Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.
I’m okay. I’ve rested long enough. This kerfuffle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has reached a red line with me, and my dander is up. I can’t hold it in. I’d like to skim the top, say there had been a little trouble and now it’s all okay. I can’t, and it’s not.
“I’M APPALLED,” SAID GOVERNOR REYNOLDS
Ed Tibbetts covered this terrain in a Bleeding Heartland post from early August. But the kerfuffle has a new wrinkle almost every day. Tibbetts tells us the details: In a law approved this year, Iowa Code §261J.2, Republican lawmakers made talk or teaching of or about diversity, equity, and inclusion forbidden, effective July 1, 2025.
Sec. 31.NEW SECTION 261J.1 DEFINITIONS.
As used in this chapter: Diversity, equity, and inclusion” includes all of the following:
Any effort to manipulate or otherwise influence the composition of the faculty or student body with reference to race, sex, color, or ethnicity, apart from ensuring colorblind and sex-neutral admissions and hiring in accordance with state and federal antidiscrimination laws.
Any effort to promote differential treatment of or provide special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color, or ethnicity.
Any effort to promote or promulgate policies and procedures designed or implemented with reference to race, color, or ethnicity.
Any effort to promote or promulgate trainings, programming, or activities designed or implemented with reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Any effort to promote, as the official position of the public institution of higher education, a particular, widely contested opinion referencing unconscious or 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, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.
A few days after July 1, a couple of University of Iowa employees commiserated with colleagues about the ifs, ands, and buts of the new law, especially as to how it related to their prior practice.
Someone covertly recorded the chitchat and passed it around, all the way up to Fox News where it riled the right wing, including Governor Kim Reynolds. She asked Attorney General Brenna Bird to open an investigation.
“I’m appalled,” said Reynolds, “by the remarks made in this video of a University of Iowa employee who blatantly admits to defying DEI restrictions I signed into law on May 9, 2024.”
I already issued a letter, said Reynolds, to the Board of Regents on January 23, 2025, reminding university representatives to comply, not only with state law, but an executive order signed by President Trump ending implementation of DEI policies at public institutions. I will be referring this matter to Attorney General Brenna Bird for her review as it relates to Iowa’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Act.
The kerfuffle quickly turned into a near capital offense, and the university put the employees on the functional equivalent of house arrest. Each was placed on “paid administrative leave.” And their names and faces were flashed on local television.
Tibbetts concluded the employees’ alleged faults could put them in such severe jeopardy they’d need legal representation to fend off the university’s case, as bolstered by the weight of the state coffers and, no doubt, by the heft of President Donald Trump.
Two GOP lawmakers, U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra (IA-04) and State Representative Taylor Collins, are calling on public university leaders to fire anyone found to have violated laws banning diversity, equity and inclusion in college classrooms and beyond. In a letter dated August 22, they argued that “Clear and decisive action … is the only way we can ensure that DEI is DOA in the State of Iowa.”
According to The Iowa Capital Dispatch, the letter from Feenstra and Collins also said “currently many of these employees are on paid administrative leave, enjoying a taxpayer funded vacation.” Collins said in an interview earlier this month the University of Iowa had lost a lot of his and other lawmakers’ trust after they learned of the incidents, and he told President Barbara Wilson in a previous letter she needed to send a strong message that DEI is no longer welcome on campus.
Even as Trump weaves his way through wars, deporting immigrants, alleged antisemitism at universities, tariffs, the downside of his Big Beautiful Bill, marketing bitcoins — and, no doubt (I think criminally), the Epstein Affair, his dyspepsia over DEI remains an ever-present annoyance for him.
The president’s agitation does not stay in his own stomach. Every red-state governor has jumped to attention and, with the swiftness of bats escaping a cave, began to act. By now just about every red state has a law. Not surprisingly, they all pretty much look alike.
One of the Texas bill’s authors said in a 2013 statement: “Texas is leading the nation and ensuring our campuses return to focusing on the strength of diversity and promoting a merit-based approach where individuals are judged on their qualifications, skills, and contributions.” Put a pin in the word “merit.” It comes up later.
You’d think this an exaggeration, except we’ve all seen the president’s capacity for vengeance, and the contagion spreads to red-state governors.
Another undercover video emerged targeting an employee over DEI compliance at Iowa State University.
The newest video features the former director of Iowa State’s Center for LGBTQIA+ Student Success, who is now the co-curricular student development director in Multicultural Student Affairs.
In a highly edited (says Ames Tribune) video by “Accuracy in Media,” the conspiracy-seeking media organization, catches the former director saying she is “finding loopholes in the laws.” The university says the video was likely shot before the new DEI law’s effective date.
