Faculty Advisers Resign After Call for Iowa Civics Center ‘Reset’

The power struggle over the civics center at the University of Iowa appears to have reached an inflection point. Nearly half the center’s 26-member Advisory Council resigned this week, all of them faculty from institutions out of state. Prominent current or former Iowans remain.

The 11 resignations come after Robert Cramer, who chairs the Board of Regents that oversees Iowa’s public universities and selected the Advisory Council, called for a “reset” of the center—and after Republican state Rep. Taylor Collins, who chairs the House higher education committee, sided with Cramer in an email dispute focusing on the process for hiring the center’s permanent director.

“The board covets and appreciates the input from the advisory council,” Cramer wrote last week to Richard Lowery, a University of Texas at Austin associate professor and now former Advisory Council member who chaired the search.

“But CIF [the Center for Intellectual Freedom] is the responsibility of the Board, and the Board will make the final decisions regarding CIF,” Cramer wrote. “I respectfully ask that you get on board and work with Regent [Christine] Hensley collaboratively or step down and allow someone else to chair the hiring process. Please let us know what you decide.”

Collins then wrote to Lowery that he agreed with Cramer, adding that “we have to keep moving forward.” Lowery stepped down, along with 10 other faculty.

“It is now abundantly clear that the University and Regents will never allow the Center for Intellectual Freedom to be a success and will never allow the Center to operate in accordance with the law,” Lowery wrote to Cramer, cc’ing Collins and others. “Sadly, it seems that there will also not be the external support needed to see this endeavor actually succeed. Your message demonstrates clearly that you have complete contempt for those academics who do not adhere to the dominant, leftist ideology on [the] university campus.”

Lowery told Inside Higher Ed that “my perception is that the political support for doing this right has disappeared in Iowa,” adding that the “legislature has lost interest.” Collins didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Wednesday.

The fight over Iowa’s civics center represents another example of internal disagreements over hiring, course offerings and more at centers created by Republican lawmakers or university governing boards in red states. Instead of being created through traditional shared governance processes involving university faculty bodies, these often conservative-leaning civics centers have been established by legislatures and, in some cases, Boards of Trustees on prominent public campuses. Some are designed to operate with significant independence from the universities where they’re located, leading to conflict over hiring faculty and administrators for the centers.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tensions over the School of Civic Life and Leadership became so fraught that the university hired an international law firm to conduct a more than seven-month review, which reportedly cost $1.2 million and resulted in a report that Chapel Hill has refused to release.

“I think there’s a fundamental tension,” Lowery told Inside Higher Ed. “We’ve had a sort of ideological takeover of the universities where you have ideological administrators hiring ideological faculty and they will do everything they can to prevent other ideas from being represented on campus.”

Lowery said that means current faculty and administrators can’t be trusted to “right the ship themselves,” but, “at the same time, you don’t want politicians directly running academic units.” He said the solution in Iowa was the Advisory Council, which included faculty from all over the country who were willing to address the problem of “ideological capture” while maintaining “reasonable” academic norms. But now many of these conservative-leaning faculty are gone.

A Lack of Faculty

Iowa’s GOP-controlled Legislature created the center last year, but upped the stakes of its success this year when lawmakers voted to require almost all University of Iowa undergraduates to complete courses in American history and American government beginning in fall 2028. Only the civics center could offer those mandated courses, they said. But it currently has just one faculty member—interim director Luciano I. de Castro—and the university enrolled more than 22,000 undergraduates this past spring.

The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette reported that de Castro has been arguing with Board of Regents staff effectively since the center’s creation. He wrote an 18-page report this year titled “Issues Facing the Center Since Its Inception,” which he provided to Inside Higher Ed Wednesday. He listed as its “central finding” that “The University of Iowa has used its influence over Board of Regents Executive Director Mark Braun to hinder the Center’s operations.” The university didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, de Castro said his request to hire temporary faculty to teach a now-canceled course was denied, among other obstacles he’s faced.

The Advisory Council had 13 nonfaculty members from Iowa and 13 out-of-state faculty. Eleven faculty announced their resignations in a letter to Cramer, saying they had “no confidence in the Board of Regents.”

That means the Advisory Council is down to 15 members, only two of whom are faculty: Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University professor emeritus whom Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis also named as a New College of Florida trustee, and Wilfred McClay, the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at the conservative Hillsdale College. Neither responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Wednesday on why they’re staying alongside the nonfaculty.

The nonfaculty include Cramer, two other members of the Board of Regents, former Congressman Greg Ganske, and former Iowa governor and U.S. ambassador to China Terry Branstad.

‘Island of Disgruntled Nonconformists’

The tipping point seemed to come last week, when Hensley, a Board of Regents member who also serves on the Advisory Council, emailed the Advisory Council’s executive committee (EC) saying, “We need to schedule an EC meeting” this week to nail down the list of finalists for the center’s permanent director. She included a timeline, with the Board of Regents’ final candidate interviews, and their selection decision, scheduled for late next month.

Lowery replied with a two-sentence email from his iPhone: “I am the chair of the executive committee for the purposes of the search. We will not be meeting for the search next week and that is not the timeline we will follow.”

Cramer replied with a longer email.

“I appreciate the work you have put into the Center for Intellectual Freedom,” Cramer told Lowery. “But it appears we are going down different paths. The Board of Regents is moving forward with a new administrative agreement with the university and with hiring the permanent director. Rather than acting as an advisory committee, you seem to want to run the center your way and you’re not respecting the Board’s decisions. It appears that you’re trying to use the hiring process as leverage with the Board to get what you want.”

Cramer added that he had copied Gov. Kim Reynolds and Collins, the House higher ed committee chair, on the email.

“We are looking forward to a reset for CIF,” Cramer said. “Instead of fighting each step of the way, we want the permanent executive director and the Advisory Council to set a new course by working in partnership with the Board and the University. … We don’t want CIF to be an island of disgruntled nonconformists but an engaging center that permeates the whole campus.”

Lowery took issue with that. “What’s academia supposed to be—a bunch of happy-go-lucky conformists?” he told Inside Higher Ed.

Cramer said Lowery was slowing down what needed to be done to get the civics center moving, while Lowery blamed Cramer, Hensley and others. Hensley told Inside Higher Ed much of the dispute centers on Board of Regents members’ belief that the permanent director needed to be in place before the center could take action, while the faculty departing the Advisory Council supported the interim director, de Castro, making those decisions. De Castro is one of 11 finalists for the permanent position.

“The communications I’ve received from the regents have suggested to me that the search process has already been prejudged in a way that I didn’t find appropriate,” Lowery said. He opposed the board’s vote last week to require the Advisory Council to send three to four finalists to it, rather than fewer.

Hensley suggested it’s time to move forward.

“I think it’s over, they’ve made their decision, they’ve resigned, I respect that.” She said she’s appreciated their past support, adding that “there’s no way we’re going to allow the center to fail.”