Months after it became known that Iowa State would have a vacancy in the president’s office this fall, the committee to find a replacement has finally completed its search criteria. After reviewing the criteria this panel has approved, it is clear the obvious choice for the job will be Martin Jischke. We are searching for the clone of a man who ran this university as a dictatorship for the past nine years. If you don’t believe me I urge you to go to www.iastate.edu/pres/ and follow along. It would seem that the most important part of a university such as this should be the students. Yet in the entire description of the presidential criteria there are only three very general references to the word students. On the opposite end of the spectrum the phrase land-grant research university is referred to in very specific detail five times. And if you read the description carefully the underlying theme of the entire list is the ability to raise funds to help in “accomplishing goals of the university.” So we are looking for a person who is very good at raising money and considers research and university goals more important than the quality of education its students receive. If this isn’t a textbook definition of Jischke’s reign over Iowa State, I don’t know what is. If I remember correctly there were more than a few faculty, staff and students who were not overly happy with this exact type of leadership when Jischke was here the first time. And now that it appears that we are searching for Martin II, no change seems likely. Iowa State is known as the Institute of Science and Technology, but if cutting edge research is all that the people in charge have in mind it is possible that we chose the wrong place to go to school. While it is great that we are credited with things such as finding that a microparasite buried 100 feet below the surface of the earth stunts corn growth by a fraction of an inch. Couldn’t the thousands of dollars that were spent on the research for the project go to a better use. And I’m sure that our multi-billion dollar virtual reality chamber is really cool for the handful of students that actually get to go inside it. Every year we set new records for the amount of money that the university raises from public and private donors. And still the cost of our tuition and fees increases at the same time. It would be nice if the average student could actually see some of the benefits from all these donations, but this seems to rarely occur. I wonder if the upstanding community members who make these donations intend to give this money to the President and his advisors to use as they see fit, or if they intended to give that money to the university itself. If this is their intention, they should have the right to know that their good intentions are not exactly being carried out. If this money is intended for the entire university the students should have some input as to where it is used. I know that to most high level administration we as students, are just a bunch of faceless numbers, but without us there would be no school at all. While it is obvious that the search committee and the regents will appoint someone to the position who will fulfill their own objectives and desires, I ask them to think of the students for once. Those are the people that this decision really affects.