Regents History: July 18, 1990
July 18, 1990. Village West Resort. Lake Okoboji, Iowa
Board Membership
- Marvin Pomerantz, President, Des Moines
- Marvin Berenstein, Sioux City
- John Fitzgibbon, Des Moines
- Betty Jean Furgerson, Waterloo
- John Greig, Estherville
- Elizabeth Hatch, Cedar Rapids
- James Tyler, Atlantic
- Victoria Westenfield, Huxley
- Mary Williams, Davenport
Highlights
The Board accepted the resignation of ISU President Gordon Eaton and approved policies for the selection of the 13th president of ISU. The search and screen committee authorized at this meeting eventually selected Martin C. Jischke, Chancellor of the University of Missouri - Rolla (Now Missouri S&T), in early 1991. Jischke served as ISU president until 2000, when he left Ames to become the 10th president of Purdue University. After serving as director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, New York, Eaton was appointed as the 12th director of the United States Geological Survey in 1994.
U of I President Hunter Rawlings announced that three writers with Iowa ties had received the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Jorie Graham, graduate and faculty member at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Patricia Hampl, graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and Kent Wealy from Decorah were honored. Graham and Hampl are now internationally-recognized poets, with Graham winning the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994.
Iowa State presented a revised honorary degree policy, which it used to present Raymond P. Baker, director of research at Pioneer Hi-Bred International, with a Doctor of Humane Letters distinction a year later. Baker’s was the first ISU honorary degree since James H. Hilton was presented with a Doctor of Science degree in 1965. Since the passage of this degree policy, ISU has awarded honorary degrees to Norman Borlaug (1992), George Washington Carver (1993), Simon Estes (1997), John V. Atanasoff (2000), Governor Robert Ray (2006), and John Pappajohn (2007), among others.
The Board voted to approve budgets for the University of Iowa pharmacy building expansion, set to begin in 1991. However, the motion to approve the designs for the building was defeated, 5-4, due to general disagreement about the location of the building’s loading dock. Regent Fitzgibbon expressed numerous concerns about the building’s design with he and Regent Tyler stating with regret that alternate options had not been provided to the Board in this regard. President Pomerantz cast the deciding vote to push approval of the addition a later date. New designs were presented at the September meeting that moved the loading dock to the northwest end of the existing building. Those designs were passed, with all regents voting aye, save for Regent Tyler.
