Kim Reynolds must veto the nation's most extreme ban on DEI and expression

Late last year, Iowa’s Board of Regents ordered the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and initiatives at the state’s three public universities. Now lawmakers claim that an amendment to the state budget, added surreptitiously and speedily before Legislature adjourned, is finishing the job. “I think what we’re doing here is just kind of cleaning it up, getting it done with,” said Rep. Carter Nordman of Panora.

But Nordman is wrong about what the bill, Senate File 2435, would actually do. Banning universities from having offices that support underserved students would be bad enough, but in reality this bill is much worse. While the text would indeed ban DEI offices, its sweeping language would prohibit much more. If signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds, Senate File 2435 would be the most extreme anti-DEI restriction anywhere in the country.

The bill, which is copied directly from model legislation written by the conservative Manhattan Institute, doesn’t explicitly censor the words of students or faculty. But it would prohibit public university administrations from expressing any “widely contested opinion” on a dizzying array of specific ideas: “implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, (or) sexual privilege.” Even a university that has carefully avoided opining on any of these ideas isn’t safe; it must then ensure it has not weighed in on “any related formulation of these concepts.”

What idea isn’t a “related formulation of these concepts”? Such a broad and vague phrase is essentially a license to ban anything the government of Iowa dislikes. A maximal interpretation of the bill could ban a university, in its official capacity, from stating any idea of any kind.

The bill’s excesses don’t stop there. Banned DEI practices include “any effort to promote or promulgate trainings, programming, or activities designed or implemented with reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” That provision could ban not only staff-organized lectures, panels, or conferences discussing those identity categories, but using university resources to promote events of this type organized by faculty or students.

It could be argued that a huge range of events are “designed or implemented with reference to” these ideas. A university staff member could violate the bill by mentioning a panelist’s research on race while introducing them, or by even thinking about gender identity while designing an admissions event.

Campus free speech requires that universities remain independent from direct ideological control by the government. Yet as Iowa is demonstrating, that autonomy is increasingly under threat across the country.

Senate File 2435 is part of a larger national push to weaken the traditional support network for academic freedom and free speech in higher education. Statehouses from Indiana to Utah have introduced legislation that would weaken or eliminate tenure, abolish diversity offices, undermine faculty governance, and otherwise chip away at higher ed’s ability to protect freedom of expression on campus. And just like in Iowa, much of this legislation has been advanced under the guise of supporting intellectual freedom, even while it does the opposite.

Again, the bill doesn’t explicitly censor students or faculty. But it defies belief that such a broad and invasive set of prohibitions on staff and administrators wouldn’t impact professors or students downstream. It is easy to see the trickle down effect in action in Texas, where a recently enacted DEI ban, SB 17, has prevented a guest speaker from discussing their LGBTQ+ identity and caused professors to change their course titles and self-censor in faculty committee meetings. Now, faculty are beginning to flee the state.

Iowa is already having problems with faculty retention. But instead of trying to shore up universities, the Legislature has sent a bill to the governor’s desk that contains language so extreme and restrictive that it was cut from the final version of Texas’s law. A similar Nebraska bill died this year after robust opposition from University of Nebraska students, faculty, and administrators, including the interim president.

Iowans deserve to know that their Legislature has quietly passed a university DEI ban with such misguided, far-reaching consequences that other conservative states have rejected it. If not vetoed or halted by the courts, the language in Senate File 2435 could bring about nothing less than the dismantling of academic freedom in Iowa universities.

Jeremy C. Young is the Freedom to Learn program director at PEN America. Sam LaFrance is the editorial projects manager for Free Expression and Education at PEN America.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa is about to ban its public universities from expressing ideas