‘Barrage of Bills’ Would Upend Iowa Higher Ed—If They Pass

Iowa’s legislative session began roughly three weeks ago, and the state’s House Higher Education Committee and its subcommittees have already advanced sweeping legislation that could threaten universities’ budgets, change who has a vote on the board overseeing public universities, increase direct legislative oversight of these universities, and more.

The Republican leading these pushes has called gender studies degrees “garbage” and made other criticism of what universities teach. Some faculty have raised concerns that the Legislature is encroaching on the Board of Regents’ authority to oversee institutions, and on faculty’s role in shared governance. If all this legislation passes into law, Iowa would join the ranks of states such as Texas, Florida and Utah in enacting far-reaching conservative overhauls of higher ed in recent years.

Republicans on the committee have already passed out of committee bills that would:

• ban tuition increases for resident undergraduate students at the state’s three public universities until July 2031;
• make the universities liable for 10 percent of students’ defaulted loans;
• tax public and private institution endowments that exceed $500 million (affecting at least the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and Grinnell College) and directing the revenue to tuition for “high-wage” and “high-demand” jobs;

• forbid university president search committees from revealing candidates’ names unless the applicants agree otherwise;
• authorize community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees in certain circumstances;
• remove the requirement for an Iowan to graduate from an American Bar Association–accredited law school to take the bar exam; and
• require the statewide Board of Regents, which oversees the public universities, to develop a “performance-based funding model” based on, among other things, how many graduates remain in the state.

The committee’s subcommittees have also queued up more bills for its consideration. One subcommittee has passed legislation—called House Study Bill 534, which would enact new law and not merely a study—that would ensure that faculty senates have no final decision-making authority, appoint a new higher ed overseer and much more. It’s an echo of a sweeping law that Texas Republicans passed last year.

This single Iowa bill would also remove voting power from the Board of Regents’ student member, shorten members’ terms from six to four years, allow the Legislature to pass resolutions canceling individual board expenditures, let the board vote to launch post-tenure reviews of faculty at any time, ban faculty senates from “exercising any governance authority” over universities, require the board to regularly review and decide whether to continue academic programs with fewer than 10 students, and establish an “ombudsman” position that would “receive and investigate complaints of violations of state or federal law or board policy.”

It doesn’t end there.

The committee’s subcommittees have also advanced bills requiring public university students to take courses in American history and American government that explicitly can’t be “primarily devoted to the study of subgroups of Americans or other nationalities;” mandating that public universities seek accreditation from the Commission for Public Higher Education, a university accreditor founded by a group of Southern universities that hasn’t yet received federal government approval to accredit; and demanding that at least 80 percent of students accepted into the University of Iowa’s law school be either Iowans or already attending an Iowa institution.

Other bills from the chair of the House Higher Ed Committee, Representative Taylor R. Collins, would require the public universities to sign President Trump’s proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which no major university in the country has publicly agreed to, and another that would ban the universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B visas. (These bills have yet to make it through subcommittees.)

At this moment, it’s unclear if any of the bills will become law, as none have passed a full chamber of the Legislature. The legislative session doesn’t end until April, and neither the House speaker nor Senate president responded to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about whether they support these bills. But even proposals could lead to changes, state Representative Jeff Shipley, the vice chairman of the House Higher Ed Committee, told Inside Higher Ed. He said that while not every idea out of the committee will move forward, “typically just discussing it” can “change some outcomes and behaviors.”

Iowa, where the GOP controls the House, Senate and governor’s mansion, has shown the willingness and ability to quickly pass major higher ed legislation. Within 10 days in April 2024, Republican lawmakers introduced an education funding bill, added anti–diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) provisions to it and passed it to Governor Kim Reynolds, who signed it into law. The legislation banned Iowa’s public universities from having DEI offices and from hiring or assigning anyone “to perform duties” of a DEI office, which included banning affirmative action and restricting nonacademic programming that simply references identities such as race and gender.

But Iowa lawmakers have tried repeatedly to end tenure but failed to do so.

This legislation is also emerging from the House Higher Ed Committee, which the House speaker created in November 2024 and appointed Collins, 30, as chair. He didn’t return requests for comment this week.

State representative Timi Brown-Powers, the committee’s top Democrat and an opponent of most of its legislation so far, said “I think that we have a group of legislators on this particular committee who really want to take away the colleges’ control to make their own decisions on what they teach.”

She added that “this is a weird committee to talk about because it’s all over the place and you don’t know what’s real and what’s … disingenuous.”

An Escalation

Collins set the tone for this legislative session before it even began, telling The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette that “my constituents are no longer interested in paying for garbage like the bachelor of science in social justice or gender studies.”

“That money needs to be redeployed to high-demand fields like nursing, teaching, etc.,” Collins said, The Gazette reported. The newspaper further reported that Collins accused Iowa State University and the University of Iowa of expecting students to take courses under a “DEI umbrella.”

“We need to review the entire core curriculum and get rid of that,” Collins said, saying he would introduce the legislation requiring American history and American government courses “to replace that.”

Furthermore, Iowa Capital Dispatch reported on what may be driving Collins’s interest in revamping university presidential searches. “After last year’s search for the new president of Iowa State University, in which two candidates dropped out and one had positive views on lab-grown meat, Collins said he is ‘no longer willing to roll the dice’ on the presidential search process,” the Dispatch reported. And, regarding the endowment bill, Collins said endowments shouldn’t sit idly “but actually be used for the benefit of Iowa students,” the outlet reported.

Shipley, vice chairman of the higher ed committee, told Inside Higher Ed that “we live in a representative democracy, and voters have made it very clear they care a lot about their state’s institutions,” and want them to reflect positively on the state. Shipley said students are graduating with “little to no skills that could help people” and debt that will follow them their entire lives.

The Board of Regents didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed interviews, and a spokesperson said the board is monitoring the various bills.

Members of American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapters in Iowa see an escalation in Republicans’ attempt to overhaul higher ed. Chris Martin, president of United Faculty, the AAUP-affiliated union representing faculty at the University of Northern Iowa, said there have been far more higher ed bills than usual, and they collectively aim at “a pretty big transformation of higher education and the state Board of Regents.”

“Our main concerns with this barrage of bills is the weakening of the Board of Regents and also the weakening of shared governance at the public universities,” Martin said.

Martin noted that House Study Bill 534, the multifaceted piece of legislation that would alter the board, would appoint four nonvoting lawmakers to the body until the end of 2029. He said they would be “sitting in the room” and likely influencing board decisions, and “it just seems like it’s created for partisan purposes” because the sunset date means the lawmakers’ board seats will be eliminated by the time Democrats could retake the Legislature.

He did say “it’s hard to know how much [of the legislation] will pass. I know that the Legislature is busy with other things, including tax reform.” As for Collins, Martin said “he just seems to have a real disdain for higher education” and what faculty do. Martin said “I think he views higher education as these elite liberals.”

Lois Cox, a clinical professor of law emerita at the University of Iowa, isn’t “completely panicking,” in part because previous higher ed bills have failed. “But, in another sense, this year’s a lot worse,” she added.

Hope Metcalf, a clinical associate professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Law and a member of the university’s AAUP chapter, said it’s unfortunate “that the climate has shifted so dramatically over the last few years. I and many others, including faculty and students, worry about what this means for the future learning that happens on campus.”

“It’s clear that lawmakers care deeply about Iowa’s public universities,” Metcalf said. “So do we. The worry is that, taken together, these bills would radically alter Iowa’s proud tradition of public higher education. We want so many of the same things—affordability, quality, public service to Iowans—so the question is: How do we get there together?”