University of Iowa, where intellectual freedom can exist in certain cases

New Center for Intellectual Freedom to be run by politically appointed Board of a regents, not the university

Graduate Herky with Old Capitol dome at the University of Iowa. (Photo by Lyle Muller)

Welcome back to college to all the students at Iowa’s three public universities — especially the University of Iowa, established in 1847 as the Iowa Legislature moved the capital to Des Moines but tossed the state’s first, Iowa City, a bone. My alma mater.

Welcome to the home of the newly forming Center for Intellectual Freedom. The center’s stated purpose is to “conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society,” a state law establishing the center states.

It is hard to criticize the notion of intellectual freedom because everyone should want it. I do. You, too, most likely. The state’s universities said when the state Legislature ordered the U of I center to be created that they do and that it already exists on their campuses.

But not everyone is convinced. MAGAs — the term is being used here as a one-word description in the same way MAGA uses words like “liberals” — think academics spend too much time analyzing unsavory things done in this country and not enough celebrating the United States’ amazing accomplishments. It is as though you did not know the only country to land humans on the moon.

The current MAGA-like push to shove into the background some of this country’s sins has a lot of folks suspicious about the new center, especially because the center will be overseen directly by the politically appointed Board of Regents instead of educators.

The regents have appointed Luciano I. de Castro, a Henry B. Tippie research fellow and professor of economics, as the center’s interim director. He is a direct report to them, not anyone at the U of I. Programming is to come, as the center was approved this year and de Castro was just appointed at the end of July. de Castro argued in favor of the center before lawmakers earlier this year.

Hooray, say those politically in charge, apparently presuming someone who doesn’t think like them never will run the state again, which happened at various times in the 1980s, 1990s and through 2010.

Their beef is long standing. They think the state universities are liberal hotbeds where young people are indoctrinated to be leftists. Gov. Terry Branstad called University of Iowa teachers socialists when speaking at a January legislative session.

But it just doesn’t ring true. Professors and instructors with strong opinions, especially based on research they have done? Yes. Socialists? Get real. Programming college students? I hope our young thinkers are not so gullible to be led blindly down a path to what they do not think is right. Like, a politician would never do that.

ROOTS BEARING MODERN-DAY FRUIT

Considering just the events of my lifetime, you could argue that the anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses but also violence during part of those protests more than 55 years ago helped paint some of the current feelings, even though the extent of that violence versus peaceful protesting in those years past gets blown out of proportion. But people have their opinions and they like to hang on to them.

Fact is, critics say, the protests did not sway conservative students away from what they believed. “No matter what might happen later in peacetime after the Vietnam War, late 1960s campus conservatives highlighted their patriotism by supporting the U.S. military any way they could,” Tim Sully wrote in 2024 for the Society of Intellectual History, an academic society at Indiana University — Indianapolis.

If you do not believe that ask yourself why the conservative movement has grown since then to where it is today.

The antagonism toward higher education also is tied by many to the rise of conservative politics during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Reagan brought into the 1980s his distaste for what he called in the 1960s “beatniks, radi­cals and filthy speech advocates” trying to force liberal values on students.

Filthy speech. Donald Trump example here.

Those complaining now say their concerns are based on current events. Johnson County is a heavily Democratic county that reflects the U of I, conservatives complaining about being in the minority have been saying for some time. And with a staunchly MAGA Legislature and governor, they are getting their way with the Center for Intellectual Freedom, the politicians’ preference over a School of Social and Cultural Analysis proposed by the U of I.

It is sad that their brand is that every faculty member is an ideologue, which would include those teaching medicine, nursing, engineering, physics, athletics, literature, medicine, law and business as well history, women’s studies, African-American studies and political science that work them up. Too much curiosity, critical thinking and scientific research apparently would not conform with the intellectual freedom that state government leaders want in the hands of political appointees.

The slighted point to a 2020 study by Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, and Sean Stevens, a research leader at Heterodox Academy, a nonprofit group in New York City that says on its website it wants “to ensure that our universities are places where intellectual curiosity thrives.”

The Langbert-Stevens study, published on the National Association of Scholars website, suggests that college campuses are prone to be liberal because an overwhelming majority engage in liberal politics or that an overwhelming majority of donors from people working on college campuses go to liberal causes. The National Association of Scholars says it is non-partisan but favors conservative claims of unfair liberalism on college campuses. Its mission is to uphold “the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”

The 2020 study, which excluded athletics coaches who work closely with student-athletes, covered 91 registered Democrats and eight Republicans for an 11.4 to 1 ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans at the University of Iowa. It covered 66 registered Democratic and six Republicans, for an 11 to 1 ratio, at Iowa State University. Interestingly, it covered 64 registered Democrats and six Republicans at Grinnell College, giving a college generally considered to be liberal a lower ratio of 10.7 to 1, thus illustrating the problem with data for Iowa colleges and universities — the survey sample is too small and only covers registered voters the researchers chose to include in their study model.

More recently, Roger Pielke Jr., a professor emeritus from the University of Colorado with backgrounds in mathematics, public policy and political science wrote on his Substack page The Honest Broker last year that public confidence in higher education is dropping because of the perceived ideological imbalance, although data he cites show overwhelming confidence from Republicans as recently as 2012 that college benefits them.

Pooh, pooh it all you want but this is where people accusing universities of being too liberal get their information and it is as real to them as it being false is to others.

