Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

(alternate title: “I am a scientist. I arrange, design, and sell science.”)

Without a doubt, the “Iowa State University College of Human Sciences” is the most ridiculous name thought up in Iowa in the 21st century. Created in 2005 through the merger of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences (which, if you’re old enough, was Home Economics) and College of Education, it has nothing to do with the hard sciences and very little to do with the soft sciences — that’s what the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is for. The Department of Human Development and Family Studies is about as close as it gets.

And now, it’s brought us this sentence, courtesy of an e-mail from the Alliance for Iowa State: “Pamela White’s four decades of service at Iowa State have helped the world to define what it means to be a human scientist.” First, if she has, it’s because some focus group came up with it only a decade ago! Second, are we referring to the fact she is a human or that she studies humans? (What about cat scientists? Should we contrast with a plant scientist, i.e. one who studies plants, or may be a human-plant hybrid?)

The College of Human Sciences can serve a springboard for a list of the what I think are the other bad names thought up for Iowa entities in the past 15 years. The list starts with the contingent representing Morrison’s Law of Team Names: The popularity of a sport’s league is inversely proportional to the number of team names that are not plural nouns.

• Cedar Rapids Rampage, an indoor soccer team, which has now doubled down with an outdoor soccer team called the Rampage United. Like they do in Europe. Because it’s soccer.
• Iowa Energy, the NBA Development League team in Des Moines. I was going to say, “If you haven’t heard of them, don’t worry, no one else has either,” but the team set the record for D-League attendance in its opening game and broke it in the 2011 finals. Then again, that’s not saying much.
• Swing of the Quad Cities, which “was supposed to be a nod to the area’s rich jazz heritage” (so, uh, why not the Quad-City Jazz? Not a plural noun but at least a normal construction). Fortunately, the team is back to being the River Bandits.
• Area Education Agency 267 (Area 2, Area 6, and Area 7). Every other AEA merger resulted in a non-number name, except for this one, and even the non-merged ones have other names now. AEA 267 overlaps with much of the northern part of the Cedar and Iowa river watersheds — “Two Rivers AEA”, there’s a perfectly serviceable name, and an allusion to being in the Land Between Two (other) Rivers.
• Hy-Vee Heroes Game, along with its garish trophy, given to the winner of the Iowa-Nebraska football game. It’s big, it’s wood, it’s a manufactured rivalry (noble cause notwithstanding), and Hy-Vee dropped the Cy-Hawk series like a hot potato to create and sponsor it.
• Iowa Department on Aging, the renamed Department of Elder Affairs. Most state departments use “of,” not “on,” and take note of the acronym it makes.
• Community Choice Credit Union Convention Center, shoehorning “Veterans Memorial” back in on the building only. Not so much bad as it is long/unwieldy and the replacement for “Veterans Memorial Auditorium,” which isn’t an auditorium anymore.

(This blog post was drafted before Tribune Publishing announced its name would be changing to “tronc” — yes, lowercase, even at the beginning of a sentence in the press release — a name that would have shot to the top of this list if it had been Iowa-initiated.)

Aside from today being the last state primaries in the presidential process, it is primary day for Iowa races. In northeast and southwest Iowa, Democrats will pick their nominees to face two freshman Republican U.S. House representatives.

The 1st District has been getting a lot of attention. Pat Murphy and Monica Vernon are again vying to take on Rod Blum, this time head-to-head instead of in a five-way race. Many big names have lined up behind Vernon. The Iowa Democratic Party is not happy (cheesed off, even) about losing out on “first Iowa woman in Congress”, and this year’s 1st District general election is probably the best chance to break the glass ceiling on the House side.

Blum is a freshman representative in a district with more registered Democrats than Republicans that is a lean-R tossup in Cook Political Report and a lean-D tossup in Sabato’s Crystal Ball. David Young, Iowa’s other House freshman, fares slightly better. Although the district also leans D in registration, it’s by less, and the 3rd is a lean-R in Cook but tossup-R in Sabato. Cook judges that only three states have more than one tossup district — Iowa, Florida, and New York.

You have to go back to the 1960s to find the last time a member of the U.S. House from Iowa only lasted one term. In the LBJ/Democratic landslide of 1964, five of Iowa’s seven districts changed hands, but in 1966 four of those winners were ejected (the survivor: Neal Smith). After 1978, as many Iowa congressmen standing for re-election lost in incumbent-on-incumbent redistricting (Dave Nagle and Leonard Boswell) than lost to a challenger (Smith, on the other end of his career, and Jim Leach).

Sabato’s Crystal Ball has a column about the effect of the growing rural-urban split on races. Besides a clean redistricting process, that’s another part of what makes Iowa so competitive: We don’t have enough districts to split those areas up.

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog carries an entry with an ominous headline, “The places in America that already have their best days behind them”. It’s about the counties across the United States that peaked in population decades ago, and it leads with Keokuk County, Iowa. Keokuk County is in red in my map above, one of 33 counties that had the most people it’s ever had in 1900. Keokuk County has issued a rebuttal via the Des Moines Register. (I agree that it’s about quality not quantity, and Iowans are the best quality you can get, but population stability would be nice, too.)

The Post article is topped off with an animated timeline map of peak population years, where you can see Iowa and northern Missouri pop out in 1900, followed by most of the rest of the Great Plains by 1940. Only a third of Iowa’s counties have peaked in 1950 or later.

The Post’s piece is based on census research from Lyman Stone, who painstakingly compiled decade-by-decade numbers for the nation. Stone’s discussion of his research includes a map of 396 counties that hit their minimum population since 1900 in the 2015 census estimates and Iowa has 46 of them, including Tama. His writeup is a good read.

(I’ve had the map made for a while; the Post gave me a hook to put it up.)