Editorial: Undermining colleges

An effort to undermine the Iowa Tuition Grant program came up before this legislative session, when some college students began to protest Israel’s bombing of Gaza following the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7. The state’s private colleges, like Buena Vista University, that really are not hotbeds of protest by any stretch of the imagination, thought they had talked sense into Republican legislators and suppressed the effort for this session.

Now come rumblings that the proposal could rise in the waning weeks of the session. House Republicans were said to be talking about stripping the Iowa Tuition Grant of a 2.5% increase, and targeting it toward majors are in demand (sorry, English and history students). Also, the program could be withheld from any colleges with a whiff of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which has become code language in the senseless political polemic of left v. right.

Iowa’s private colleges are tremendous economic assets and engines of development. Buena Vista University is of incalculable value to Storm Lake, Northwest Iowa and a rural three-state region. Northwestern and Dordt make Sioux County grow. Briar Cliff and Morningside make Sioux City what it is. Graduates of these colleges are Republican and independent voters. Buena Vista long has supplied the state with school administrators, Drake with pharmacists, Simpson with business leaders.

The Iowa Tuition Grant was designed to bring down the cost of a private college more in line with the cost of attending a state university. It is necessary and popular. Nobody has been calling to weaken our state’s private colleges but some legislators who do not have the benefit of a good education can’t figure out this is bad politics.

Legislators should leave well enough alone and go home before they undermine, and ultimately destroy, Iowa’s unique economic asset: its private colleges that make places like Storm Lake, Waverly, Sioux Center and Decorah — all in solid Republican territory. The deans keep a close eye on the rare radical, not to worry. Voters in these areas have to wonder why the legislature is attacking their own. Put these bad ideas over on the dunce chair.

Church and state

The Middle East cauldron is stoked by religion, tribalism, monarchy and oil (that is, money). Israel is a Jewish state. Iran is Shia Muslim and Persian, which is in conflict with the Arab Sunni Muslim monarchy in Saudi Arabia — each rich in oil vital to the world economy — conducting a proxy war in Yemen.

Israel has been under attack since within hours of its founding in 1948 because of religion and arbitrary boundaries created by a British monarchy (with its own church) that displaced Muslims and Christians. Israel was established, of course, because of the Holocaust that targeted elimination of the Jewish people.

This is what happens when you mix religion, money and politics: endless war.

Here at home, Donald Trump is peddling Bibles. Gov. Kim Reynolds is imposing a religious framework on Iowa that would strip classes of their civil rights (gays and women, for starters) and punishing teachers for not properly indoctrinating children.

There is a reason the Framers made separation of church and state central in the Bill of Rights. They had experienced first-hand the oppression of a religious monarchy, and were skeptical of the zealots in their midst who fled for America in order to establish their own Puritan utopia.

So much history informed them, from Exodus to the Holy Roman Empire to Henry VIII. The American Experiment would be something different. The farther we go, the more we worry that we forget the lessons as the bombs explode. The Russian Orthodox Church is exhorting the troops at the front lines murdering Ukrainians. Iranian mullahs refer to the United States as the Great Satan. It is impossible to deal rationally with people who think God is on their side. That inevitably leads to war. In that event, might leads to right and innocents pay with their lives.

Mixing religion and government is deadly. America should learn the lesson. Iowa, too.

OIL MARKETS ARE ROILED by the war, causing prices to rise. The principal reason we are enmeshed in the Middle East is oil. We would not sell the Saudis fighter jets were it not for oil, and secondarily for their hatred of Iran. We should be reminded that the United States must be self-sustaining for its energy needs, and we are. The US is a net energy exporter; China is a net importer.

For now, ethanol distilled from corn is an important part of our national security energy mix. Corn-based ethanol is not a sustainable energy solution long-term, but it is an important part of our current safety net, so long as we rely on burning liquid fuel. New, more efficient technologies are coming on the scene rapidly. Still, vehicles will be burning gasoline for decades to come. Ethanol supplements our energy supply, for now, and as such deserves subsidy and protection. It is not the solution for Iowa as it is sold, but ethanol is necessary. So are electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and all other manner of true renewable energy. As long as we are addicted to oil, we will be at war in the Middle East.