Vanessa Miller

A letter to Mercy Iowa City patients went out over the weekend about its transition to University of Iowa Health Care ownership asking them to “continue to schedule and go to your appointments as usual.”

Just weeks away from “day one” of a merged University of Iowa-Mercy Iowa City model through which the 150-year-old Mercy Hospital will morph into UI Health Care’s “downtown campus,” job offers are going out to more than 1,100 prospective transitioning employees.

Speaker of the Iowa House Pat Grassley has served in the Legislature nearly 18 years and has never — over that span — seen it undertake a broad review of “how we deliver higher education.”

Building on its existing collection of pre-U.S. Senate political papers from Chuck Grassley, the University of Northern Iowa on Wednesday announced the long-serving senator will make another gift leaving UNI with a complete collection of papers from his entire career spanning 60-plus years.

That concept the children intuitively understood -- that giving can be as inspirational as getting – is one that UI honors program associate and longtime professor Dave Gould decided to explore this fall in his final semester teaching “Life Design,” an esteemed Blank Honors Center course that over more than a decade has produced community leaders, community events, and community change.

The University of Iowa shift in leadership and decision-making power has meant “significant” challenges for the $525.6 million hospital campus it’s building in North Liberty, according to an Oct. 18 audit by Baker Tilly, provided to The Gazette through an open records request.

Across colleges and universities, the words and lived experiences of addiction and recovery, dependence and therapy, mental illness and counseling are becoming less taboo, making initiatives like Iowa State University’s Collegiate Recovery Program more popular and important for students seeking support.

Universities nationwide, including those across Iowa, are prioritizing access and affordability to higher education among their recruiting strategies – even as tuition rises – and many hope a first update to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in many decades will help.

As the University of Iowa continues its takeover of Mercy Iowa City, administrators are sharing more details about the transition — including the appointment this week of Deborah Berini to lead management and integration with the now-bankrupt community hospital.

Among the complexities of a Mercy Iowa City bankruptcy sale to the University of Iowa is its electronic medical system transition – with any gap or abrupt termination of system operations posing “significant” threat to Mercy and its patients.

About halfway through construction of the University of Iowa’s new 469,000-square-foot hospital campus in North Liberty, its orthopedics department this week shared more details about plans to move its clinical, surgical, research, and educational operations to the Forevergreen Road site — further backing his characterization of the campus as an “orthopedic hospital.”

“There are real benefits,” he acknowledged when asked for his main takeaways from the scientific report. “But that doesn't mean there aren't real potential harms as well.”

Although only a fraction of the students who graduate in more traditional spring ceremonies do so in December, Iowa’s public universities this weekend will celebrate thousands participating in fall commencements across their respective campuses.

A month after Iowa’s Board of Regents approved a list of diversity, equity and inclusion recommendations, like restructuring DEI offices and cutting unnecessary positions, its public universities have started to “review and reimagine” their campus DEI efforts.

When the University of Iowa finalizes its purchase of the 150-year-old Mercy Iowa City campus, it will be renamed “University of Iowa Health Care Medical Center Downtown,” according to a rebranding UIHC announced Thursday.