I was going to do this whole dialectic on evil this summer. It’s a good way to talk the nastiest subject known to man and still dress it up and take it out for a night on the town. The masses like salacious bits of wicked gore and I must admit I am not different.

Then this whole thing with President Jischke moving to Purdue comes up and my schedule gets thrown all out of whack. No worries though, I can still manage to fit this into my schedule and still have time to watch “Faces of Death VI” later.

A lot of people don’t just dislike the way Jischke has run Iowa State, they hate him like a despotic overlord. The only thing separating Jischke from Mussolini is accountability. He can’t kill any of us without drawing attention from law enforcement agencies whose purse strings he doesn’t hold.

This is not hyperbole either if the 1998 Baylor game was any indication of what otherwise good cops will do when the order comes down from the higher ups to keep students in line.

We should all consider ourselves lucky they didn’t call in the Ohio National Guard to pull a Kent State on us for being in a celebratory mood that day.

The atmosphere of fear and repression at Iowa State has also not been overstated.

Those faculty members who have spoken out did so out of desperation. They were largely members of departments that do not get the lion’s share of funds or even the lamb’s share.

When departments don’t even have enough funds to run their copy machines without nickel and diming faculty members, something is wrong.

Not all departments can run at a profit measured in dollars. Some departments, whether they like the analogy or not, are like garbage men.

The job they do is smelly and none too glamorous, but without them, we would all be waist high in our own filth in no time.

English, history and philosophy may not be a big draw for donors. They may not even turn out world-class scholars on a regular basis, but they do open up enough minds to make it worthwhile.

No matter how many times it is said, it cannot be said enough: A university is not supposed to be run like a business. This is a land-grant university, after all, a public trust established for the improvement of the citizens of Iowa.

We are not here to provide a better-educated class of wage slaves for corporate interests.

Our university, and it is ours, should not be a technical institute for teaching skills even if those technical skills are genetics, engineering and computer science.

When we narrow our mandate, we become no better than schools devoted to truck driving, refrigerator repair and computer programming that crank out skilled but uneducated workers.

Now those schools have their place, but a university by its very definition should be dedicated to creating well-rounded individuals.

It should not be a place where students with technical majors complain about having to take one or two basic requirements in liberal arts. A history class or two won’t kill you, it will just make you educated.

Whether the average citizen of Iowa appreciates it or not, they send their children here to better themselves, to become well-rounded. That doesn’t just include teaching those nasty liberal arts courses, it demands it.

I have recently become more impressed with the level of discourse I see coming across my desk, but that does little to quell the overall disappointment I have felt while reading letters written with no regard for spelling and grammar let alone logical continuity.

Praise for Dr. Jischke’s reign over Iowa State has come at the expense of everything Iowa State was founded to be.

Those who like Iowa State’s current course are captains of industry who equate success with the bottom line.

On the one hand, it is a reflection of the times we are living in. As agriculture has given way to agribusiness and biotechnology, so has Iowa State taken people out of the equation.

As farmers fall on hard times and become a shrinking voice in a state once filled with people of the land, so has Iowa State turned away from the traditions of the past.

But then this argument tends to fall on ears deafened by the sound of coins clinking in the pockets of the money-changers.

It is time to throw these people out of the temple of higher learning and get back to what is important: Spreading the gospel of higher learning.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily