Iowa’s success in the global marketplace strongly depends upon having high-powered, high-impact public universities that are competitive with the best universities in the world.

These universities educate the professional, business and government leaders who determine our course. They provide the entrepreneurs and educated workforce needed to power our economic engine and attract new businesses and leaders to the state. And they help improve people’s lives and enhance their economic circumstances.

Iowans should be extremely proud that over many decades they have built universities of such high caliber. Iowa State and the University of Iowa are among the most highly respected educational and research universities in the world.

They are known for producing highly skilled graduates, and Iowa State was just named one of the top 50 best value public universities in the nation by Princeton Review Best College Values for 2011.

At Iowa State, we are leading the way in such key areas as biobased products; sustainable agriculture; alternative energy; animal and human health; and new materials and technologies to strengthen industry, communications and national defense. Iowa’s public universities serve the people of their state better than any university system in the nation.

But we are in jeopardy of losing that position and the ability to provide the kind of service that has helped make Iowa such a great place to live and work.

Over the past two years, Iowa State’s base-budget state appropriation has been reduced by $62 million. If the budget proposals currently being debated are adopted, the cuts will climb to $72 million or more.

These are huge numbers, and they come on top of unavoidable cost increases. Tuition increases during this time have averaged about 4.5 percent — half the national average — and these increases have covered less than half of the cuts in state appropriations.

We have done our best to manage these reductions without severely damaging the university. We reduced our workforce through forced layoffs, position eliminations and early retirements. We held faculty and professional and scientific staff salaries nearly constant for two years, with a pay freeze in 2010. We implemented mandatory furloughs for all employees last year, amounting to a 3 percent reduction in pay. We held the line on benefit cost increases to 5 percent, and passed additional increases on to employees.

Our many operational efficiencies and cost savings measures include: Administrative and program reorganizations in several colleges; elimination and downsizing research centers and institutes; new processes to gain efficiencies in information technology; and streamlined administrative functions. We restructured the statewide extension system in 2009, reducing the number of county and area directors by 77 positions and closing several regional offices. No other statewide Iowa government reorganization matches the scope of what we had to do in restructuring ISU Extension.

Despite our best efforts to insulate students from these cuts, there has been an impact because we are educating the largest student body in Iowa State’s history, but with fewer faculty and staff to serve them. Over the past two years, per-capita state support for Iowa resident students has decreased by 21 percent. That means larger classes, fewer elective courses, fewer advisers and counselors, more crowded laboratories and less direct faculty contact.

The continuing, severe erosion in state support is jeopardizing our ability to carry out our land-grant mission at the level that Iowans expect and deserve. These cuts are cumulative and debilitating. We are losing top faculty, and, with them, the ability to do the kind of groundbreaking research that has made Iowa a leader in science and technology. We are losing the ability to serve Iowans through our state-wide extension programs. And the levels of state funding being proposed for FY 2012 will only worsen this downward spiral.

At a time when Iowa needs the leadership and contributions of its high-powered universities most in order to compete successfully in the global arena, why are we crippling their ability to do so? We ask Iowans who care about the future of this great state to call for a stop to these severe cuts to Iowa’s public universities.