Broad visions for the University of Iowa differ from 1988 to 2026
Iowa went from envisioning a major research park to a politically based culture wars center.
Hunter Rawlings III brought his doctorate in classics to the University of Iowa in 1988 at the age of 43 with a learning curve in his first job as a major research university president. He was respected as a scholar, having written The Structure of Thucydides’ History, and had been a vice chancellor at the University of Colorado. Now, those in higher education were watching to see how he would do in a top role in Iowa.
He showed how at an initial meeting with faculty leaders when he shared a vision. He wanted the University of Iowa to create a research park, he told them, where Iowa innovations could be researched, refined and turned into knowledge but also new businesses. Iowa could have its version of California’s Silicon Valley and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.
It sounded like a heavy carry. The next year, the research park started to take shape at the university’s Oakdale campus, in northern Coralville, east of Highway 965.
Almost 40 years later, the park covers close to 500 acres and has spun off nearly 100 companies and ventures. It has a Business Incubation Lab; several ventures in biotechnology and life sciences, business innovation and effective education; and a prized get, the National Advanced Driving Simulator in the Driving Safety Research Institute.
The driving simulator became possible in 1992, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration chose Iowa to host and run its simulator, which uses technology created at the U of I.
A recent leisurely drive past the research park provoked memories of those days in U of I history, when a grandiose idea turned into something remarkable. It also served as a comparison to the grand vision for the university last year: The Center for Intellectual Freedom.
How times have changed. Instead of growing technology incubators out of the dust of former farm fields, the big vision for the U of I at the start of 2026 is saving Americans’ hearts, minds and souls in a cultural war that calls liberal thinking the enemy.
Even the ill-fated laser center former U of I President James O. Freedman proposed in 1986 had more pizazz than the Center for Intellectual Freedom. Before that ill-fated center idea collapsed when researchers whom Freedman recruited backed out and Freedman left the U of I for Dartmouth University, it at least was forward-thinking. Laser research still exists at the university and the building along the Iowa River that was to have housed what Freedman’s proposed world-class laser center was designed by the renowned and recently passed architect Frank O. Gehry.
Those were high visions. The Center for Intellectual Freedom is not.
Billed as opening “a bold new chapter in our community as a dedicated hub for exploring the foundational ideas, texts, and traditions that have shaped the American constitutional order and free societies,” many of the center’s critics doubt that this politically motivated, Legislature-created, entity will, as its website states, “offer a unique environment where diverse viewpoints are encouraged to come together to engage in civil debate and thoughtful conversation.”
Do not misunderstand. It will be great if that happens — or continues to happen, if you accept that the university already offers deep exploration into ideas, texts and traditions. Critics’ suspicions were reinforced during the center’s previously reported, initial conference that was a bitch session about radicals, crazies, leftists and other demons running university faculties and indoctrinating young adults in the name of higher education.
I have written about the new U of I center twice, in December after the conference and in August piece, when I acknowledge why many conservatives have real concerns about how they feel they are treated at Iowa’s public universities. Being treated disrespectfully or in ways that make you fear for your safety are wrong.
But, being taught hidden truths that can be ugly or disrupt what you thought you knew is not wrong.
STUDY AND THOUGHT ABOUT INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY, FREEDOM
An interesting working paper published in July offers some insight into concerns conservatives have about college classes. The husband-wife team of Jon Shields and Stephanie Muravchik, professors at Claremont McKenna College, and Yuval Avnur of Scripps College, write that they found diversity lacking when researching millions of course syllabi involving the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and abortion ethics is not always reflected in the courses’ syllabi.
They wrote: “ … no work has had more influence on the study of race and the criminal justice system than Michelle Alexander’s ‘The New Jim Crow,’’ The book is a take-down of how the U.S. criminal justice system has failed Black Americans. They also identified as frequently used college texts the book ‘Orientalism,’ by literary critic Edward Said, when teaching how historical conflicts between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians neighbors are viewed, and a Judith Jarvis Thomson’s controversial 1971 essay, ‘A Defense of Abortion,’ when teaching about abortion ethics.
