Gov. Kim Reynolds has just signed into law House File 437, which establishes a Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa. Reynolds did a great service to Iowans – as did Rep. Taylor Collins, who shepherded the bill through the legislature, and all his colleagues who supported and voted for House File 437. The new Center will do a great deal to improve Iowa’s public higher education. It will improve intellectual diversity on campus, and it will help address Iowa’s crisis in civic education.
The Center for Intellectual Freedom will provide faculty, courses and entire programs dedicated to teaching courses in American history and government that lead students to a greater understanding of the principles of the American Founding and the Constitution. Because the Center will be administratively autonomous within the University of Iowa, it will be immune from capture by members of the education establishment who are allergic to depoliticized, truly civic instruction. Iowa policymakers still should exercise oversight, to make sure no bureaucrats attempt to veto legislative intent, but the Center’s administrative structure should make sure that a mission-aligned executive director can proceed without sabotage from the larger university. The ideologically extreme advocates of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) would undermine the Center if they were given the chance.
Establishing the Center also is a step in the right direction to help address the crisis in civic education, both at the undergraduate and the K-12 levels. For too long, Iowa students have been leaving college without a basic understanding of American history, government and Western Civilization. Too often they have been propagandized by progressive teachers who subordinate education to revolutionary “critique” of America’s history and founding principles. Iowa’s K-12 teachers, alas, have been mistaught at the undergraduate level and in education schools, so they convey the same hostile view of America into K-12 classrooms. Reforming undergraduate civics education will help Iowa to educate a new generation of K-12 teachers who haven’t been indoctrinated to hate their country.
Iowa’s civics education also has been in decline because real civics-based education has been steadily replaced by “action civics” – also known as “civic engagement” or “service learning.” Action civics advocates claim that students can only learn civics by doing it – but action civics really is vocational training in progressive activism, on the taxpayer dime. Civics education also replaces real civics with “global studies,” which teaches students to be “citizens of the world” instead of citizens of America.
The Center for Intellectual Freedom will educate a new generation of teachers, who know that students need to spend their scarce classroom time learning about the Federalist Papers and the Gettysburg Address, not being organized to protest for the progressive cause of the day.
Iowans deserve great civics education. The Center for Intellectual Freedom is the largest step taken in recent years to restore Iowa’s civics education to what it should be.
