I graduated from Iowa State in May of 1998 in animal ecology and environmental studies as a member of the ISU Honors Program. While there is no doubt that Martin Jischke raised a tremendous amount of money for the university and deserves some credit for a few valuable programs, I believe that his influence on Iowa State as an institute of higher education was mostly negative. For this reason, I believe Iowa State’s choice to name the new honors building after Martin Jischke is highly inappropriate.According to a letter I received from the ISU Honors Program, ” … our new honors building will be named the Martin C. Jischke Honors Building in recognition of Dr. Jischke’s commitment to excellence in undergraduate education.” In my opinion, to recognize Jischke as having been committed to excellence in undergraduate education is ridiculous. A more accurate statement would be to say that Jischke was committed to selling out the institution and the ideals of higher education to the highest corporate research bidder. Research has been directed to focus primarily on how business and industry can make more money through ISU discoveries and thus continue to invest in ISU research. While this made Jischke look great to some, a closer look would show that it was undergraduate education that paid a heavy price for his actions.During the tenure of Martin Jischke, undergraduate education suffered tremendously. Class sizes in undergraduate courses went up while at the same time students were increasingly taught by teaching assistants (TAs) in place of actual professors, who no doubt were busy conducting research. The actual teaching professors, those who mean the most to undergraduate education, were denied tenure while a multitude of their research-oriented counterparts were granted the privileged status. This is likely the biggest testament to the fact that Jischke was not committed to excellence in undergraduate education, as was claimed.All academic programs that could yield potential commercial benefits were emphasized and funded at the expense of academic programs concerned with social and environmental matters. An obvious example is the fact that Iowa State’s social work program lost accreditation under Jischke’s tenure. Jischke did not fairly distribute Iowa State’s resources to all the worthy programs, instead focusing on those that could bring in the most corporate research money and letting the rest atrophy. His actions as ISU president sacrificed truth for the sake of money. No longer can Iowa State be trusted (without a healthy dose of skepticism) to discover and report unbiased truths to the public to help society decipher greater value and meaning. I offer the following question as an example. How could the public believe the biotechnology industry’s claims that genetically-modified organisms are safe in terms of human health and the environment when ISU research on the technology is bought and paid for by the industry’s largest corporations who stand to gain the most from this controversial technology?In my opinion, Martin Jischke’s actions while president of Iowa State affected the university in more negative ways than positive. I believe this is especially true for his influence on undergraduate education. It pains me to think that the new honors building will bear his name.

Rick Meyers

Alumnus

Coralville