Higher Ed

A 12-member committee charged with helping find Iowa State University’s next president aims to cast a wide applicant net, leaning toward using the word “preferred” instead of “required” for candidate attributes like a terminal degree or higher ed experience.

Community college leaders and advocates say they are feeling confused and left out of conversations that led to the list of eligible career fields for the Last-Dollar Scholarship program being cut down by one-third.

Reiterating Iowa’s “longstanding support for Israel and the Jewish community,” Gov. Kim Reynolds on Monday ordered the Board of Regents to review antisemitism policies at each of its universities and report back to her office on acts of antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023.

With Board of Regents permission to start work on the first of three phases for its more than $1.5 billion patient tower, University of Iowa Health Care is seeking an outside firm to audit in real time what is expected to be the largest construction project in state history.

Cornell College is the latest Iowa institution to take a stab at defanging its $54,776 tuition-and-fees tally by instituting a new “Save Your Seat” program, which this week proactively sent 19,357 prospective students “personalized financial aid estimates.”

After more than a decade leading University of Iowa Health Care’s orthopedics department from its basement dwellings on the main Iowa City campus, J. Lawrence “Larry” Marsh is stepping down as chair — just months after moving the department into a new 469,060-square-foot orthopedics hospital in North Liberty.

Echoing the CyTown multiuse development district that Iowa State University initiated five years ago, the University of Northern Iowa on Wednesday announced plans for a “Panther District.”

Nearly half of $15 million the University of Iowa has withdrawn for the upcoming budget year from a $1 billion P3-related endowment fund – created for and committed to supporting the UI strategic plan and its core teaching, research, and scholarship missions – will go toward faculty compensation and a $10 million renovation of its Performing Arts Annex.

“Call our legislators and tell them what a bad idea this is (from your own phone or using your own email),” UI Interim Vice President for Research Lois Geist wrote. “Being located where we are, we have limited ability to publicly fight this as faculty or as an institution.”

Nearly a decade after an investigation into Iowa State University’s Flight Service incited a Board of Regents reprimand of former ISU President Steven Leath, auditors again have uncovered “unacceptable weaknesses” in the ISU Flight Service unit.

With the $1 million Iowa lawmakers appropriated in the last session for a new Center for Civic Education at the University of Northern Iowa, the campus has hired a founding director following a national search.

A year after the University of Iowa aired plans for a multi-stage expansion and modernization of its Tippie College of Business, the Henry B. Tippie family has committed another $20 million toward a campaign to make the project happen.