That Land Grant university in the middle of Iowa, whose nickname is the Cyclones, has a storm brewing over whether its appropriate to hire a chaplain to minister to the football team. Some 101 faculty members have filed a petition calling on the Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy to nix the plan because of church-state separation issuesI spent four years at Iowa State, with my first dormitory, Westgate Hall, in the shadows of the old football stadium at the time, Clyde Williams Field, which had a mere 25,000 seats. It gave way in 1975 to 55,000-seat Jack Trice Stadium, named for the first black athlete at ISU, who died from injuries suffered in a varsity football game in 1923. Presumably, a football chaplain would have come in handy. According to the Des Moines Register, the Cyclones new coach, Gene Chizik, came up with the idea to hire the chaplain and make him/her part of the teams staff. The salary would be paid from private donations. Athletic director Jamie Pollard gave his support and suggested student-athletes are under a lot of pressure and need access to spiritual guidance.But faculty members, led by a professor of religious studies no less, Hector Avalos, see trouble. Are you going to have counseling for Jewish students? Muslim students? Theres no such thing as one religion or one version of Christianity, he said. As of Friday, 77 newspaper readers, on-line, have offered their comments, pro and con. Some say a football team is a closed group of athletes of a public, taxpayer-supported university and that players wont exactly be free to spurn a chaplain praying and imploring and talking about Jesus. Register reporter Tom Witosky went to a constitutional law professor, Tom Berg of the University of St. Thomas College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., for insight. Berg sees distinctions between the government furnishing chaplains in the military and prisons and a public university sports team. It seems to center on their availability versus chaplains engaged in what amounts to a closed group. He suggested a general belief that government shouldnt be acting in a way that pressures people to act in a religious fashion or engage in a religious practice. For example, Berg said an Iowa State chaplain leading prayers before a game or match, or coaches praying with a small group of players, could be viewed as coercive, Witosky wrote. He quoted Berg further, Even at the college level, to have a chaplain praying before a game could be viewed as putting pressure on people to participate. An athletic director would have to structure it in such a way as to make sure the chaplain is simply there as a resource and not participate in any kind of coercive pressure.Bottom line, Berg said, When does it become religion within the government itself, as opposed to the government providing funds or access to private organizations for services. Its unconstitutional, suggests Charles Haynes, a senior scholar and the director of education programs at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va. He said the courts have been more lenient toward universities than grade schools in such an issue because university students are not as young and impressionable and university education is not compulsory. But he said the use of any public funds to pay for a chaplain slot at a public university should be unconstitutional. Using on private money, however, puts it in a little more of a gray area.Just as a side note: I can somewhat thank Des Moines Register reporter Tom Witosky for introducing me, in August 1972, to the woman who would be my wife now for nearly 34 years. At the time, Tom was a University of Wisconsin journalism student serving as a summer intern in the newsroom of the Waterloo Courier where I had only begun working in June. That summer he had several dates with a city court clerk named Patty. I met her at Toms going-away party. Patty and I subsequently had our first date in November, were engaged the following April and were married in July 1973. Toms grandmother, Alice Witosky, was one of the Couriers most aggressive and prolific newspaper correspondents in Tama County. Her forte was crime reporting. For more than 11 years, she and I would work closely together.

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