The Iowa State University Foundation finds itself without a leader. Tom Mitchell, the oft-lauded President and Chief Executive Officer of the ISU Foundation, has left to become vice chancellor of university advancement at the University of California at Irvine. Since then, Iowa State has been searching for a new leader of solicitation. I’m glad to say that the long and probably expensive search can stop right this minute. I have found the best possible leader for the Foundation.

I’m proud to say that person is none other than me, Tim Kearns.

There’s no real need to gush with my self-righteous pride. After all, considering the disasters in athletic coaching that have come about in the past year, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. If you don’t have experience, you can simply make it up and slip by undetected for at least five years. As such, I am proud to report that I am the best candidate because I have already been the President and CEO of the ISU Foundation for the last nine years.

But my credentials don’t stop there. As I see it, the Foundation exists to do one thing: stimulate donations that may otherwise have been wasted on worthless charities such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International and countless homeless and batteredwomen’s shelters.

When considering an appropriate leader for such a Herculean task, we must ask: who could possibly be a better leader for the Foundation than me? Records (which I would be more than willing to open to the Foundation) will show that an incredible amount of money has been either donated personally or donated in my name to the university. Between my college education and my Woody Allen movie collection, it is apparent that I have no problem funneling money into dead-end enterprises.

In 2001 alone, my records indicate donations of over $15,000! Considering that my net income that year was roughly $25.42, consisting primarily of change found on the floor of the Memorial Union, I donated 59,500 percent of my income last year to the Foundation.

What’s more, I intend to increase the donation by 19.4 percent next year. Over the past three years alone, my donations have increased in exact proportion to those tuition increases passed by the Board of Regents. If tuition increases continue at this rate, the Foundation won’t even need to attempt to raise money, because they’ll see my donations increase exponentially.

With my seemingly unlimited benevolence, Iowa State will be able to stop raising money to make it the finest land-grant institution in the United States and start trying to make it home of the most gold-plated toilet seats in the universe.

If every student, faculty member and alumnus was equally willing to give 59,500 percent of their income to the institution that is waving good-bye to my professors and introducing thousands of new students to my classes, then I can’t possibly see how we would fail in our efforts to help students become their poorest and our toilet seats their shiniest.

At this time, I would like to thank you, ISU Foundation. During the past decade, you have done more to raise funds for buildings than I thought imaginable. It’s really a shame that they will have to be pawned to Des Moines Area Community College in order to afford toilet paper in the dorms by fiscal year 2004.

Stupid me. I would have encouraged donors to contribute to the general operating fund or to a scholarship fund that they could humbly name after themselves and then award only to family members as a tax write-off. Instead, we have new buildings that will house majors that were cut by the university in a desperate attempt to keep from closing its doors to every Iowan who wants to enter this institution of somewhat higher education.

I humbly feel that my service as the next president of the Foundation would be the best I could do to continue my pattern of contributions, since graduation seems imminent, even though the classes I need to take will likely be eliminated by Fall 2002, placing me in academic purgatory until I can take them abroad, where I believe there are still professors and classes, despite global economic problems.

But fret not, Foundation. As soon as I die, I am more than willing to donate my mummified corpse to serve as the pillar of your next glorious construction project. I’ll have my executor keep my preserved eye on you, though. I don’t trust you so much after the Marie Powers debacle.

Hell, if you had your way, you’d probably sell my corpse and then use the funds to funnel weapons to the Iranians.

If you can’t do that much for me, well, I’d like to respond to you in the words of Ben Folds Five: “Give me my money back, you bitch!”

Tim Kearns is a senior in political science from Bellevue, Neb., and ISU Foundation, don’t forget his black t-shirt.