“To varying degrees, we found a strong asymmetry: While some of the most important voices like Alexander’s, Said’s and Thomson’s are routinely taught, their critics are not generally assigned along with them. And when we flip the analysis to see how often the critics are assigned along with the canonical texts, we find that they generally are taught together.”
But, this is not a case of indoctrination, the trio argued in a follow-up October article. Rather, their research shows that more diverse study resources need to be taught in college classrooms, they argue.
By the way, Shields and Muravchik have been to Iowa. They used Ottumwa and the rest of Wapello County, Iowa, as one of their sites when researching their book “Trump’s Democrats,” which delves into voters’ shift from supporting Democrats to Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Also, they generally loathe Donald Trump, they have said in interviews, while Shields has written either individually or with Muravchik extensively about the United States’ right wing.
Former state Rep. Wayne Ford, D-Des Moines, has been diving deep into the notion of intellect freedom, too. “Public universities exist to prepare citizens for a complex society—not to pre-decide conclusions for them,” he wrote at the end of 2025 for Bleeding Heartland.
Ford founded and led Urban Dreams in Des Moines before becoming executive director of Wayne Ford Equity Impact Institute and co-director of the Brown and Black Forums of America. He drills holes in the argument that diversity, equity and inclusion — a consistent target of those who think attention to such things are out of hand — is being jammed into the brains of our young people in college.
“Black student unions, cultural centers, and academic programs emerged through choice and dialogue, not requirement,” Ford wrote. “White students were not forced into ideological coursework, nor were Black students required to justify their presence. That balance—imperfect but principled—allowed learning to occur across difference.”
RESEARCH PARK AND POLITICS
This gets me back to the University of Iowa Research Park. Driving by it on Highway 965 should get you to thinking: Why would faculty members innovating in biosciences, business, education and the like want to indoctrinate students to be liberal sheep? Even if they predominantly are Democrats and favor, say, insuring workers in same-sex marriages and accepting that slavery and killing native people had a significant role in the United States’ history, it seems as though they spent a lot of time developing technologies and new ways of thinking that could be explored deeper for Iowa’s benefit.
We have not heard a lot about the innovations and scholarly advancements being part of the the culture war besieging the U of I and public universities. The state recently awarded $50,000 each to a company that removes nitrates at a water source to convert them into useful products and another working with protein therapeutics in medicine. The U of I gave cash incentives to innovators at the research park who are using technology to create new products.
Concerns always could be on the horizon. A study published last April in the Nature Human Behaviour online academic website. The study of 7,800 U.S. participants by University of Amsterdam researchers showed that conservatives in the study were less likely to trust scientists than were liberals.
“Moreover, following motivational accounts of scientist distrust, the study tested five theoretically grounded intervention strategies to improve conservatives’ trust in scientists,” the study’s authors wrote. “None of the interventions were successful, suggesting that trust in scientists reflects relatively stable attitudes that require more elaborate and time-intensive interventions.”
“Compared to liberal Americans, their trust is also lower in fields that contribute to economic growth and productivity,” a news release accompanying the study states.
Moreover, whether or not the center’s reach extends to 500 acres of laboratories at the Oakdale campus in Coralville would be conjecture. The National Advanced Driving Simulator program has an electric car for research and you know how the Trump administration feels about electric vehicles.
The Center for Intellectual Freedom’s website indicates that its focus is on the liberal arts and humanities: “Courses in American history, government, and civic leadership will be paired with public programs, guest speakers, and opportunities for research that connect classroom insights to real-world challenges.”
The over-under on how these programs, guest speakers and opportunities will balance out is a guess, at this point.
But, a wide gap exists when it comes to Big Vision — capitals “B” and “V” — at the University of Iowa between 1988 and 2026.
Good work, but pretty depressing Lyle!