THE DES MOINES REGISTER WEIGHS IN
The lead staff editorial in the August 24 edition of the Sunday Des Moines Register argued that “In Iowa, anti-DEI campaigns sweep up far too much.”
What to make of this? For starters, a cheap shot: Maybe public employees would do well to try to schedule future interviews at nearby hog farms, where Iowa has finally succeeded in making some undercover recordings illegal.
More substantively, it is hard to discern what exactly the administrators in these videos admitted to. Each said they wanted to try to accomplish important work within the confines of the law. None of the videos provides any meaningful context about the questions or the nature of the recordings. Retired KCCI television news director Dave Busiek noted in a blog post about the first video that it was full of time jumps and other edits.
The Register’s editorial also argued,
Looking at an even bigger picture, says the Register, it is discouraging that the videos were seen as sufficient on their own for the UI employees to be placed on leave, and that the first one merited a rare late-night official statement from the governor a few hours after the airing on Fox News.
Here is one way to summarize what the videos show: Some people spouted off about deeply felt disagreements with their bosses. More specifically, the people spouting off were employees of universities that Iowa Republicans keep saying are supposed to teach freedom. The Board of Regents also has pledged unflagging attention lest anyone else fail to publicly adhere to their rejection of DEI concepts.
For Reynolds and Bird, it’s an episode of heavy-handedness like the upbraiding of Winneshiek County Sheriff Dan Marx for months over his nuanced comments about the Constitution and immigration enforcement.
MY THOUGHTS
From where I’m sitting, the employees are the aggrieved parties—not the state or the university. I think the employees should go on offense.
The University of Iowa’s president bolstered my view in a campus message she released on July 31. Wilson wrote in part,
Our responsibility as a public university is to support all of our students, faculty, and staff regardless of their race, religion, sex, nationality, or political beliefs. To do so we must infuse a culture across our campus that rejects the use of litmus tests to determine which faculty, staff, and students we support. We help them all.
Wow. Will enforcers put Wilson on “paid administrative leave”? Or what? That “infuse a culture” line is pretty incriminating, sounds “woke” to me. And her rejection of “litmus tests” goes right to the heart of the state’s new law.
The irony is that Wilson’s articulation of the university’s commitment to the likes of diversity, equity, and inclusion follows immediately after her pledge to follow the right-wing’s new extortion policy—i.e. to fill the campus air with enough carbon dioxide to snuff out any practice that recognizes and respects the social, racial, sexual, or ethnic realities all around them. (Recognition and respect are not innate. Kids must be taught.)
It doesn’t look good when Attorney General Bird says, “(if) the University of Iowa effectively maintains a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office or has employees that perform duties of a DEI office, saying “there certainly appears to be, at a minimum, a potential violation of Iowa Code §261J.2.”
The law-enforcers can’t have it both ways. I say bring the employees back to work. I hope they take a stand. Do this and ten thousand employees will join you to defend your courage—like Kirk Douglas in the 1960 Stanley Kubrick movie Spartacus.
IOWA BOARD OF REGENTS MEETS AGAIN
The Iowa Board of Regents, which governs the three state universities, proposed a new policy prohibiting DEI earlier this summer. Apparently cowed by the push-back on their proposal, the board ditched that version and approved a new DEI policy (by seven votes to one) at the board’s August 11 meeting. The Daily Iowan paraphrased Regent David Barker, a vocal supporter of anti-DEI initiatives, as saying “The new policy would aim to promote discussion of both viewpoints, rather than presenting one side or the other as a settled fact.”
The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported that the board “updated its existing academic freedom and syllabi posting policies by laying out explicit expectations that ‘instruction should be presented in a manner that fosters critical thinking and avoids indoctrination of one perspective.'” That article quoted Regent Robert Cramer as saying,
Cramer took issue with the difference between equal opportunity and equity, saying, “I think everyone on the board supports equal opportunity,” but “equity says trying to have equal results.”
“It means trying to treat students differently based on their preferred status to try to get the numbers at the end to be the same,” he said.
You can tell Cramer has no idea how university professors teach.
To be as candid as possible without being insulting, “indoctrination” is the process of bringing a youngster into a firm belief in and commitment to a set of religious principles. Should a believer be immersed, as in all the way under water. or will a sprinkle do? And, does baptism alone bring salvation, or not?
I don’t know Cramer, but he seems to be confused as to what’s indoctrination and what’s “discovery.” He might study the methods a college professor might use in assisting a young scholar to read, understand, and enjoy King Lear, and empathize with an aging father whose tragedy is coping with daughters who are at odds with one another and drowning in greed.
According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the new policy reads, “Faculty are expected to uphold academic integrity, encourage open and respectful inquiry, and present coursework in a way that reflects the range of scholarly views and ongoing debate in the field.”
