We stand with the students, staff and faculty mourning the forced closure of ISU’s LGBTQIA+ Student Success center. This center provided a protected space where students shared and made needed community. We are dismayed at the continued complicity of the university’s administration in silencing, erasing and removing yet another place from the ISU campus where diversity thrives.
ISU needs the queerness of LGBTQIA+ folks just as ISU needs the contributions shared by Native, Black and Muslim people and by immigrants. Welcoming and supporting the polyculture of ideas, identities and experiences shared by all its students is foundational to ISU’s, and the state’s, future.
As alumni of ISU’s Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture, we mourned the loss of the Leopold Center, once a vibrant heart of our program and nexus for state-wide creative collaborations advocating for rural and agricultural diversity. We understand well how the defunding, re-naming and removal of centers of diversity on campus erodes public trust and the obligation ISU has as a land grant institution to serving the public good.
The empirical research and applied work of many of ISU’s students, faculty and alumni make clear the power of polycultures in their many forms. The best science finds continued evidence of diversity as a foundational part of sustainability, be it ecological, economic or social. Local food systems infrastructure, grassfed livestock systems, soil health, rural entrepreneurship–it’s not only pollinators or agricultural fields that benefit from diversity, but all of us. We’d be glad to forward the scientific papers with these findings to President Wendy Wintersteen and her advisors should they need them.
Our lived experiences shape our perspectives; a diversity of people and thought contributes to a rich intellectual diversity on campus. Scientist and activist Vandana Shiva describes a monoculture as a worldview that marginalizes diverse perspectives and knowledge systems, leading to a lack of understanding and appreciation for biodiversity. She cautions that a monoculture of the mind reflects itself on the ground; it does this through the very steps ISU is now employing in erasing, controlling and forcing diversity to fit the perspectives of the power holders.
ISU’s administration continues to allow external entities, from right-wing politicians to agribusiness barons, to use the campus to further their own agendas. How is one center on the fourth floor of the Memorial Union really so threatening when, elsewhere on ISU’s campus, students walk daily through Bayer Student Services hallway, past the Bruce Rastetter Center for Agricultural Entrepreneurship, or have the Iowa Pork Producers partnering with their football team to support the pork industry? Every time ISU chooses to be so eagerly subservient to these monocultural interests, it fails again, in its land grant mission to the public good of all Iowans.
Agriculture has been a means of violence through subversion, domination, control and erasure of diversity since the founding of the United States. We are disappointed to see the university continuing to perpetuate these harms. We call on ISU to do better and to be better. Collectively written and signed by:
Angie Carter, PhD Sociology & Sustainable Agriculture, 2015
Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, PhD Sociology & Sustainable Agriculture, 2016
Claudia M. Prado-Meza, PhD Sustainable Agriculture, 2013
Maritza Pierre, M.S. Community and Regional Planning & Sustainable Agriculture, 2018
Virginia Nichols, M.S. Sustainable Agriculture 2014, PhD Crop Physiology, 2021
Jess Soulis, M.S. Sociology & Sustainable Agriculture, 2012
Jackie Nester Jelen, M.S. Community and Regional Planning & Sustainable Agriculture, 2015
Carrie Chennault, PhD Sustainable Agriculture, 2019
Jennifer Vazquez, M.S. Sustainable Agriculture, 2011
Erika S. Rojas, PhD Plant Pathology, 2013
Ahna Kruzic, BS Sociology and Women’s & Gender Studies, M.S. Sustainable Agriculture and Sociology, 2016
Stefan Gailans, PhD Crop Physiology & Sustainable Agriculture, 2017
Andrea Basche, PhD Agronomy & Sustainable Ag, 2015
