Iowa students rally against regents, DEI directives: ‘We matter’

AMES — A crowd of angry students and community members armed with signs, chants, and prepared comments convened Wednesday inside the Iowa Board of Regents meeting to oppose its anti-DEI actions and other politically-aligned impositions on the public universities.

“The question that I have for the Board of Regents is, when do you call enough enough?” Terry Miles said. “As a person in the City of Ames who supports (Iowa State University) and the faculty and the students, my question is, where are you going to draw the line? When are you going to say that education is higher and more important than a political party or a political statement?”

The half dozen people who spoke during a public comment portion of the meeting hammered regents for bending to demands from Republican lawmakers and a governor who they said seems uninterested in academic freedom, free speech, and the core values that long have served as pillars buttressing higher education.

“A lot of people have brought up the budget incentives for restricting DEI programs or canceling DEI offices,” ISU student Bruce Hilton said. “But what really is a waste of everybody's time and money is making university officials comb through thousands of university websites, university directives, emails, and footnotes to remove language that you have decided you do not like.”

In response to legislator demands, the Board of Regents in 2023 issued a list of diversity, equity, and inclusion-related directives to its campuses that legislators then baked into law in the last session — including a prohibition against DEI offices, hiring, staffing, training, and related spending.

When the state appropriations-reliant campuses said they were largely done with that work last fall, lawmakers took issue and brought their concerns to Board President Sherry Bates — who told the universities in February to do better and “a lot more,” like stripping the websites of any remnant of DEI.

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But the speakers who addressed the board Wednesday referenced recent federal attacks on higher education funding, research, and curricula in pleading with the regents to push back.

“If you want to provide needed public services, high-quality accessible education, and high-quality research and scholarship — if your goal is to provide all of these — then please tell me why, even though in the initial directive issued by the Board of Regents it says that educational programs are not affected by the DEI restrictions, why are so many teachers fearful right now, censoring themselves, taking things out of their lesson plans?” Hilton said, urging the regents to have their educators’ backs.

“Teachers have no protections right now … and you are the only thing that stands between unchecked federal regulations and our universities, our professors, our students, and our programs,” Hilton said. “Stand between it. You don't have to let it all slide through just because you are loyal to your party.”

Urging a public statement, Hilton said, “Our teachers need to know.”

“Please let our teachers know that they are not affected, and you will stand by them and anything that they are going to teach, including history and facts.”

Holding signs reading “Who is Next?” students addressed what they perceive as the erasure of students — including minority and international students under threat.

“You are telling us we do not matter, and that message does not land quietly,” UI student Darrell Washington said. “It hits like a visceral wound to silence.”

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Calling the DEI actions “an erasure,” Washington said the board is making “a choice to scrub our histories, our identities, our truths, out of the curriculum, out of existence.”

“It's a choice to ignore us, to pretend we were never here,” he said. “But we are here. We are not a footnote. We are the story. We are the voice. We are the truth.”

Demanding transparency on decisions before they’re made, Washington argued, “It is our right.”

“This university is more than bricks and buildings,” he said. “It’s a community. It is a living, breathing entity. And we are the heartbeat of it.”

Referencing the diverse history of Iowa and its public universities, Washington pointed to “our international peers.”

“We see you. We stand with you. You are not outsiders, you are not guests, you are family,” he said. “We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for our rightful place at the table, because we have built this table, we bring the chairs and we will not be pushed away. We are not invisible. We are not optional. We are not leaving. We are here. We belong. We matter. And we will be heard.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com