Last week the AAUP issued a blistering report criticizing the Iowa Board of Regents for its conduct of a presidential search that led to the hiring of businessman J. Bruce Harreld as President of the University of Iowa. The report acknowledged, however, that Harreld had pledged to respect shared governance and faculty rights and had…
The following is taken from an email sent to AAUP members on December 10: Today, the AAUP is releasing an investigative report on the University of Iowa’s 2015 presidential search. The investigation found that the search was nothing less than a crude exercise of naked power by the Iowa Board of Regents. Notably, In contrast…
The following is excerpted from an article by Vanessa Miller, published in the Iowa City Gazette and reposted on the blog of the University of Iowa AAUP chapter. About 500 protestors marched into the Board of Regents meeting on the University of Iowa campus Wednesday, holding signs and demanding that each member be dismissed, along…
On Thursday, the Iowa Board of Regents unanimously appointed former IBM senior vice president J. Bruce Harreld as the University of Iowa’s next president. Harreld’s experience in higher education is limited to a few years as an adjunct business teacher, but the regents apparently selected him over three distinguished academic leaders for his alleged expertise…
The Yes Men — whose slogan is “impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them, and otherwise giving journalists excuses to cover important issues” — delivered a satirical speech yesterday at the Iowa City Public Library wherein they posed as representatives of the Iowa Regents, as well as the private consulting firm that is doing the…
In an earlier post, “’Vodka Sam’ May Be a Symptom of a Problem but She Herself Is Not the Problem, Not Even the Public-Relations Problem” [https://academeblog.org/2013/09/11/vodka-sam-may-be-a-symptom-of-a-problem-but-she-herself-is-not-the-problem-not-even-the-public-relations-problem/], I wrote about the University of Iowa’s being named by Princeton Review as the Top Party School in the United States. Coincidentally, at around that same time, a female…
Last week, the Princeton Review released its annual rankings of U.S. colleges and universities. In the category “Top Party Schools,” the University of Iowa was ranked #1, moving up from its #2 ranking last year and bumping last year’s “winner” West Virginia University from the top spot. A spokesperson for the university responded to the…
In the case of Teresa Wagner v. Carolyn Jones, a conservative candidate for a law professor job alleges political discrimination at the University of Iowa. Peter Wood writes, “We have seldom had so clear a case of a conservative academic being steamrolled by a politically correct faculty.” He’s right. This isn’t a very clear-cut case…