- Sep 13, 2002
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Love his common sense, plain-spoken style. And he happens to be 100% on the money in this one:
Ivy Leaguers and minor leaguers
I don’t give a damn about Harvard or Yale. I care deeply about Buena Vista University. Leave the University of Iowa alone because that’s where the seeds for “Field of Dreams” were germinated. We should be more concerned with livestock disease research funding for Iowa State University than whether Ivy League presidents were too dull-witted to handle questions from congressional simpletons. Republicans have set their sights on higher education in Iowa. They want to root out diversity brainwashing and stuff like that. They maintain there is a whole lotta liberal grooming going on in Ames, Iowa City and even Storm Lake. It is due for a leash in an election year. Banish the elitists! Art Cullen’s Notebook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Your bookkeeper might have attended Buena Vista. Your veterinarian no doubt went to Iowa State. Caitlin Clark is surely elite but not elitist — go Hawks — and it is a damn fine children’s hospital to which we wave on football Saturdays in Iowa City. Such is the state of our politics. Pick a side: Palestinian or Israeli. Hamas is a terrorist organization that murders innocents. Israel terrorized Gaza, and intends to clear out the Palestinians. A college president worth her pay would say: “Each side is wrong. There is no place for calls to violence anywhere in America, including on campus. Otherwise, we will defend free speech.” I could have come up with that line on the spot, and I barely earned a journalism degree. From St. Thomas, at the time a small men’s college in St. Paul with a decent hockey team. Lucky for me, if you had a solid C average and an Irish name you were a lock for admission. Me and the boys thought Tommy Tech pretentious when it became a “regional university.” In our day, the rector of Ireland Hall who lived on the second floor for what must have been 100 years, Father Scooter Lavin, put out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at night for the stoners to feed on. You could say just about anything you wanted because nobody listened to you. None of us could have located Gaza on a map back then. I got out with a solid C average. We did okay. Oscar became a psychologist, Duffy a workers comp lawyer, Lentz a mental health care worker. We tried. Harvard, meanwhile, fostered RFK2, Ted Cruz, Larry Summers and other weirdos who read all the wrong books and have not done much productive work. Instead of pursuing their own course of political correctness, I wish politicians would increase funding into avian flu research through the National Animal Disease Lab at Ames and Iowa State University. Nobody is talking about that. Nothing nefarious is going on anywhere near the campanile. It is not anti-Semitic to question whether sending more arms to lunatics controlling the Netanyahu government is wise. The kids in Ames are okay. It is not elitist to expect that your children will get post-secondary education. There was simply no question with our parents: You will go to college because that’s how you get ahead in America. You must learn a trade. Education allows you more control over your life. Brother John attended what we consider an elite college, Notre Dame. Sister Ann went for a couple years to Mount Mercy in Cedar Rapids. She can write a funnier column than he can if she wants to, and John knows it. Their experience on campus had very little to do with their politics, which were in place by the age of reason, seven. Daddy bounced us on his knee extolling the virtues of Harry Truman, who attended business college for a year in Kansas City before dropping out. Truman, by the way, was the first world leader to recognize Israel, within 11 minutes of its creation as a nation. Don’t blame him for the conflict, it was a mess handed off from the crumbling British Empire. You could learn that anyplace except Iowa, where it could be labeled a “divisive concept” and banned from the classroom. Seriously. Joe Biden went to the University of Delaware, a land-grant school like Iowa State. Not exactly Ivy League elitist. He was a crafty running back who nearly flunked out. Biden should be remembered as a more consequential president than Yale baseball star George HW Bush. Biden was dealt an awfully bad hand with the pandemic and such, and has played it as well as a Fighting Blue Hen could. His mother would tell him to cut Netanyahu down to size but it’s probably not so easy with all the great Ivy League thinkers in his ear. Apparently it is not easy finding ways to fund soil health research, Storm Lake’s urgent and chronic water problems, or keeping rural Iowa from sliding off the map. These are not the concerns of the Penn or Harvard former presidents, nor of their Ivy League congressional interrogators, nor of the great East Coast opinion factories. They are the concerns of Buena Vista University, where education for service is the motto. Quaint, no? |
