Higher Ed

Back in mid-March — more than a month before the Iowa Legislature passed a bill imposing on Iowa’s public universities sweeping diversity, equity, and inclusion restrictions that go beyond directives from their governing Board of Regents — Republican lawmakers sought a DEI update from the campuses.

Far from this week’s dramatic scenes of baton-wielding police clad in riot gear and bulletproof vests clashing with pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses coast to coast — a diverse combination of Iowa City students and residents on Friday mingled peacefully on the University of Iowa Pentacrest lawn.

A pro-Palestine protest is planned for the University of Iowa from 12-7 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A social media post states the protest will not be an encampment, which a campus public safety official said would violate school policy.

Using military-style code words like Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot for team names -- each group was assigned one yellow bin of drills and screws, along with a list of locations and instructions, aimed at executing the group’s larger mission: to distribute and install 100 6-foot-tall Herky statues across nearly as many locations in a 10-mile radius under the cover of night.

The 20th anniversary of Herky on Parade features 100 statues, including a handful grouped into a “G.O.A.T series” – like one in a “22” jersey named “From the Logo Herky” and another wearing Rudis shoes labeled “Yoda.”

Dozens of protesters took over a building at Columbia University in New York early Tuesday, barricading the entrances and unfurling a Palestinian flag out of a window in the latest escalation of demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war that have spread to college campuses nationwide.

A former faculty adviser and a former coach for the embattled Iowa State University crew club — which three years ago came under scrutiny after two students drowned during a club activity — are “immune from personal liability” and have been dropped from a lawsuit scheduled for trial next week.

Seven years after a Cedar Rapids-based contractor first started feuding with the University of Iowa over its work on the towering Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Iowa’s high court has weighed in and sided with the university on part of its appeal — reversing an order to pay Modern Piping another $12.8 million.

In response to 10 directives the Board of Regents handed down in the fall to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion spending and programming across its public universities, presidents of all three campuses on Thursday shared significant changes underway – including the permanent closure of Iowa State University’s Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office.

With questions about tenure, its value, and its threats still top of mind for some Republican lawmakers, the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty on Iowa’s regent campuses is continuing a generational slide to its lowest in recent history.

Iowa’s Board of Regents is not ready to include in its automatic-admission scoring system a relatively new “Classic Learning Test” gaining traction nationally and especially in conservative-leaning states as an alternative to the traditional ACT and SAT tests.

A growing percent of students across Iowa’s public universities feel comfortable expressing their opinions on and off campus, in and out of class, and even on social media — according to a second free speech survey Iowa’s Board of Regents administered earlier this year, just over two years after ordering its first following a string of campus incidents that drew intense criticism from Republican lawmakers.