Iowa Civics Center Must Teach Thousands. It Has One Professor

An 11th-hour change to Iowa legislation last month required almost all University of Iowa undergraduates to complete courses in American history and in American government. 

And the provision, which became law, said only the Center for Intellectual Freedom—the civics center Republican lawmakers previously created at the university—could offer these mandated courses, starting in fall 2028. 

Now, the advisory council overseeing this civics center faces a logistical issue. The university had more than 22,000 undergrads this past spring, per the Iowa Board of Regents. And the civics center officially has just one faculty member: its interim director.

Nuts-and-bolts problems of hiring faculty and leaders for these civics centers have proliferated as they’ve spread from one public university campus to another, in red state after red state. They don’t arise from the traditional shared governance process, or a proposal from a faculty body to add programs. Legislatures and, in some cases, university governing boards have created these often conservative-leaning entities.

But, in Iowa and Utah—where Republican lawmakers tasked faculty appointed to Utah State University’s civics center with teaching all general education courses there—these new centers must now teach graduation requirements, raising the stakes of hiring decisions. 

The Iowa center’s interim director, Luciano I. de Castro, said it only taught 19 students last semester in its two courses, Political and Economic Institutions of the U.S. and American Culture and Values. Now, the center needs to hire more faculty, or somehow get more affiliated instructors, to significantly expand its capacity, all while searching for a permanent director.

“There are still quite a few undefined aspects regarding implementation that will need to be worked out in the coming months,” de Castro said in an email to Inside Higher Ed earlier this month. “However, I’m very confident we will be able to organize the required courses within the timeframe.”

Teaching core-curriculum courses is “going to require a significant amount of faculty to be hired,” said Christine Hensley, a member of both the Iowa Board of Regents and the center’s advisory council, at an advisory council meeting earlier this month. She said, “There’s just a lot of work ahead,” but also called it “very doable,” per the meeting recording. 

Richard Lowery, an advisory council member who’s also a University of Texas at Austin associate professor of finance, suggested at the meeting that the scholars on the 26-person council start developing curriculum outlines, even before the permanent director’s hiring. 

“We’ve got two years and change to get a small set of classes that will be delivered to a massive number of people. I think we need to start working on this now,” Lowery said. He added, “We’re going to need to be starting to scale up very fast to get the hiring in.”

Hensley, though, said hiring a permanent director is at the top of her list. That search may be aided by the anticipated salary range: $200,000 to $450,000, per the job posting.

Josh Lehman, a spokesperson for the Board of Regents, said Hensley wasn’t available for an interview Tuesday. Regarding the salary range, he told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “They wanted to be able to recruit the best and brightest” and “the final salary would be commensurate with the experience of the successful candidate.”

The new director should “rebuild trust with students, faculty and taxpayers,” Hope Metcalf, a faculty member at UI’s College of Law and co-president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Unfortunately, the combination of the legislature’s ideologically-driven attacks on DEI and CRT, combined with the overblown rhetoric used by many of the Center’s champions, has left the impression that [the] Center is the pet project of a few partisan politicians rather than a serious scholarly enterprise.”

Still, she acknowledged the potential for finding common ground.

“A simple starting place is teaching core courses. Rather than rushing to make expensive new hires from outside of Iowa, the executive director should start by speaking with the world-class faculty here at UI who teach US history and government.”

Regarding hiring sufficient faculty, Lehman wrote, “The process is just getting started for implementation of the law, as it was just recently signed and does not take effect until fall 2028. There are many specifics and details to be worked out, in consultation with the universities.” (Other parts of the law affect other public institutions in the state.)

The law requires undergrads to take a “comprehensive survey of all American history” course, plus a second such course in American government. The only students exempted are those who have already completed “substantially similar” coursework or who are pursuing degrees that are supposed to take three years or less.

Lehman told Inside Higher Ed, “There won’t be any classes offered by the Center in fall 2026.” It’s unclear whether that will remain the case until fall 2028. 

Lowery pushed back during the meeting on the idea that the center should stop offering courses until the mandate kicks in two years from now. He said that could exacerbate issues with hiring enough people quickly enough.

“I really would hate to see us try to scale up to have enough faculty to teach all of these required classes, like, the fall when they’re starting,” Lowery said. “The idea of hiring that many people at once just is causing me enormous anxiety.” 

“I’m nervous about going from nothing to teaching every student at Iowa,” he said.

Lowery, an outspoken conservative, didn’t provide an interview Tuesday. His lawyer, Del Kolde of the Institute for Free Speech, cited the appeal of his First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Texas. “As a result, Richard avoids speaking to reporters on topics relating to UT or public universities.” 

The University of Iowa, for its part, isn’t commenting on the situation. The university previously deferred comment to the Iowa Board of Regents, to which the center reports, and it didn’t respond to further requests for comment Tuesday.