Creating a new school at UI is all about politics

A Trojan Horse is computer malware disguised as a harmless file: when opened it takes over your system, perhaps to steal your financial information. An antivirus Trojan Horse is designed to make you think your computer is infected with a virus, so you’ll panic and click on the file.

Republicans in the Iowa Legislature are advancing House File 437 and Senate File 127, also known as the “School of Intellectual Freedom Act,” to create a new academic unit at the University of Iowa. These bills are the political version of an antivirus Trojan Horse. The fake virus “threat” is that “left-leaning professors” predominate at the university. The bills are disguised as “educational reform,” but the school they detail is an attack on the UI.

There is no educationally responsible justification for the new school, since it deals with subjects already represented across such UI departments as History, Political Science, American Studies, and Rhetoric. Intellectual freedom of faculty and students is already supported by university policy; and faculty are appropriately enjoined from presenting “values, judgments, or speculative opinions” as if they were facts, and from interjecting into classes “material or personal views that have no pedagogical relationship to the subject matter of the course.”

The act ignores the university’s administrative structures and procedures. Administrators traditionally hold faculty appointments, and governance structures facilitate their consultation with faculty and staff representatives. New professors are hired based on recommendations by departmental faculty search committees; searches for college deans involve faculty, staff, and students. The system may be complicated and sometimes inefficient, but it promotes participation and transparency.

The “School of Intellectual Freedom” will be different. The Act gives the school’s dean “sole and exclusive authority” to hire all faculty and staff, and to fire all staff. The dean “reports directly to the president of the university or a designee of the president,” bypassing the provost, who as the university’s chief academic officer oversees all academic programs and faculty matters, including promotion and tenure decisions. The act says the dean will submit an annual report on the school — not to the provost or president, but to the governor, the general assembly, and the Board of Regents!

When you open the bills, there’s more damage: the dean of intellectual freedom would be hired by an “academic council” of up to nine members appointed by the Board of Regents; but “no more than one member may be an employee of the university” (emphasis added). Compare that to last year’s College of Law dean search committee: six faculty, two staff, one student, and one distinguished graduate. The Trojan Horse hiring scheme shuts out the university community in favor of — who knows?

House Republicans brought representatives of the Manhattan Institute and the National Association of Scholars to Des Moines to promote their bill. Such out-of-state right-wing lobbyists could be on the so-called “academic council.” The act also greases the skids for right-wing donors to fund the school with minimal oversight by the University.

Last but not least, the School of Intellectual Freedom will need to offer degrees and recruit students. The Republicans on the House Higher Education Committee recently proposed eliminating undergraduate degree programs that don’t give students a “return on investment.” So how’s the job market for “freedom” majors?

I was privileged to work at the University of Iowa for 33 years: I write as a private individual to defend its autonomy and values against an unconscionable political attack.

Michael Eckert is a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa.