The Civics Center That Had Every Advantage — and Failed Anyway
A cautionary tale from Iowa shows that civics schools need independence from universities in order to succeed.
Conservatives 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.
