On June 22, 2010, six people sat down for lunch in the dining room of the U.S. Senate.

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy, ISU Foundation President Dan Saftig and ISU alumnus and wealthy California lawyer and Democratic power broker Chuck Manatt were there to talk to Sen. Tom Harkin about what he was going to do with the trove of papers he had amassed in 10 years in the House of Representatives and nearly 30 years in the Senate.

They suggested he might want to turn them over to Iowa State, his alma mater. They pulled out a brochure they had mocked up describing a “Harkin Institute” and the vital role it would play at Iowa State, in Iowa and in the nation.

The papers would be invaluable to future students and scholars and historians, they said. In fact, the papers are a slice of history. As Harkin’s Senate seniority piled up, he became chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, where he twice wrote the nation’s farm bills, and then head of the hugely important Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Along the way, he also wrote the Americans With Disabilities Act, which has changed the lives of the disabled and the infrastructure of the nation.

Harkin, who has steered tens of millions of dollars of federal money to his alma mater over the years, was receptive to the idea. He and his wife, Ruth — a lawyer, business executive and one of nine members of the Iowa Board of Regents, who also was at the lunch — ultimately decided Iowa State would be a good home for the papers. (The sixth person at the lunch was Harkin’s chief of staff, Brian Ahlberg.)

The Harkin Institute would be a place not of bricks and mortar but of ideas, the Harkins and ISU officials agreed. It would house scholars and interns, hold forums and seminars, bring in speakers and office-holders. A staunch believer in academic freedom, Harkin was assured it would be open to anyone interested in any subject in the papers. It would be financed privately.

Late that year, the paperwork was begun. Establishing anything at a Board of Regents school requires a careful and formal process. Something like the Harkin Institute must first be vetted by the staff of the board office and then cleared by the provosts at all three state universities. Anything new has to mesh with the regents’ strategic plan, be unique in the system, have a clear mission and have a financing plan.

Agriculture was the first priority with regents

All of those hurdles were met, and at the meeting of the Board of Regents in April of 2011, the proposed Harkin Institute of Public Policy was presented to the board as Docket Item No. 31, a detailed, three-page explanation. “The senator’s policy concerns, including those related to agriculture, education, international affairs, disabilities, nutrition, health and labor, will guide and direct the proposed institute’s teaching, research and outreach priorities,” the docket item noted.

Geoffroy spoke forcefully and eloquently about its value to the university. And he noted that several public universities had centers named after senators and former senators.

But Craig Lang, a member of the Board of Regents and then head of the Iowa Farm Bureau, strongly opposed it. He said it was being rushed through, but ISU officials responded that nothing was unusual, that the plan had been sent to the board office six weeks earlier, that board president David Miles and president pro tem Jack Evans and executive director Robert Donley all had been briefed.

Lang, a conservative Republican with a deep dislike of Harkin (and who has since been voted out of office by Farm Bureau members), tried to stop the board action. He moved to table a motion to approve the institute, but he lost on a 5-3 vote, with Ruth Harkin abstaining. He grasped at straws, saying — somewhat incredibly — that the creation of the institute violated the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which is also known as the “Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act.”

A vote was called for, and the institute was approved, 6-2, with Ruth Harkin abstaining. The two “no” votes were Lang and Greta Johnson, the student regent who had close ties to conservative Republicans in the state. (Johnson now is on the ISU presidential staff, which can be interpreted in various ways.) Voting “yes” were Miles, a Democrat, and Evans, a Republican, along with Robert Downer, a Republican, and Rose Vasquez, Bonnie Campbell and me, all Democrats appointed by Tom Vilsack and all of whose terms were going to end in a few days.

Lang, Rastetter have much influence at Iowa State

But the fight was just beginning. Bruce Rastetter, who was at the meeting as an observer and who was soon to become a regent, berated a fellow Republican on the board for his vote. Someone stirred up the Legislature, which is usually stirred only by tuition rates or pornography in classrooms, and the Republican-controlled Iowa House passed a resolution that would have barred naming anything in the state after any sitting state or federal elected official. Gov. Terry Branstad, who is close to Rastetter but who had privately told Harkin that he supported the institute, suddenly came out against it.

The institute was launched. A temporary director was appointed. An advisory board was named. Money was raised. The first guest lecture was held.

The landscape was changing, though. Geoffroy retired. Rastetter and two others joined the Board of Regents. Miles, under pressure from the governor’s office, relinquished the board presidency before his term was up, and Lang was elected president. Rastetter replaced Evans as president pro tem. The board became, for the first time in memory, overtly political.

After a search for a new ISU president, Steven Leath, vice president for research at the University of North Carolina, was elected. He took office on Jan. 16 of this year. But Lang and Rastetter emerged as the people really running the university. Leath told me he talked with Rastetter almost every day — as astonishing change. In the past, except in times of crisis, board presidents usually talked with university presidents once every couple of weeks, if that. The board presidents concentrated on strategy and legislative relations and, when needed, crisis management and let the presidents run the universities.

