Iowa public universities rewrite strategic plans to remove or rephrase DEI language

IOWA CITY — A month after Iowa’s Board of Regents cut references to diversity and inclusion throughout its five-year strategic plan, Iowa’s public universities largely have done the same in response to legislation and regent directives curtailing all DEI efforts.

Where the University of Iowa’s 2022-2027 strategic plan previously included a goal to foster a “welcoming and inclusive environment,” the rewritten plan has cut the word “inclusive” and omitted the intention to embed “diversity and equity” into the Iowa experience.

A section of the UI plan stating that “diversity, equity, and inclusion are essential to every aspect of the University of Iowa’s mission and are embedded in each of the strategic plan priority areas” has been redlined and replaced with language emphasizing “access to high-impact opportunities.”

That, according to the revised plan, “is essential to the University of Iowa’s mission and plays a key role in each of the strategic priority areas.”

Instead of being dedicated to “transparency, communication, collaboration, and accountability in its diversity, equity, and inclusion growth” the plan has rephrased that commitment to providing a “welcoming and respectful environment in which individuals from a wide-range of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences have a sense of belonging and the ability to achieve their potential.”

In some cases, the rewriters simply replaced words like “diverse” and “inclusive” with words like “different” or “array” or “comprehensive.”

Where the plan once outlined a goal to advance interdisciplinary collaboration in strategic areas like the sciences, well-being and mental health, arts and humanities and diversity, equity and inclusion, the plan now swaps out DEI with “health care.”

Iowa State University in revising its 2022-2031 plan does much of the same, redlining one of its five “aspirational statements” — the one that made it a value to “be the university that cultivates a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.”

In its place, ISU has added an aspiration to be a campus “that cultivates a welcoming and respectful environment where all students, faculty and staff flourish.”

Instead of recruiting a diversity of students, faculty, and staff and tracking demographic gaps, ISU’s rewritten plan charges it to recruit “talented students, faculty, and staff who enhance the university’s teaching, research and extension missions by contributing diverse intellectual and philosophical perspectives.”

The University of Northern Iowa cut “equity” from its list of values — including the explanation that it aimed to cultivate and nurture “a diverse, just, and inclusive community, culture, and environment.”

  Buy Photo

Instead of a goal to “create equitable, diverse, and inclusive opportunities,” UNI set a new goal of “access for all.”

Metric shifts

The changes — which go before the Board of Regents for approval next week — are a response to a bill Gov. Kim Reynolds signed last year barring Iowa’s public universities from spending on any DEI office, staff, training or programming. Regents handed down 10 directives — including ones ordering the campuses to cut DEI functions not necessary for compliance with accrediting bodies or law.

Republican lawmakers this session have sustained their attacks on campus-based DEI initiatives — this time directing legislation to Iowa’s private institutions and to the curricular offerings across the three public universities.

With President Donald Trump’s election and subsequent executive order terminating “DEI discrimination in the federal workforce,” the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights last week issued a “dear colleague” letter admonishing colleges, universities and K-12 schools for embracing “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences” in their admissions, financial aid, hiring and training practices.

“Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’ and advanced discriminatory policies and practices,” according to the letter. “Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them — particularly during the last four years — under the banner of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.”

The letter — in step with Iowa’s Republican-led Legislature and Board of Regents — advised all campuses to end DEI practices.

UNI and the UI — as part of their strategic plan updates — also adjusted or amended metrics used to track progress toward their goals, including measures watching demographic gaps in things like graduation and retention rates.

UNI measures of retention and graduation rates for first-time “students of color,” for example, were redlined. Another eliminated UNI metric was the percentage of minority students “in the first-time in college entering class” and one that would have tracked and reported faculty, staff and student self-reported gender identity.

The UI traded any metric aiming to measure the attainment gap of minority students to ones measuring the performance of Pell Grant recipients — or low-income students qualifying for the largest federal grant program.

Although ISU cut its goal to monitor graduation and retention rates of underrepresented students, it maintained among its metrics one to “reduce the attainment gap of underrepresented students.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

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