Vanessa Miller

With a rich history in teaching and producing top-tier writing, the University of Iowa has gotten creative not just in the texts its students publish but the tactics its educators take to train them – turning from traditional textbooks for inspiration and education to society and culture, including pop-culture.

The University of Iowa is planning to close its 50-year-old Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and its Department of American Studies — both of which are replete with the kinds of courses and content that have been the target of Republican regent and lawmaker ire, directives, and legislation in recent months.

The University of Iowa has denied an appeal from a fraternity it placed on interim suspension in November for alleged hazing -- rejecting the organization’s argument that only two members were responsible and those two have been kicked out.

Two weeks after receiving a progress update on its public universities’ efforts to comply with 10 directives to scale back or eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on campus, the Board of Regents in late November issued an 11th DEI mandate.

“There's much more demand than five or six years ago for delivery, which is part of why looking for efficiency is really important. Because how many trucks do you want in your downtown, circling around, looking for parking?”

After evaluating campus feedback to a trio of finalists under consideration to become the next University of Iowa College of Law dean, UI leadership has determined “none of the candidates was the right fit for the position.”

More than 4,100 students across Iowa’s three public universities are slated to graduate this weekend in fall ceremonies that, while smaller in size and hype than spring commencement, are no less momentous on a personal, professional, and workforce level.

The University of Northern Iowa in fiscal 2024 contributed $6.3 million from its main campus’ general fund to its Athletics Department — the most in program history — indicative of an evolving college athletics landscape and analogous to budget issues facing similar programs, officials said.

Nearly a year after crews began work on the first new road on the University of Iowa campus in more than a decade — pouring pavement and removing 126 trees to make space for the 1,500-foot artery — a roundabout portion of the project is complete and began welcoming traffic Wednesday morning.

Upending a Polk County District Court ruling and reinforcing precedent for wage discrimination cases in Iowa, the state Supreme Court has found a former and long-time Iowa State University professor could recover damages going back more than a decade for being paid less than her male colleagues.

The number of Eastern Iowans needing or wanting emergency care has soared over the last two decades – as has the severity of the health issues patients are facing – cramping ERs, crowding wait rooms, and compelling hospitals to expand, renovate, and build.

Over the years, the concert’s proximity to the holidays snowballed into a full-on holiday theme – outfitting Yeats as the conductor in a Santa suit and inspiring UI School of Music students to come up with more and more tuba arrangements of the seasonal classics, from “Sleigh Ride” and “Silent Night” to “Frosty the Snowman” and “Grandma got run over by a reindeer.”

The Iowa Hawkeye and Missouri Tigers football programs finally are getting their Music City matchup Dec. 30, four years after COVID in 2020 derailed their first scheduled faceoff – returning the University of Iowa to Nashville just two years after it shut out Kentucky 21-0 in the 2022 Music City Bowl.

Iowa’s public universities maintained, or even increased, their first-year undergraduate counts this fall – bucking a national trend of deep losses in 18-year-old freshmen, according to special analysis of that group recently released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Having two Rhodes scholars in a single year is a feat for any state, given the program’s U.S. allotment is 32 annually and Ivy League campuses typically snag many -- including 10 in the 2025 crop of scholars.