Vanessa Miller

Once in a while — amid the clamor and chaos of crowds and jeers and protests and press — someone would walk up to a 45-pound, third-grade Tricia Saunders and thank her for “what you’re doing for women’s lib.” As an 8-year-old, she said, “I didn’t know what that was.”

A version of proposed updates to Iowa’s science education standards — omitting the phrases “climate change” and “biological evolution” — is not the version a 37-member “Iowa Department of Education Science Standards Revision Team” signed off on, members said during a public forum Wednesday.

The State of Iowa has agreed to pay $5.2 million to the family of a 21-year-old Wisconsin woman who was run over and killed by a state-owned unattended tractor while she was sunbathing at Clear Lake State Park in July 2020.

Just months after returning to the University of Iowa in spring 2024 following its removal for hazing in 2018 — when it was just re-establishing itself after closing in 2012 due to hazing — the UI chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon already is facing interim suspension, again, due to hazing allegations.

Research for years has linked exercise with long-term health benefits, but a new University of Iowa study highlights ways to capitalize on the connection in a health care setting.

Just days before lawmakers convene Monday in Des Moines for the 2025 legislative session, the Republican chair of a new Iowa House Higher Education Committee sent a letter to the state Board of Regents advising it to reject a University of Iowa proposal to create a new “School of Social and Cultural Analysis.”

Adding to its more than 50 civil rights complaints in recent years accusing colleges, universities, and other academic institutions of race- and sex-based discrimination, the anti-affirmative action Equal Protection Project on Monday filed a federal complaint against the University of Northern Iowa.

The University of Northern Iowa has signed settlement agreements with five assistant professors promising them tenure and back pay after they filed grievances based on the institution’s initial denial of their promotion applications.

Ahead of its public universities’ charge to draft strategic plan updates by February, Iowa’s Board of Regents next week will consider an update to its own five-year plan that eliminates references to diversity and inclusion.

The chair of Cornell College’s Philosophy Department is suing her institution, its provost Ilene Crawford, its former Dean of Students Jackie Wilson, and a professor who she said obsessively and persistently sexually harassed her.

In 2020, the University of Northern Iowa suspended its professional development assignments application process for the 2022 budget year — given requests are approved two years in advance — dropping the three public campuses’ total from 134 in 2021 to 72 in 2022.

Iowa’s Board of Regents, governing the state’s three public universities, has been understaffed for seven months spanning five meetings – with its student-regent seat sitting unfilled for the longest stretch since the Legislature in 1988 passed a law requiring a student fill one of the nine spots.

Iowa native and prolific astronaut — first with NASA for three decades and recently as director of human space flight for Axiom Space — Peggy Whitson again is celestial bound as commander of the 2025 Ax-4 mission to the International Space Station.

The Windstar Lines charter bus carrying the Cyclone Marching Band home from Iowa State University’s Pop-Tarts Bowl victory in Orlando was involved in an accident -- leaving some band members with “bumps, bruises, and cuts.”

The University of Iowa for years has had the top writing program in the country among public campuses – competing at times for No. 1 nationally with Ivy League universities like Yale and Brown, and generating a stream of award-winning novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, and screenwriters.