(NEW YORK) — PEN America today expressed deep concern over reports of a letter by Iowa Rep. Taylor Collins and Sen. Lynn Evans demanding the Iowa Board of Regents reject, on ideological grounds, a proposed new academic division of the state’s flagship university.
In December, the University of Iowa proposed to consolidate six small departments, including American Studies, African-American Studies, and Women’s and Sexuality Studies, into a new School of Social and Cultural Analysis. The proposal has come under fire from Sen. Evans, chair of the Senate Committee on Education, and Rep. Collins, chair of the newly formed House Committee on Higher Education. Collins has a broad mandate to review the state’s higher education system from House Speaker Pat Grassley, who has said “everything is on the table.” Collins was a leader of last year’s successful efforts to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices at public colleges and universities, and has announced plans to use his committee to ban certain majors and programs, such as a University of Iowa major in social justice.
According to multiple news sources, Collins and Evans sent a letter to the Board of Regents advising the University’s consolidation proposal be rejected, writing, “Iowans expect our institutions of higher education to be focused on providing for the workforce needs of the state, not programs that are focused on peddling ideological agendas.”
“Not only is this a bald, ideologically driven attack on academic freedom,” said Amy Reid, senior manager of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program, “it’s also a brazen example of jawboning: two legislators, including the chair of a powerful new committee who has been clear about his intent to cut programs and majors at the University of Iowa, are trying to bully university leadership into restricting the ideas students can access in class, even without legislation requiring them to do so. Collins’s and Evans’s demands, if used to eliminate programs under the proposed new division, would severely limit students’ academic options and impoverish their educational experiences. This also undermines the curricular autonomy of the University and the authority of the Board of Regents to provide oversight to the university system free from political interference, a necessary condition for protecting the freedom to learn on campus.”
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