University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook is relatively new to the job, and he joins River to River host Ben Kieffer to talk about higher education and priorities at UNI. He says his school will continue to have a high percentage of Iowa residents attending. Nook says about 85%-90% of UNI’s students are from Iowa, though he's open to admitting more out-of-state students.
“But we’re not going to do that at the expense of the number of Iowa kids we continue to educate. You’ve got to balance those, especially at a place like UNI. We’re training teachers and we’re training business leaders, we’re training other professionals, really for the state of Iowa and the surrounding region.”
Out-of-state students pay about 10-thousand dollars more in tuition than in-state students.
In the second half of the program, former Deputy Director for Operations at the CIA Tom Twetten is the guest.
He talks about why Russian meddling in our elections is unprecedented in espionage spy-craft, and he says he thinks the meeting the president’s son had last year with a Russian lawyer had all the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence operation. Twetten is a graduate of Iowa State University.
