Articles Tagged: Iowa Board of Regents

After considering a resolution earlier this week to rebuff a Board of Regents prohibition of mask mandates by encouraging faculty to act “at their own discretion,” even if it violates state law and board policy, University of Northern Iowa’s Faculty Senate opted for a less combative stance.

Faculty across Iowa’s public universities are continuing to demand the right to mandate masks in the classroom — looping in attorneys and considering resolutions urging faculty, regardless of state law or campus policy, to act in their own best interest and that of their students and the community.

A strategic planning survey Iowa’s Board of Regents Office in June sent to more 230 Iowans — including every lawmaker, every member of the governor’s staff and every state department head — received 75 responses, including just 17 from the 200-plus lawmakers and state staffers who got it.

‘I have no illusions that we will ever go back to so-called normal’

Just as the Board of Regents’ five-year strategic plan nears its end, higher education across the nation and in Iowa finds itself experiencing widespread disruption and primed for a fresh – re-imagined – start.

Iowa’s Board of Regents on Thursday unanimously approved, without discussion, a request for $20.3 million more in state funding for the next budget year, including the first increase in five years for University of Iowa special purpose units like the State Hygienic Lab and the Iowa Flood Center.

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics – heading into the fall and winter months with COVID still spreading – is preparing for another surge, albeit different from the one that stressed the campus last year.

University of Iowa Health Care, at the same time its moving swiftly to erect a $395 million 469,000-square-foot campus on a 60-acre site in North Liberty, is looking to expand its footprint in Coralville near its popular Iowa River Landing clinic.

Among 20 pages of policy changes the Board of Regents will consider next week is one explicitly giving the board president power to remove someone from a meeting if that person “engages in behavior that materially interferes with the board’s ability to conduct the meeting.”

Total enrollment across all three of Iowa’s public universities dropped again this fall, according to new numbers made public Thursday showing a continued slide that began in fall 2017 and worsened last year when COVID-19 upended the higher education experience.

Iowa’s Board of Regents – denied any state funding increase for its public universities in the last legislative session – is requesting a $15 million bump to its higher education appropriations for the next budget year.

With little discussion and much praise for the project – which struggled to get the state go-ahead it needs – Iowa’s Board of Regents on Tuesday unanimously approved construction on a new $395 million University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics site in North Liberty to start as soon as later this month.

The Board of Regents has called a special meeting for next week to consider giving the go-ahead to start construction.

Arguing no one disputes how University of Iowa Health Care for years paid employees overtime and for working extra shifts, the thousands of past and present workers suing UIHC’s governing Board of Regents recently asked a federal judge to decide the case without further delay via “summary judgment.”

The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics’ second try to get a state certificate it needs to build a new $230 million facility off Interstate 380 is getting a second round of pushback just as the five-member State Health Facilities Council prepares to reconsider the project this week.