In his position as president of Iowa State, Steven Leath is something like the CEO of Iowa State. He has held that position, as a peer of his 14 predecessors, for exactly one year. Jan. 16, 2012, was his first official day in office. Ordinarily, anniversaries are cause for celebration or commemoration.

Today, we just hope that Leath gets cut a little slack from the rest of the world. In the past year Leath has had to contend with a need to familiarize himself with Iowa, Ames and the campus environment, and has had to assemble a new cohort of college deans. He has had to weather the storms of controversies regarding the connections between Iowa Board of Regents member Bruce Rastetter and a land development project in Tanzania by a company linked to Rastetter called AgriSol. He has had to explain away the hiring of a former Rastetter employee, Joe Murphy, as the university’s state relations officer, without a public search, and he has had to deal with immense criticism about restrictions on the academic purview of the Harkin Institute for Public Policy.

Today we take a more moderate tack than we have in the past, and try to offer the simple perspective of a few students who study the arts and humanities and social sciences rather than the technical aspects of hard sciences such as chemistry or physics or agricultural science.

Leath has had to contend with all the challenges, controversies and problems mentioned above while overseeing the day-to-day operation of a research university enrolling more than 30,000 students alongside his ambitions to make Iowa State a key player in a “Capital Corridor” stretching from Ames to Des Moines as well as vastly expanding the size of Iowa State’s Research Park along the lines of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park — all the while remembering to include due homage to Iowa State’s land-grant origins in his inauguration speech and subsequent actions.

Perhaps Iowa State should not be run as a corporate research and development department-for-hire. Perhaps, instead, we should concentrate more on the curriculum and the demands of teaching 30,000 students how to provide the next generation of scientific and technological innovation — and to provide it judiciously, so that the innovations we develop tomorrow have a place not merely within the boundaries of their scientific fields, but so that they exist within a context of the whole world.

Without the compass of such “ivory tower” disciplines — political science, history, sociology, art, music, literature, foreign language, and many others — a multitude of scientists would have been able to quote, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Hosting facilities that drive economic growth by attracting big businesses to the state and providing them with the technologies necessary to do business here is a good. At the core of any university’s mission, however (including the land-grants), is the advancement of learning in as many subjects as possible. Within the universe-ity, everything has its place. And if we exclude some from their places, that universe-ity is incomplete.