Iowa’s Board of Regents voted Thursday to scale back the state university system’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
The vote came after Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill in June establishing a Board of Regents commission to review Iowa’s DEI activities and recommend necessary changes.
That study group met over the course of the summer and emerged with a report containing ten recommendations that the broader board approved.
The changes to Iowa’s DEI programs include eliminating university-wide “DEI functions that are not necessary for compliance or accreditation,” reviewing “all college, department, or unit-level DEI positions to determine whether DEI specific job responsibilities are necessary for compliance, accreditation, or student and employee support services” and eliminating all that are not, and reviewing “the services provided by offices currently supporting diversity or multicultural affairs in other divisions of the university to ensure they are available to all students.”
Notably, the steps the Board of Regents have adopted also include ensuring that employees, students, applicants, and campus visitors are not required to submit DEI statements or “be evaluated based on participation in DEI initiatives” unless the position is one required for “DEI-related compliance or accreditation.”
The new rules also prohibit Iowa’s public universities from requiring that employees, students, applicants, or campus visitors provide their preferred pronouns.
In addition to scaling back DEI programs’ hold on universities, the Board of Regents affirmed the state university system’s commitment to ideological heterogeneity on the campus as well. One new effort is the issuing of standardized guidance “regarding the separation of personal political advocacy from university business and employment activities” and another promotes “potential recruitment strategies for advancing diversity of intellectual and philosophical perspectives in faculty and staff applicant pools.”
The Board of Regents also approved the development of a proposal “to establish a widespread initiative that includes opportunities for education and research on free speech and civic education.”