Iowa’s Higher Ed Overhaul Bills Mostly Fizzled. State Regents May Act Instead. The House launched a wave of controversial legislation earlier this year that never made it through the Senate. But familiar-looking policy proposals emerged from the board overseeing public universities.
By Ryan Quinn
Banning public universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B visas. Forcing universities to sign President Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Forbidding presidential search committees from revealing candidates’ names unless applicants agree.
This year, a key Republican lawmaker in the GOP-controlled Iowa House introduced bills to do all these things, and more. He pushed to allow post-tenure reviews of faculty at any time, shorten state Board of Regents members’ terms, remove the student board member’s right to vote, enable the Legislature to cancel individual board expenditures, make universities liable for 10 percent of students’ defaulted loans and tax public and private institution endowments that exceed $500 million.
These were just some of the proposals that House Higher Education Committee chair Taylor Collins advanced. But none of them passed the state Senate—which is also controlled by Republicans—by the time the regular legislative session ended Sunday. Some didn’t even get through the full House.
Yet House Republicans might still get some of what they wanted. The Board of Regents, which oversees Iowa’s three public universities, could adopt some provisions of the dead bills into board policy instead. It’s an example of red-state governing board members working with lawmakers to make changes in the stated hope that the Legislature won’t act unilaterally. In 2024, the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees acted similarly by formalizing anti–diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and mandating American history readings.
“We have had some successes in many of these bills not getting through the Legislature,” said Chris Martin, president of the United Faculty union at the University of Northern Iowa, part of a coalition that opposed the legislation. “On the other hand, [for] some of these bills, the ideas have been translated into proposed policies at the Board of Regents.”
Regents president Robert Cramer said at the board’s April 23 meeting that “negotiations with legislators resulted in a lot of the policy changes that we approved here.” He was referencing policies that the board approved to go out for public comment—but which still need final board approval, expected in June.
One such change would have the board review, every other year, courses that meet general education requirements at each university, and identify those “with substantial diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or critical race theory content.” The policy doesn’t say what will then happen to those classes.
It’s an echo of a bill that passed the House but not the Senate, which would’ve required the board to conduct this review and further would have said the board “in its discretion shall … eliminate” DEI- or CRT-related courses or requirements.
“Many of our legislative friends agree with us that it’s better for the board to handle issues than it is to codify them,” Cramer said. “We, in turn, respect the principle of academic freedom and responsibility and prefer that the universities handle the academic issues, rather than us.” Cramer told Inside Higher Ed on Thursday that “the Legislature is definitely getting more involved in the running of the universities … If the Legislature is going to do that, the board wants to do it in the best way possible, and we think that’s by keeping it under board control. So our actions, I guess, ended up being that a lot of legislation did not get pushed through. We think that’s a positive thing.”
U.S. History Req Advances The House Higher Education Committee’s wave of often-controversial higher ed bills started this year’s legislative session with a bang—drawing media and faculty attention. But it ended with a whimper.
“Only one of the original bills kind of snuck through,” Martin said. But the legislation, which awaits Republican governor Kim Reynolds’s signature or veto, would affect general ed requirements for almost all public university undergraduates.
Collins, the committee’s chair, successfully amended a budget bill on the penultimate day of the session to require undergraduates at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa to take a “comprehensive survey of all American history” course, plus a second such course in American government. The requirement wouldn’t apply to students who already completed “substantially similar” coursework or who are pursuing degrees that are supposed to take three years or less.
The bill, House File 2800, says civics centers at Iowa State and UNI would designate which courses meet the requirement. But at the University of Iowa, its Center for Intellectual Freedom would be the only academic unit offering the courses there. Such civics centers often lean conservative; the Republican-controlled Legislature created the Center for Intellectual Freedom last year, and The Gazette reported it paid conservative activist Christopher Rufo $34,000 to speak at the inauguration.
“This is a giant gift or a subsidy to that center—that they would have complete control,” Martin said, noting reports of low enrollment in the new center’s currently optional classes. Sen. Janice Weiner, leader of the Democrats in the upper chamber, said, “This seems like a way to force student uptake there to keep it alive.”
In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Luciano I. de Castro, the center’s interim director, noted that the university paid progressive commentator and author Joy Ann Reid $55,000 for an event. He said, “The vast majority of past speakers” at the university leaned left and “one of the goals of the Center is to help increase viewpoint diversity on campus.”
He said one of his center’s courses has 11 students and the other has eight, but “our enrollment numbers are typical for [elective] courses of this type.” He also said, “Our mission is to teach students how to reason clearly, analyze data and arguments rigorously, and distinguish truth from propaganda. I see this as the opposite of ideology, and as the strongest defense against it.”
Collins didn’t return repeated requests from Inside Higher Ed to comment on his other bills failing. Iowa’s Senate president and majority leader also didn’t return requests for comment.
Another bill, House File 2711, which didn’t come out of Collins’s committee, also made it through the Legislature. If Reynolds signs it, it would strip from state law a requirement for the Board of Regents to promote affirmative action in employment.
While Weiner said she doesn’t have direct knowledge regarding why the higher ed bills failed to advance in the upper chamber, she said that “in the Senate, clearly it was not a priority.” She’s grateful for that, noting public universities represent a “huge economic driver” for the state.
“They’re supposed to be governed by the Board of Regents, and I don’t believe it’s our job as the Legislature to be meddling,” Weiner said.
But the board does seem to be responding to some lawmakers’ wishes. The board president said regents and lawmakers began “negotiating” before the legislative session ended, when the proposed bills still loomed over the board.
'Building Trust’ At the April 23 board meeting, Cramer, the board’s president, thanked “all the regents for making visits with our legislative friends.” Turning to the planned gen ed review—an idea that had seemingly transformed from a legislative proposal into a board one—he said the board’s chief academic officer and a regent would work with university leaders and faculty on it.
“We don’t want this to be a board-directed item,” Cramer said. “We want this to be the universities working through this process.”
“This initiative is just to find out what we’re currently doing on general ed and compare that across departments and across the regents’ system,” he added. “Just like with the legislators, our goal is building trust with our faculty. We want to work together on this initiative rather than have the Legislature mandate changes.”
Cramer also briefly mentioned other board proposals that sound similar to the rejected bills: an “instructor review process,” “accreditation agency options” and “trying a tuition guarantee pilot program at one of the universities.”
The board’s written policy proposals include designating the chief operating officer as an “Ombuds Coordinator on behalf of the Board Office.” It says this coordinator would serve as “a neutral point of contact for individuals with questions or concerns” regarding the universities.
“In some situations, the Ombuds Coordinator may need to share information with appropriate administrators when there is a reasonable belief that doing so is in the best interests of the Regents,” the policy says. Last year, Texas Republicans passed a law creating an ombudsman position tasked with ensuring public institutions there follow state laws weakening the independence of faculty senates, banning DEI and requiring regular reviews of gen ed curricula. (Collins pushed to create an Iowan ombudsman in one of his failed bills.)
Another board policy proposal would get members more involved in hiring university administrators. The board president would appoint one regent to serve as a voting search committee member for “selection of any provost, vice president, or other direct report to the University president.”
Martin said he thinks the board is more willing to work with universities than the Legislature is. But he expressed concern about all these proposed policies, including the curriculum hunt for DEI or CRT content.
“If you’re collecting the information,” Martin said, “it’s likely that you’re going to do something with that.”
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