The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is delighted that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed into law House File 437, which creates a Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa. Governor Reynolds puts a capstone on the legislative campaign this year by Representative Taylor Collins and his colleagues in Iowa’s legislature to reform Iowa’s higher education—a campaign that also includes House File 295, which reforms Iowa’s system of higher accreditation. Iowa’s citizens have been well-served this year by the very good work to reform higher education completed by their elected representatives.
NAS also is proud that the Civics Alliance’s model School of Intellectual Freedom Act, drafted by NAS, informed House File 437. We are glad that Iowa’s elected representatives found our work useful, as they drafted legislation suited for their state. Our work now has informed state legislation establishing intellectual freedom centers in both Ohio (2024) and Iowa (2025). We hope that elected representatives in other states also will find our model legislation useful.
Iowa now faces a new challenge: proper legislative oversight to ensure that Iowa’s education establishment fulfils legislative intent. This is not an idle worry. Last year, Iowa passed House File 2545 to reform K-12 social studies education—and Iowa’s Education Department delegated the reform task to a member of the education establishment with deep links to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) activism. At present, it appears as if Iowa’s Education Department is preparing to nullify the legislative intent of House File 2545. Iowa legislators, in addition to addressing bureaucratic compliance with House File 2545, should exercise continuing oversight to make sure that education administrators, both in the Iowa Department of Education and at the University of Iowa, comply swiftly and with good will with the intent of House File 437 and House File 295.
We also urge Iowa’s legislators to undertake further higher education reform. We suggest—well, everything in our Model Higher Education Code could be used to inform further legislation. If Iowa legislators wish to focus on removing DEI from Iowa’s universities, they might look at the provision of Ohio’s Senate Bill 1 (2025).
But we will suggest two of our model pieces of legislation that would complement House File 437 especially well: the General Education Act, which would create a School of General Studies at one or more Iowa public universities to teach general education requirements in the form of a core curriculum, and the School of Classical Education Act, which would establish an independent School of Classical Education in a state university, which will teach courses on the pedagogy of classical education. Both of these initiatives would expand the teaching of intellectually pluralistic, depoliticized courses at Iowa universities—and the School of Classical Education Act would provide a depoliticized course of instruction for future K-12 teachers.
But that is for the future. Now, Iowa joins a whole network of states that have set up new institutes of intellectual freedom, including Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. Iowa is not only doing well by its own state, by providing an autonomous home for excellent, depoliticized teaching of America’s civic tradition. It is doing well by America as a whole, by helping establish a national system of reformed higher education. Then too, Iowa can be a model for other states—and especially, we hope, a model for all its neighbors. Good state policy in Iowa will spread from Iowa. For that, all Americans should be grateful.
Photo by Brandee Taylor on Unsplash
