Scrubbing webpages is un-American

This week we learned the scope of an order from the Board of Regents to take down or scrub any webpages connected to diversity, equity and/or inclusion.

The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported that many University of Iowa webpages have been deleted or are now dead ends.

The names and winners of diversity-related awards are disappearing. And essay by a diversity ambassador is gone. Even a letter to the university community by then-President Bruce Harreld in 2020 following verdicts in the George Floyd case has been scrubbed.

“How our community moves forward impacts our ongoing fight against racism and the growth of our campus culture,” according to the message, promising “institutional change will be created through listening, dialogue, and action over time,” Harreld wrote.

This is the sort of content that offends the board and Republican legislators who are hell bent to eliminate anything tied to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed legislation ordering DEI be dismantled.

We don’t know whether any of these deleted records are public documents that belong to the people of Iowa, not the board. We’re also left to wonder whether any of this whitewashing is violating constitutionally protected speech.

Moves to sanitize the university’s online archives is beyond troubling. Erasing the past so it can’t influence the future is the stuff of authoritarian governments. Watching what you say or write under threat of punishment smacks of the Red Scare.

Republicans want this done as fast as possible to head off any objections. Lawmakers have even criticized university officials who share their concerns about erasing DEI. They know what’s said thanks to informants.

On Wednesday, Miller reported on online communication rules mandating that universities “may speak, as an institution, on political, social, or public policy matters when such matters are central to the mission or critical operations of the university.”

But “The universities should refrain from making statements on political, social or public policy matters.”

All university statements must be in line with the positions of the Republican dominated Board of Regents. It must follow state law, including the law barring DEI on campus. All three conditions must be met.

Individuals, such as faculty members, still have the freedom to air their views on personal accounts, so long as it’s clear they are not speaking for the university.

Why would any Republican be OK with deleting documents and erasing history? Archives aren't partisan, they serve as historical markers which provide historians and anthropologists glimpses of the thinking of the time.

Trying to eliminate archives and engage in revisionist history harms everyone, regardless of political ideology. As Spanish-born American philosopher and novelist George Santayana wrote in The Life of Reason in 1905: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Lawmakers should demand a stop to the scrubbing. It’s one thing to question the merits and effectiveness of DEI, but trying to destroy the ideas behind it is un-American.

(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com