Lang was behind change in Harkin agreement

Meantime, unbeknownst to the Harkins, the ag interests were at work against the institute. Early this year, the Harkins and the institute’s advisory board discovered, almost by accident, that ISU officials last fall had produced a “memorandum of understanding” that removed agriculture from an area of scholarship at the Harkin Institute — an area emphasized in the brochure produced at lunch and listed foremost in the regents docket item — rendering useless the boxcars of the senator’s ag papers.

This memorandum said the university’s Center for Agricultural Research and Development (CARD) “is the ISU unit that conducts public policy research on agriculture and related issues.” The Harkin Institute was to limit itself to “public policy research on education, international affairs, disabilities and labor, health and human services.” Nothing else.

When advisory board members questioned and complained — I am on that bipartisan board — Leath said he would take care of it. But emails make clear that Lang wouldn’t allow him to let the research at the Harkin Institute be unshackled. Yes, it would be okay for scholars and students to mine the ag papers at the Harkin Institute, Leath ultimately decreed, but:

• “Any public policy research conducted by the Harkin Institute focusing on agriculture shall be directly related to Sen. Harkin’s official papers and must be coordinated with CARD and reports issued jointly.”

• “To the extent that the Harkin Institute may conduct public policy research related to agriculture but not specifically in the field of agriculture, CARD must approve these projects and play the lead role.”

• “The Harkin Institute must not conduct any work in the area of agriculture that is not directly related to Senator Harkin’s papers and also approved by CARD.”

Only Board of Regents can modify agreement

In other words, Leath gave one institute veto power over work at another. There are upwards of 20 agriculture institutes at Iowa State, ranging from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture to the Egg Institute, and there are no such restrictions on any of them. But the Harkin Institute will contain a treasure trove of documents. ISU ag interests clearly didn’t want any research done that might offer views that differ from the company line.

“I don’t believe there should be conflicts. … [The institutes] should work together and find what the university believes best represents the interests of agriculture,” Lang told the Ames Tribune. One view, presumably, on nutrition and red meat. One view on conservation practices. One view on hog confinements. One view on no-till farming. Views that, not unlikely, would parallel the views of the Farm Bureau.

There are two problems: One is that not Leath, not Lang, not Rastetter — no one — has the authority to alter or renege on the policy in Docket Item No. 31 that established and outlined the Harkin Institute. Only the Board of Regents can alter that. Harkin thought the institute proposed by Iowa State would be what was outlined in the docket item — with no special constrictions, no special favors.

The second problem is even more troubling. A university is supposed to be a stew of ideas, a place where teachers and students and scholars and writers can debate and discuss, explain and expound. A place where minds can be opened to new ideas, where old truths can be challenged or affirmed. A place where freedom is unfettered.

Instead, the current leaders of the Board of Regents, Lang and Rastetter, and Leath, either on his own or acting at their direction, are seeking to restrict and restrain, to mandate the agriculture version of political correctness. They are in grave danger of repeating an awful chapter of ISU history.

School suffered a black eye over margarine fight

About 70 years ago, there was a fight over academic freedom that tore the university apart. It is remarkably similar to the fight over the Harkin Institute and agricultural research.

The issue in the early 1940s was ostensibly about a research paper an economics scholar wrote recommending American families substitute more margarine for butter to help ensure the supply of dairy products for soldiers. All hell broke loose.

The fight boiled down to whether research was to be controlled by the Farm Bureau and the Dairy Association and shaped to their views, or whether it was to be free and in the interests of the nation and the people. (Time Magazine quoted the Farm Bureau as saying such a research paper “might befit scholarly Harvard but was disloyal in a cow college.”) Iowa State College was raked over the coals in the national press.

At the time, Iowa State had an enormously well-regarded Department of Economics — indeed it gave its name to the “Ames School” of economics.

But ISU President Charles Friley and the head of Extension basically sided with those seeking to reshape the academic paper and suppress academic freedom. The place was decimated. Between 1943 and 1945, 16 of 26 economists left the school. Still more left over the next few years.

“By about 1948, the Ames School of economics had vanished. The campus-wide level of discontent turned … severe,” said an article in the Annals of Iowa four years ago. Several of those who left went to the University of Chicago, where they were instrumental in developing the “Chicago School” of economics. Two of the departees from Iowa State went on to win Nobel Prizes.

Clifton Wharton, who studied under one of the professors, Theodore Schultz, at Chicago and went on to become president of Michigan State University, recalled the controversy in the “Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.”

“Major efforts were made to squelch the report, but Ted Schultz, citing academic freedom and the dangers of censoring research, held firm and refused. … When the college administration proposed withdrawing the article, Schultz spoke out unsuccessfully against the action and resigned in protest.”

Schultz was working “to establish a place for unbiased policy analysis” at Iowa State, the Annals of Iowa article noted. That is exactly what the Harkin Institute was designed to be.

What a tragedy that the university and two regents are trying to shackle it. And what a tragedy for Iowa State and the state of Iowa if Harkin decides he must take his papers elsewhere to guarantee academic freedom for the generations to come.