Controversial 1987-88 Iowa presidential search would give today’s Legislature fits
Statehouse Republican leaders only want regents on presidential search committees, reversing shared faculty governance role that has helped find university leaders
Boy, oh boy, leaders of the current Iowa Legislature would have blown their collective minds over the University of Iowa presidential search in 1987 and 1988.
That controversial, historic search included delays, a reboot, accusations of a rigged process and arguments with the faculty about shared governance. You know, the kind of shared governance Statehouse Republican leaders are considering abolishing by law.
It all smoothed over back then but doing so took a lot of time. Even so, the ripples of events like that have traveled a long way to Des Moines 2026.
Certainly the spirit of 1987-88 lived on when the House Higher Education Committee kicked off the new session by taking up House Study Bill 538, which says only state regents, who run the universities for now, may be on search committees when the U of I, Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa need a new president. The study bill’s wording mandates such searches, instead of the current practice of authorizing them if the regents so desire.
The study bill also says the regents may keep secret the names of finalists who are identified and interviewed unless the unsuccessful ones say being public is okay. The first-week filing is part of an onslaught of study bills introduced in the Legislature as its Republican leaders try to impose what they think are fixes on higher education institutions that are getting close to two centuries old.
These lawmakers, for sure, would not have liked efforts to replace James O. Freedman when he left the U of I presidency for the same position at Ivy League Dartmouth College in 1987. [Ed. note: corrected to Dartmouth College in 1/20/26 1:17 pm CDT — thank you reader for the catch]
The presidential search committee back then, led by the late communication studies professor Sam Becker, consisted of 17 faculty, staff and students. The regents hired the Heidrick and Struggles firm in Chicago to find candidates who could fit Iowa’s needs. The search committee sent the regents the names of four finalists but only two — University of Arizona Provost Nils Hasselmo and University of Kansas Vice Chancellor Frances Horowitz — remained in the hunt to be interviewed by the regents in December 1987.
The regents emerged from those interviews demanding more finalists and that Richard Remington, the U of I’s vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculties they had picked to be interim president, be included. The delays and maneuvering were enough for Hasselmo to take his name out of the running.
It was not a pretty time in Iowa City during winter break that school year. Trust was low. Several faculty members accused the regents, especially their strong-willed president Marvin Pomerantz, with rigging the selection process. Pomerantz said the regents would work with U of I faculty on the appointment but made certain to all involved that the regents had final say and wanted make the best choice possible.
Swirling around in the arguments as 1987 shifted into 1988 was shared governance, a long-standing practice at Iowa’s three public universities. Faculty leaders like to remind politicians about shared governance when politicians want to push too far into classrooms. At least they did when the privilege was not under fire. Faculty senates and councils have been able to recommend policies for the state universities but the state regents have had final say for some time, despite the concocted notion implied in the study bill that regents do not.
The U of I Faculty Council went into executive session in January 1988 to discuss what its members wanted to say about the rebooted presidential search and how it was ordered. Council members did not want to make the situation worse, English Professor Donald Marshall said at the time, and the situation already was bad, he added. “I wonder if the members of the Board of Regents understand and appreciate the role the faculty ought to play in the governance and the operating of this university,” he said.
The search committee recommended in May 1988 Alice Chandler, State University of New York, Albany, president; Indiana University Vice President Kenneth R.R. Gross; and the University of Colorado’s Hunter Rawlings III to join Hasselmo and Horowitz. The regents kept Hasselmo’s name on the list of finalists despite his decision to move on.
Steven Cahn, a City University of New York administrator, had visited the U of I campus in April but told the search committee he was out for personal reasons. Cahn stayed at CUNY and is professor emeritus.
Rawlings was the pick — hired in a one-hour deliberation after the regents met with Horowitz — but the other finalists did not suffer because of the public, controversial, crazy vetting in Iowa. Remington stayed at Iowa to teach and lead the Institute for Health, Behavior and Environmental Policy until he died in 1992. Hasselmo became University of Minnesota president later in 1988.
Horowitz landed on her feet, become the CUNY Graduate Center president from 1991 to 2005. Chandler did fine, too, as her university’s president until retiring in 1996 before being called to be interim president at Ramapo College of New Jersey in 2000. Indiana University gives an award in honor of Gross.
Future regents tried to get more business interests at the U of I helm, promoting people like Bruce Harreld, who had a stronger business background than academic background, into the presidency. Faculty worried about him, too, but he won them over by paying attention to their concerns, raising funds and handling the university’s business end while leaving academics to faculty. He met monthly during the school year with the student-run The Daily Iowan for interviews about campus issues.
To be fair, the state universities are supported minimally by tax dollars, although nowhere close to the level when they truly were state universities. But, it seems that no matter hard they try, Republicans in charge in Des Moines cannot be satisfied with just establishing centers for intellectual freedom or other efforts they have taken to run the universities.
Now, they are considering pumping the brakes on the voting rights of the state-required college student member of the Board of Regents and on acknowledging Native American land that once existed where the state universities exists while looking into giving themselves authority to veto regent spending the elected politicians do not like.
Little seems to work well enough for those in the Iowa Legislature who cannot trust the people hired at the state universities to run the places.
Marvin Pomerantz, a major Republican Party figure during his lifetime, could not satisfy them when advocating for the universities and keeping lawmakers out of the regents’ decision-making authority. The countless regents — especially, apparently, the college students over the last 40 years — could not satisfy them, either.
Same for Harreld, Freedman and Rawlings, Sally Mason, David Skorton, and current president Barbara Wilson at the U of I; Wendy Wintersteen, Gregory Geoffroy, Martin Jischke, Gordon Eaton at ISU, where David Cook gets his chance in March; and Constantine Curris, Robert Koob, Benjamin Allen, William Ruud and current President Mark Nook at UNI.
All of those Iowans have had their turns but are deemed to be inadequate at, what, failing to teach the values of a United States republic even while they built bigger things elsewhere on their campuses.
A lesson can be learned from Rawlings. He left Iowa in 1995 to become president of Cornell University and, eventually, the Association of American Universities. At Iowa, he started the university’s research park, helped the university get chosen for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s National Advanced Driving Simulator at the park, and oversaw completion of a new College of Business building.
But, he also was a strong advocate for keeping political and business interests out of how major research universities like those in the AAU are run. He argued that such interests posed a threat to public colleges.
“The politicians often want to get things done quickly,” Rawlings said in a 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education interview. “They don’t respect, in some cases, the joint governance, the shared governance that I think has been one of the great reasons why our universities are so strong. And so there’s a desire to act quickly and without proper consultation.”
Two years later, he wrote for Inside Higher Ed: “If anything exhibits the essentiality of education to the maintenance of democracy, it is the current presidential campaign.” It was 2016 and Donald Trump was picking up steam toward his first election as president.
“Some candidates have succeeded with appeals to fear and base instincts, with misleading claims based on passion instead of evidence, with repudiation of reason and rationality, and with autocratic overtones,” Rawlings wrote. “America needs citizens educated to think critically and independently, and trained to weigh arguments about complex subjects like energy and climate and tax policy against one another with some degree of sophistication.”
If only we would heed his words in the state he once served.
Lyle Muller covered the state Board of Regents in Iowa for the Iowa City Press-Citizen and The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) from 1986-1999. He is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary. And, purchase a copy of his book.
