Higher Ed

Systems are not in place on the University of Northern Iowa campus to ensure compliance with the 32-year-old federal Clery Act – which governs higher education crime reporting and security mandates – leaving the Cedar Falls-based university at risk of hundreds of thousands in fines and safety breaches, according to an internal audit.

Over the next 24 years, if nothing changes, Kirkwood Community College is on track to spend nearly $40 million maintaining its 97,094-square-foot Iowa City campus – which has a current classroom-use rate under 40 percent and saw a 75-percent enrollment decline between 2016 and 2021.

The state education budget lawmakers finalized early Wednesday includes a fraction of the $22.1 million increase Iowa’s public universities sought for the upcoming budget year.

Inflation and supply chain issues have driven up the cost of two premiere University of Iowa construction projects about to begin – including a new wrestling facility featuring state-of-the-art locker rooms and practice spaces for the Hawkeye men’s and women’s wrestling teams.

Kirkwood Community College, a 55-year-old Cedar Rapids-based higher education fixture that’s ballooned to a sprawling network of 14 campuses in seven Iowa counties, for the first time is conducting a comprehensive review of its Iowa City campus to ensure it is meeting the needs of the community in which it sits.

Iowa’s public universities last year used a waiver process to bypass open searches — designed to attract a diverse pool of qualified candidates and ensure all applicants have an equal opportunity to compete for open positions — in more than 150 hires, most of which involved the University of Iowa.

Over the most recent decade on record, only 28 percent of NASA’s “competed missions” had female principal investigators — a primary and substantial position — and NASA over that time didn’t fund any female PI-led mission proposals in two of their four divisions: astrophysics and earth science.

A former University of Iowa provost who resigned under a cloud of suspicion after just one year – hinting on her way out that she wanted to serve a campus aligned with her diversity, equity, and inclusion values – is being accused in a lawsuit of taking that social justice mission too far in her new job.

Like more than a dozen museums working to return to Nigeria objects and artifacts stolen in the 1800s, the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art has arranged an audience with the Oba of Benin this fall in hopes of repatriating two pieces “to their rightful owners as swiftly as possible.”

Two years after Iowa’s three public universities made the unprecedented and heart-wrenching pandemic-propelled decision to nix in-person spring commencement ceremonies – a historic rite of passage – all three are resurrecting them this weekend.

Since the start of this spring semester, Iowa State’s name-removal committee has met 15 times about the request to remove Catt’s name from Catt Hall – interviewing experts and hearing from Maryland-based History Associates Inc., which provided the committee with 200-plus historical documents.

An Iowa State graduate student is suing the university, a fellow veterinary medicine research assistant, and two supervisors, asserting she endured years of sexual harassment – which continues today – and gender discrimination and retaliation for reporting it.