Research to develop renewable energy is very important to Iowa State. Since ethanol subsidies have been common for more years than we as students can remember, and wind farms are cropping up left and right, Iowans are in the habit of giving attention to renewable energy. Since Iowa State is the land-grant college of Iowa and is a large, research university, much of the burden to research renewable energy technology rests with our alma mater.

In his installation speech last September, President Steven Leath articulated a vision of a university that partnered with Iowa’s “business and industrial sector” to develop “the three state focus industries of bioscience, advanced manufacturing and information technology.” Then (and presumably still), Leath plans “to work with the other segments of Iowa to develop a broad and bold plan for becoming a leader in the bioeconomy and to implement that plan.”

He also prescribed a character trait necessary for the state to achieve this development: “If Iowa wants to be successful in the bioeconomy, we need to be bold.”

In keeping with those ambitions, Iowa State’s advocacy group for relations with state legislators, Alliance for Iowa State, has four initiatives. Alliance for Iowa State holds as its priorities a base appropriations increase of 2.6 percent ($4.4 million), a $39.5 million appropriation to create a financial aid program to replace tuition set-asides, a $7.5 million “Bio Economy Initiative” appropriation to develop “biorenewables and biorefinery capabilities” and a $5 million appropriation for a biosciences building to house research facilities.

Half of Alliance for Iowa State’s goals, then, relate to the narrow goal of developing one industry.

And recently, the National Science Foundation awarded Iowa’s three Regent universities a $20 million, five-year Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research grant “to boost the state’s research capacity in renewable energy and energy utilization.”

Through Iowa State’s devotion to such specific, economically in-vogue knowledge, rather than adaptable principles that can be applied to create whatever technological implement a producer desires, we seem to have repudiated the legacy of such individuals as the author of the land-grant colleges bill of 1862, Rep. Justin S. Morrill and Iowa State’s first president, Adonijah Welch. We seem content to be the research and development department of a major corporation or government-directed economy rather than a storehouse and explorer of knowledge that ordinary people can use.

When he gave his inaugural address in 1869, Welch had to combat several educational prejudices. One prejudice in particular that Welch pushed back against was that agriculture and the mechanic arts, as branches of learning, were not as intellectually vigorous as the classical liberal arts and the professions.

Welch countered with a profound assertion that the specific material of the branch of knowledge was irrelevant to rigor. Any discipline that required a student to discipline himself or herself in its pursuit and that could be adapted “to further the interests and enjoyments of life” deserved academic study. “The gaining of disciplined ability depends more on the teacher who inculcates the method and mode of acquiring than upon the science that supplies the facts to be acquired and far more on the pupil than either,” Welch posited.

Enduring knowledge, not the particular solution to a problem that has a distinct place in space and time, should consume a university’s energies.