Vanessa Miller

For its 50th year this summer, RAGBRAI will head back to Coralville as one of its overnight stops on the 500-mile ride.

$300K spent on failed search could go toward another

Once again, the University of Iowa has lost a legal battle with a contractor that worked on its six-year-old Stead Family Children’s Hospital – adding millions to UI’s swelling legal tab and further ballooning its total project cost to more than $420 million.

A group of 26 Republican lawmakers wants Iowa’s public universities to explain themselves and their teacher training curriculum by defining a long list of terms plucked from course descriptions — like “compulsory heterosexuality,” “critical media literacy” and “equitable science teaching.”

More than half the nearly 6,000 University of Iowa faculty and staff who responded to a recent campus climate survey said they’ve “seriously considered leaving the university” in the last 12 months – primarily due to pay, workplace culture, or career advancement.

By the time the University of Iowa student union celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2025, administrators expect the campus hub will be deep into an $81.1 million renovation that includes swapping its historic Iowa House Hotel for a new “campus well-being and mental health center.”

The UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital is considering installing a NICU camera system allowing families of intensive care infants to do watch livestreams of their babies stretching and arching and blinking or just sleeping.

Typifying the gap separating the union representing thousands of University of Iowa Health Care workers and their governing Board of Regents, union representatives Wednesday opened contract negotiations with a 25-page proposal including a 14-percent raise while regents offered a 1.5- to 3-percent raise on a single page.

By 2025, University of Iowa Health Care expects to have a new primary care location up and running in southeast Iowa City – addressing a “health care access gap” in that part of town.

Five years after lawmakers denied Iowa State University the full $100 million it sought for a new and updated Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory – which underpins Iowa’s $32.5 billion dollar animal agriculture industry and aids in animal health emergencies, like the bird flu – Gov. Kim Reynolds on Tuesday committed another $40 million to the new lab.

Although just 39 percent of Americans 65 and older have had both the initial COVID vaccine series plus an updated bivalent booster against the omicron strain, new University of Iowa-involved research shows “significant protection” from that bivalent shot among those older adults.

Iowa State University, which begins developing the $200 million CyTown entertinament district this spring, is looking for vendors, retailers and restaurants to eventually fill out the regional destination.

For the first time in more than a decade, Iowa’s 15 community colleges in the last full academic year saw a collective bump in credit-seeking students — although the total number of hours they took continued to fall, sustaining a trend of students taking lighter course loads.

The Cedar-Rapids based community college confirmed Thursday it’s moving most of its operations from that facility to its regional center in Coralville.

Iowa’s university and college campuses this month are planning a host of lectures, activities, and events to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and his National Day of Service — including Iowa State University, featuring a lecture from a civil rights leader arrested for climbing a South Carolina State House pole in 2015 to remove its Confederate flag.