Heeding mounting pressure from not just directly-affected students but the larger student body, University of Northern Iowa late Wednesday revised its discipline of an embattled professor who required masks — allowing him to continue teaching the class he was removed from last week.
The dozen University of Northern Iowa students left without an instructor after administrators stripped him of his in-person teaching duties for making them wear masks have continued meeting at their scheduled class time, and on Tuesday finalized a joint statement in support of their lost professor.
The University of Northern Iowa faculty union is filing a prohibited practice complaint against the Board of Regents and UNI for reprimanding their tenured peer for rebuffing regent guidance by requiring masks in class and threatening lower grades if students didn’t comply.
Upper-level University of Northern Iowa students who this week lost their specialized “plant systematics” professor feel they’re the ones being punished by the administration’s decision to discipline him -- for imposing a mask mandate -- by stripping him of in-person teaching duties.
Professor Steve L. O’Kane — who is 64 and has been at UNI for 26 years — will be allowed to continue teaching his online courses for this semester, according to a disciplinary letter UNI College of Humanities, Arts, and Sciences Dean John Fritch wrote in a disciplinary letter Wednesday.
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.
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