President Harreld on the value of public universities’ work

Iowa Now - Research

Bruce HarreldEarlier this month, Tom Rice, director of the UI’s Iowa Center for Higher Education in Des Moines, wrote a wonderful piece about some of the commonly overlooked ways a university serves its surrounding community. He was able to succinctly express that even though we can study the positive economic impact a university has, the real value of a public institution like the UI isn’t something that’s truly quantifiable. As I’ve said before, we can certainly talk about the monetary value a university brings to its community, but now it’s time to go past the numbers and take a wider view of what the UI provides.

What comes to my mind when I think of the value of a public institution like ours is the opportunity it gives undergraduates like Niko McCarty, Velarchana Santhana, and Akanksha Chilukuri to tackle real-world problems and collaborate with some of the best faculty in the country to improve people’s lives. All three work in the Pappajohn Biomedical Discovery Building and are actively contributing to cutting-edge research. Where else would undergraduates be able to do that sort of work? The UI is able to give them that chance, and they’re already giving back by breaking new ground in the study of how diabetes affects the heart and eyes, and how preeclampsia can harm infants.

A public university can also be a home for researchers who want to bring important discoveries in their areas of expertise to the general public. Our faculty’s findings don’t stay locked away within the borders of campus; UI professors and researchers work hard to share their results and explain their fields to the public. For example, Robert Cargill, an assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the UI, published the book Cities that Made the Bible, regularly appears on CNN’s ...

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