Vanessa Miller

Adding to the lawsuits and settlements mounting for Mercy Iowa City and its affiliates is one filed earlier this year by the husband of a Mount Pleasant woman who died in April 2022 after making nearly 20 trips to various providers in a two-month span for what started as complaints of sinus pressure and earaches.

“There was blood everywhere,” she said. “I was dying. I was going to bleed to death. I was afraid I was going to die and was in severe pain.”

After hearing from student representatives worried about the rising cost of higher education but aware of eroding state support, Iowa’s Board of Regents without discussion Wednesday approved across-the-system tuition and fee increases – including a 3.5-percent hike for all in-state undergraduates.

Iowa’ Board of Regents also approved additional deferred compensation plans for her and for Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen. At the University of Northern Iowa, President Mark Nook gets his first raise since 2016.

The Board of Regents today is evaluating the performance of its three university presidents and executive director over the last year — a process that on many occasions historically has resulted in pay raises and increased deferred compensation.

The University of Iowa wants to make part of its research park in Coralville more attractive to prospective companies by cutting out the Board of Regents as owner and allowing developers to either buy parcels or lease land directly — making it more like Iowa State University’s booming research park.

Iowa State University next week hopes to add to its list of 80-plus honorarily-named buildings, centers, and spaces with Board of Regents approval to name its veterinary medicine academic building, “Frederick Douglass Patterson Hall.”

Continuing its construction boom involving more than $1 billion in new and renovated facilities, University of Iowa Health Care next week will seek Board of Regents approval to spend $249 million on a new 263,000-square-foot “Health Sciences Academic Building.”

In pushing a judge to move out of Johnson County a trial involving a University of Iowa student’s sexual assault allegations against the FIJI fraternity and former members, defense attorneys this week pointed to the likelihood of a scared juror pool.

Six months after launching a search to replace Harriet Nembhard as dean of its College of Engineering, the University of Iowa on Thursday announced Ann F. McKenna — a vice dean at Arizona State University — will take the reins of the 2,000-plus-student college Aug. 16.

Postsecondary enrollment nationally stayed well below pre-COVID levels this spring — down 1.3 million students or 7 percent from 2019 — and Iowa remained among the hardest-hit, with a 13 percent drop in combined community college, private, and public university enrollment over the four years.

On the same day University of Iowa officials asked a federal judge to dismiss a January lawsuit in which its new private utilities partner accused UI of shirking obligations just three years into their 50-year $1.165 billion deal, the university filed its own counter lawsuit against the utilities partner.

The tally of tenured and tenure-track faculty across Iowa’s public universities in the academic year that just wrapped continued down a slope that began a decade ago — when 3,531 Board of Regents faculty were tenure eligible, amounting to 63 percent of the 5,637 faculty total.

He retires Aug. 1 -- the 17-year anniversary of him being introduced at Iowa.

University of Iowa Athletics Director Gary Barta nearly a week ago on Saturday signed a “retirement agreement” with UI and the Board of Regents separating him from the institution Aug. 1 — without additional compensation beyond that date.