Regents Block Iowa Civics Center Director From Conferences

The Iowa Board of Regents is refusing to pay for Luciano de Castro, interim director of the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, to attend three upcoming conferences in Indiana, Ohio and Virginia that feature conservative scholars, pundits and politicians.  

According to The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, it’s the latest scuffle in an ongoing power struggle between the university and the center, which opened in 2025 after the State Legislature voted for its creation to “expand the intellectual diversity of the university’s academic community,” to balance out what some Republican lawmakers have alleged is rampant liberal bias on college campuses.

Although the center—which is among many similar establishments that Republican legislators have created across the country in recent years—only taught 19 students across two courses last semester and canceled course offerings for this academic year, the state passed a law this year requiring every undergraduate at Iowa’s three public universities to take one history and one government course selected by the center beginning in 2028.

The center, whose only faculty member right now is de Castro, will have to hire a permanent director and more faculty members to accommodate that plan; the state has so far appropriated $2 million for the center’s operations, according to The Gazette. But in April, de Castro published a report complaining that university administrators and the Board of Regents were not cooperating with his efforts to launch the center by blocking hiring, scrutinizing expenditures, altering bylaws and excluding de Castro from communication. 

And last week, a Board of Regents committee that governs the center also said it wouldn’t fund his travel to three conferences this semester, The Gazette reported. Each conference is hosted by right-leaning organizations—The Philadelphia Society; the Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society at Ohio State University; and the 2026 Mont Pelerin Society—and will feature former Vice President Mike Pence and Wilfred McClay, a history professor at Hillsdale College (which has supported Republican-led efforts to present a bowdlerized version of American history), among a variety of other prominent right-leaning figures.

Regent Christine Hensley, who is also a member of a separate 26-person advisory board that oversees the center, said the decision was aimed at focusing resources on growing local interest in the center. It has planned numerous activities on campus this fall, including an “America 250 Speaker Series,” which features McClay, among other scholars.

“We’re going through the executive search right now, and the feeling is Luciano really needs to be focusing on the speaker series and ensuring that we have significant attendance,” Hensley told the Gazette. “So we just feel the timing is not appropriate.” 

But de Castro and some members of the center’s advisory council criticized the decision as board overreach and a missed opportunity to promote the center.

“It is genuinely painful to miss these conferences,” de Castro told The Gazette. “I view this restriction as one more sacrifice required to continue this effort to create something valuable for the students of the University of Iowa and, ultimately, for the people of the state … I accept it only because of my sense of duty to that work.”