CONSERVATIVE VOICE WEIGHS IN

In 1990, a group of students supporting President George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Kuwait held a series of demonstrations on the U of I Pentacrest, the same spot anti-Vietnam War protests were held 20 years earlier. One of those organizing the demonstrations was David Mastio, who went on to a prominent career writing opinion pieces in places like USA Today and, now, the Kansas City Star. He also was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He writes thoughtfully and pragmatically instead of dogmatically — he has been a harsh Trump critic, for example, while maintaining conservative stances.

I sent him an email recently asking what I was missing with my concerns about the Center for Intellectual Freedom. He took a few days to get up to speed on the matter and then responded: “The center could be an important balance to the University of Iowa's political monoculture that has only grown more extreme and more openly partisan in the years since I left Iowa.”

He pointed to an Open Secret report on the University of Iowa showing Democrat Party contributions from faculty and staff growing since the turn of the century, with a record in 2020. More than 90% of donations in 2024, 2022 and 2020 have gone to Democrats, he pointed out. The 2020 election field influenced a lot of that but the gap remained large in the other two years, too. Of note, U of I law professor Christina Bohannan has made a couple of unsuccessful but costly runs for U.S. Congress during the last two election cycles and is running again.

Mastio recalled how a faculty human rights committee investigated him for something he wrote in the Daily Iowan and said he has heard complaints about increased hostility toward conservatives at the U of I. “For me as a conservative student at Iowa, it was not welcoming. My dorm room door was defaced and I got death threats. Once I was public about my views, some professors were openly both hostile and dismissive,” he wrote.

Those in Iowa City at that time will remember that the group Mastio was in was fairly provocative with its rhetoric. One member, Jeff Renander, later became the Cedar County Attorney and was admonished by the Iowa Supreme Court’s Attorney Discipline Board in 2022 for ethical misconduct. It is worth mentioning because, well, people will remember and try unfairly to cloud Mastio’s point. Mastio made better choices.

“I know that measure is imperfect,” he wrote about the legislation establishing the Center for Intellectual Freedom, “but I think it reflects a real and dangerous imbalance. I love universities and I love talking to professors who know way more than me about the subjects they have dedicated their lives to, but this dangerous political imbalance threatens to paint universities (this financial pattern is repeated across the country) as partisan factories of political indoctrination and the enemies of the values of more than half the people who fund them and send their children to them. This is a crisis.”

If anything, he wrote, the center should get faculty, administrators, the regents and students to changing the U of I’s political climate. They also should be thinking about how they got into this situation of the Legislature dictating the center’s establishment, he wrote. And then, this ominous warning:

“I don't expect this center to be the final say the legislature and the regents have in righting the ship.”

YEAH, BUT…

Mastio makes good points about how students should be treated and how the donations affect the way the U of I is perceived. Same for allowing opposing viewpoints to be raised. The university has guidelines for how students are to be treated and for keeping politics out of classrooms, so just follow that. But how do you have a conversation about, say, Marxism, and whether or not it has seeped into academia without offending someone? Or, if racism has seeped into government? How can those topics be taught in a way that makes students comfortable? And should students be guaranteed comfort if what they have believed is not factually true?

Why, for example in this rhetorical question, should college students be comfortable when learning unfortunate realities like the United States breaking treaties with tribes of people who were here first, murdering members of those tribes, white racism combined with greed driving Black slavery in the United States, and a U.S. president who is a convicted felon using mob-like threats to get what he wants, having been determined in the criminal justice system to have committed sexual assault.

Oprah Winfrey’s dress hanging in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Does Winfrey’s success as a Black entertainer and business owner mean students should not be taught about race discrimination she has faced during her life? How do you teach that in today’s politically charged environment, especially because she supports Democrat Party candidates? (Photo by Lyle Muller)

CONTRADICTIONS DEFINING ACADEMIC FREEDOM

The late conservative philosopher Allan Bloom put me on my heels during an interview in Iowa City quite some time ago during an interview in which when he argued that academia did not need diverse sources when it came to discerning truth and morality. People like Plato and Shakespeare did that adequately and hearing it from Black authors would not alter basic truths and ethics, he said in a combative manner, his cigarette smoke burning my eyes. What about James Baldwin? I asked, and he replied something akin to: what about him?

Turning that argument around, you should be able to learn basic truths from writers like Baldwin, or more recently Iowa native Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project, and not have to study Plato and Shakespeare. Bloom was not taking that position but it would be a good topic for the Center for Intellectual Freedom.

This has been written and said plenty of times but it bears repeating in order to bring this lengthy piece to a conclusion: Irony exists when state leaders bark about intellectual freedom while also banning the state universities from considering diversity, equity and inclusion when making hiring decisions that could expand the array of knowledge and experiences on a college campus.

Irony exists when the universities have had faculty training to be academic freedom first responders for topics like “digital security measures, reducing risk of extremist attacks, and bolstering colleagues who may experience targeted harassment” since 2000, before the center for intellectual freedom started to gear up.

Irony exists when Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird says she is investigating two U of I staffers caught on a secretly recorded video allegedly saying they could find ways around the anti-DEI laws. One of the videos was a frequently edited piece sent to Fox (News), which aired it so its commentators could use it in that day’s buffet of outrage instead of doing any reporting on context, circumstances and motives. Irony exists when politicians seeking points from voters say university employees who disagree with Iowa’s anti-diversity, equality and inclusion law should be fired.

de Castro told legislators earlier this year the center can “make universities great again.” That is a tall responsibility and here’s hoping it does. Maybe the U of I can pave the way with a new discussion about intellectual freedom.

But the effort would be more credible if someone other than political appointees, especially by the current MAGA crowd that has such an aversion to knowing this country’s complete history because parts don’t make them feel good, got to run the place.