COVID-19 altered how faculty members across Iowa’s public universities spent their work days in the last academic year – draining hours spent in a classroom and decreasing time on research and scholarship while spiking virtual instruction and online grading and preparation.
The ongoing enrollment losses Iowa’s public universities are experiencing mirror trends shaping the higher education landscape nationally – with the Board of Regent campuses since fall 2019 losing 7 percent of their total enrollment, compared with a 6.5 percent two-year drop at the national level.
After much speculation on how COVID-19 would affect Iowa’s high-profile university athletic programs in the 2021 budget year — with deficit projections p
The University of Iowa’s dining operation this fall is about 900 workers shy of being fully staffed — putting it at only 42 percent of its goal.
The upper-level University of Northern Iowa students who last week experienced the “unnecessary stress and anxiety” of losing their specialized Plant Systematics professor as part of his discipline for mandating masks want their money back.
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.
More college and university students nationally and locally are in need of mental health resources in the wake of pandemic-related changes and challenges, according to recent surveys and campus experts.
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.
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.
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