus High warped my mind before the radicals at UNI and Iowa State ever got their hands on me. Dang, they let us read Ralph Ellison and Babi Yar and stuff like that.
Mr. Cullen, we both live in Iowa, so I'll say - Art, it sounds Iowa nice. Your words bring hope for a regrowth of Iowa NIce. But I cannot find evidence that Iowa has ever been 'nicer' than anywhere else. In fact, Minnesota and Wisconsin claim that Iowa used their marketing slogan. Marketing slogans are "dime-a-dozen" won't even buy a cup of coffee. Art - I encourage you to hold the course - rough waters ahead - creating twenty years of fodder for your analysis.