Articles Tagged: Iowa Board of Regents

Views: It expands rights and freedom. It makes ‘zero sense’

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’ picks to lead Iowa's state education agency and serve on the board that governs its three state universities met some push back Tuesday by Iowa Senate Democrats.

One of those projects is a $40 to $49 million expansion and build-out of its six-year-old Stead Family Children’s Hospital that -- with price escalations during construction, court-ordered payouts post-construction, and faulty work requiring widespread window repair -- already has seen its price swell from a $270.8 million budget to up to $450 million.

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh – as part of his nationwide “What is a Woman” documentary tour – is planning a visit to the University of Iowa this month, inciting some complaints, concerns and an online petition to shut down his lecture.

A Board of Regents pause on new diversity, equity, and inclusion programming – enacted last week in response to a Republican-led bill

The union representing 3,800 University of Iowa Health Care workers has announced the ratification of its “strongest contract for our members in Iowa since the changes to Chapter 20 in 2017.”

University of Iowa Athletics’ 2023 “diversity, equity, and inclusion five-year action plan” — which the department will get help operationalizing under terms of a new discrimination lawsuit settlement — lists 20-plus “actionable activities,” like designing “spotlight recognition awards for DE&I teams and departments who exemplify our values.”

Gov. Kim Reynolds on Friday reappointed two regents charged with governing Iowa’s public universities and named one new appointee to the nine-member board — former Republican congressional candidate Robert Cramer.

Mercy Iowa City Hospital in recent months had to retain a “strategic and operational performance improvement” consultant after breaching debt coverage obligations amid declining patient days and occupancy percentages. Just two miles west, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is overrun with as many as 70 people waiting in the emergency room at one time.

Republican lawmakers Wednesday began “dismantling the (diversity, equity, and inclusion/critical race theory) bureaucracies existing at our regional institutions” by advancing a bill barring Iowa’s public universities from spending money on DEI offices, employees, and programming.

The former Hawkeye football players who in 2020 filed a lawsuit accusing the UI football program of racial discrimination and harassment have dropped their claims against head coach Kirk Ferentz, offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz, Athletic Director Gary Barta, and former strength coach Chris Doyle.

This spring, the

With lawmakers in the throes of deciding how much to appropriate Iowa’s public universities for the upcoming budget year, the Board of Regents this week released a new “economic impact report” showing its campuses collectively added $14.9 billion to the state’s economy in the 2022 budget year.

The University of Iowa’s efforts to acknowledge and reward good work come as UI Health Care reports 500 to 600 open nursing positions, and the broader campus reports its most faculty resignations since at least 2006 — with 92 in fiscal 2022.

For the first time in decades, all three of Iowa’s public universities want to update the peer institutions with which they compare themselves to “more closely align” with their respective campuses.