The Civics Center That Had Every Advantage — and Failed Anyway

C onservatives and other reformers are finally showing cautious optimism about higher education. In red states, the proliferation of “civics schools,” designed to provide a separate home for ideas outside the academic mainstream, has led to a perhaps naïve overconfidence that the tide has turned.

What just happened in Iowa shows why that confidence is premature. Eleven other academics and I just resigned from the advisory council of the Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa, in protest of the efforts of the Board of Regents and the university to undermine the new center. The legislature created the center in 2025 to teach and research the ideas behind the American constitutional order and to promote free speech, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity on campus — and on the terms the regents have now set, it cannot do what the law created it to do.

This center, though smaller than better-known efforts like the School of Civic Leadership at UT–Austin and School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC, was poised for success. Its structure drew on the lessons of other attempts, above all genuine independence from the University of Iowa’s academic leadership and bureaucracy. Many such centers are plagued by the fact that the very people who caused the problems they were meant to address are put in control of them. Iowa’s design was meant to avoid exactly that.

It did not work. From the start, the university, with the assent of the regents, obstructed the center at every turn — refusing to list its courses, blocking its hiring of even temporary faculty, denying approval for routine travel — and the regents’ new organizational plan now makes the estrangement permanent. The legislation envisioned the center as an academic unit within the University of Iowa, distinguished only in that its director would report to the Board of Regents rather than to the provost and president. In every other respect, it was to have the powers of any college: hiring faculty, housing their tenure, offering courses and degrees. The university, however, made clear that it wanted nothing to do with the center, and the board acquiesced, using the authority the law gave it to unwind the arrangement the law required.

The result is a center with neither the advantages of membership in the university nor the independence of standing outside it. Under the plan the regents approved this month, one regent, Christine Hensley, will approve center purchases of $25,000 or more, as well as the director’s travel and time off. The center’s faculty will hold their appointments and their tenure at the Board of Regents rather than the university — an arrangement that no serious scholar would accept.

Meanwhile, the regents’ plan is meticulous about what the center must pay the university and silent on how the center is to be funded at all. The legislature provided two one-time appropriations of $1 million each and no ongoing support; its attempt to fund the center indirectly, by requiring every undergraduate to take two center courses, does not close the gap. A center too poorly funded to staff those courses hands the board a pretext to satisfy the reform mandate with cross-listed courses from other departments, as if the departments that created the problem could be trusted to fix it. What remains would be an empty husk. This sort of subterfuge is not hypothetical: When the Board of Regents, under pressure from the legislature, ordered a review of the university’s “Diversity and Inclusion” requirement, the university simply renamed it “Understanding Cultural Perspectives” and announced that students “will not need to take any additional or different courses.”

The legislature showed real initiative in designing the center. But once the regents and the university began fighting it, no one held the line on the provisions that mattered. Legislators seemed more concerned with avoiding a critical story in press outlets than with whether the center survived. The center will survive, but in name only. That is precisely the problem.

Some will point to civics schools elsewhere that appear to be flourishing. But this kind of capture does not produce visible failures. A center that gives up its independence does not close; it carries on and tells donors and legislators what they want to hear. The question to ask of any of them is not whether it is growing, but whether it has ever made a lasting impact on the university as a whole.

Even with the best structure and the right people — committed, principled regents and trustees who are willing not only to push back against university leaders devoted to the ideological status quo, but to replace them if need be — are essential. And politicians who claim an interest in reform must stay the course in the face of caustic criticism. Running scared from one hostile news story to the next, betraying those on the ground fighting for real reform, guarantees failure.

I hope leaders in other states learn from Iowa’s mistakes and show genuine commitment to restoring universities to their rightful place as great American institutions. Those of us fighting from inside the academy have learned hard lessons about how reform can and cannot work, and we stand ready to help.