Smiley's Latest A Light Look At Land-Grant Universities by Steve Sullivan Yes, Jane Smiley admits, she did crack herself up while writing Moo, her first novel since winning the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres. "I couldn't wait to sit down and start writing every day. I hated to stop, hated it to be over," said Smiley, a distinguished professor of English. Moo, which will be published April 1 by Knopf, is a satire about a land-grant university. Smiley concedes that readers may look for similarities between personalities and places in the novel and those at Iowa State. They shouldn't, she said. "I've never been a person who is in the know about goings-on at Iowa State," she said. While she doesn't satirize Iowa State, Smiley does have a lot of serious fun with the land-grant philosophy in her seventh work of fiction. "It's more or less about certain ideas that underpin the land-grant university. It has more to do with this idea that: Well, we are going to become experts in this and that and go out and improve the world," Smiley said. "In a lot of ways, it is about the idea of corporate funding of research and what that means to the university. It has been promoted a lot over the past few years, and I, for one, am suspicious of that." A Thousand Acres and Moo are companion pieces Ñ one a tragic examination and the other a comic look at agricultural issues. In A Thousand Acres, her heart-wrenching novel about an Iowa farm family that loses nearly everything, Smiley created the mythical Zebulon County. In Moo she creates a place referred to simply as "the university." Moo is populated with more characters than a faculty senate meeting. The lively bunch includes a world famous economist who is a hero in Costa Rica; a provost and a dean of extension who are twin brothers; an English professor who is pursuing full professorship and has never returned to campus for the beginning of a new semester more than 12 hours before his first class; a secretary in the provost's office who might be the most powerful person on campus (she surreptitiously transfers money from the athletic budget to the library's); an agriculture professor who dreams of cloning the perfect herd of Holsteins if he can find the funding; a farmer who may revolutionize agriculture if the "FBI, CIA and big ag companies" don't thwart him; a collection of students who struggle with academics, budgets, beer and each other; and, a gigantic, sensitive hog named Earl Butz. The university is facing massive state budget cuts that spur the rush to outside research funding and open the doors of the Ivory Tower to a Ross Perot-ish Texas billionaire with some ideas that kick Moo into high gear. Smiley is known as a writer who does extensive research. She contacted Iowa State scientists to find out the scientific language she should use in Moo. Beyond that, her main goal was to write a comic novel. "People have thought some of my earlier books funny," Smiley said. "But this is the first time I set out to write with a comic structure." _____ contact: Steve Sullivan, News Service, (515) 294-3720 updated: 03-24-95