Iowa State President Martin Jischke is undecided about how he will vote in this fall’s gubernatorial election, but he sat down with Democratic hopeful Tom Vilsack last week to discuss the issues.

“Both candidates understand the importance of education and the fact that Iowans value education,” Jischke said in an interview Thursday afternoon.

Vilsack, a state senator from Mount Pleasant, is running against Jim Ross Lightfoot, a former U.S. Representative from Iowa’s Third District.

Jischke chatted with Vilsack on Thursday, Sept. 10, as part of a series of meetings between the two candidates for governor and the presidents of Iowa’s three regents universities.

“We wanted to meet with both candidates to encourage the continued support of these institutions in the state of Iowa,” Jischke said.

Jischke said he left the one-on-one session optimistic about Vilsack’s commitment to financing the state schools.

“We will have to justify that and compete for those funds,” Jischke said.

A main topic of the “executive summit” was ISU’s cutting-edge agricultural research and its value to Iowa’s future.

In a separate interview with the Daily, Vilsack reiterated the slogan he has used throughout his campaign: “Iowa should be to food what the Silicon Valley is to computers.”

He said ISU students studying food safety, nutrition, genetics and biotechnology have done “fantastic work” in the area of “value-added agricultural processing” — taking Iowa’s crops and converting them to market-valuable products.

Jischke proudly displayed three of these products: LoSatSoy, a healthful soybean cooking oil now being sold in grocery stores; whey protein concentrate, used as a baby food supplement; and corn gluten, a natural herbicide for crabgrass.

“Senator Vilsack is very interested in the potential that Iowa has to continue to be a world leader in agriculture, and I agree with him,” Jischke said. “Iowa, by virtue of its incredible climate and soils, its hard-working people and its educational system, has the opportunity to be a leader in this new era.”

Both Jischke and Vilsack say they want to keep students at Iowa State — and the other Iowa colleges and universities — from leaving Iowa after graduation, a problem that has plagued the state for a number of years.

“More of our graduates would remain in Iowa if there were the kinds of jobs here for which they had prepared themselves,” Jischke said.

This lack of quality employment is made worse by lower-than-average salaries, Vilsack said.

“The key to enhancing the salaries of Iowans is providing more educational opportunities for them,” he said.

“We talked about the importance of education to the state’s ability to grow and to attract economic opportunities,” he said.

One tactic Vilsack mentioned was offering forgivable loans to Iowa-educated teachers who stay in the state to teach for a period of time.