We'll say it again: Fire Bruce Rastetter
Academic freedom under corporate attack
Iowa Regent Bruce Rastetter, embroiled in fourth corporate scandal, has to go
Bruce Rastetter, one of Governor Branstad's biggest political donors, is back in the news again for abusing his position as an Iowa Regent by continuing to put corporate interests ahead of the common good.This time he's making headlines for interfering with independent academic research at the University of Iowa.An ethanol industry lobbyist complained to the Branstad administration after a UI professor named Jerald Schnoor publicly warned against ethanol expansion because of water quality concerns. Rastetter responded by asking UI president Sally Mason to, in effect, silence the professor. To read more details about the story, try here, here, or here. These abuses of power have to stop. Enough is enough. Rastetter needs to go.
The Board of Regents has been mired in scandal for the last nine months and Rastetter has been involved every step of the way:
Last summer, CCI members filed an ethics complaint against Bruce Rastetter after emails showed that Rastetter tried to use his regent connections to push Iowa State University into backing a land grab in Tanzania by Rastetter’s private multinational corporation, AgriSol.
Last fall, the Board of Regents also hired Rastetter’s personal lobbyist and public relations officer, Joe Murphy, to become ISU’s new university lobbyist – without publishing the job opening, conducting an open search, or following the university’s diversity-in-hiring guidelines.
Last month, Senator Tom Harkin chose not to leave 40 years of congressional papers at his alma mater, Iowa State University, because of repeated attempts by Lang and Rastetter to limit the academic freedom of the Tom Harkin Institute of Public Policy.