The policy writers would be quite good at drafting the rule book for a college sorority. But as a guide for men and women at the cutting edge of their respective fields, people who want young people to understand the “cutting edge” and see how the discipline pursues its truths—it’s an annoyance. It’s annoyances of this type that drive a PhD in the humanities or the physical sciences to ply her/his trade elsewhere.
Cramer should have stopped while ahead. But his line, again as per the Gazette, “I don’t want any of the DEI, CRT, woke left stuff being taught in any of our classes,” should have caused at least one regent to grimace.
If any of the regents could pick up on irony, Cramer gave them a huge chance: “And I think we do believe in academic freedom and, of course, freedom of speech. So I think addressing how things are taught is the right path.”
The topper for the regent’s session was another Cramer-ism: “Minority students need to know that they’re there by merit. They deserve to be there. And some nonminority students might be left out. There might be reverse discrimination from those policies.”
“Merit” seems to be his favorite word.
The line may be at the heart the regent’s angst over DEI—that DEI means only affirmative action that once gave historically disadvantaged kids a leg up in the admissions process. It’s a part and should still be.
As Cramer says,
“And that’s what merit is all about, is just looking at individuals and trying to help them succeed,” he said. “No matter where they come from, no matter what their race is, no matter all these different things, we’re going to treat them all the same and give them that equal chance. That’s why I think we push so hard to get rid of some of these philosophies that divide us, and instead talk about how we can unify and help students.”
The line literally drips with self-righteousness—of the ironic variety. Cramer should have added, “unless that ‘equal chance’ results in reverse discrimination.” Or some white kid feeling bad because the World War II history professor neglected to include in her lecture something about the merits of Hitler’s Third Reich.
Iowa should be better than this.
TAKE PHILIPPE SANDS, FOR EXAMPLE
I discovered Philippe Sands thanks to the August 13 edition of the Ezra Klein Show. Klein is a New York Times columnist who does weekly interviews with big thinkers about important issues of our times.
That episode featured Klein’s lengthy interview with Philippe Sands, a lawyer who specializes in genocide cases, has tried genocide cases, and who teaches on these questions at Harvard Law School and University College London. Sands is the author of East West Street, about how the definition of genocide was developed and written into international law.
I recommend the podcast because it’s useful to listen to a real professor, one who practices his trade, teaches it and whose research plumbs the depths of hard, seemingly intractable subjects, all at the heart of the core of diversity, equity, or inclusion, all at the center of what does and does not define the ingredients of our civilization.
Yes, he’s an expert on “genocide.” What you’ll learn from the interview is how an expert goes about understanding a phenomenon so terrible as to be almost unspeakable. It’s history. It’s careful analysis. It’s discovery at the granular level. It’s research. Surprising to me is that the term is relatively new, given meaning only after World War II to understand the horrific deeds of the Nazis as they went about exterminating six million people.
Sands’ life will end. He knows that, so he teaches. That’s what university professors do.
Maybe surprising to the governor and her Board of Regents, there are hundreds of experts like Philippe Sands at the public universities in Iowa. Any thought that, in his teaching, Sands is “indoctrinating” is absurd. It would be an insult to his integrity, and to the ways he goes about discovering truth. He is guided by “discovery,” the process of divining truth from the seeds of a human civilization that come under his microscope.
“Discovery” is the ways and means of a teaching and learning profession. Like hundreds of university professors at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, or the University of Northern Iowa.
I’M APPALLED
I’m “appalled” that Governor Reynolds is “appalled” by an off-handed, no doubt truthful, remark by an employee exercising her and his free speech rights, unaware that someone was videotaping private remarks.
But back to the two employees sitting at home nurturing a grudge against the governor and her sycophants.
My strong recommendation is that they host a viewing of the movie Spartacus. Not the television series, which may be okay, but the 1960 version with Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Tony Curtis, and a cast of hundreds (four Academy Awards). It’s on Prime.
It’s the scene where the Roman army is trying to find Spartacus in a huge encampment of imprisoned slaves (historically in the 1st century BCE). The punch line for me is when the slaves are asked which among them is Spartacus, and one-by-one they each shout out “I’m Spartacus … I’m Spartacus.” The phrase has resonated with many, symbolizing the power of collective action and the importance of standing up for one’s beliefs. I saw the movie when I was 18 on spring break in a downtown Chicago theater with a huge screen. It made me the radical I am today.
For the wronged employees, I urge collective action. This attack on the independence of universities public and private has taken the form of an extortion where academic freedom and universal goods are under attack, all under the guise of stamping out “woke indoctrination.”
At least two employees have been impugned and sentenced to home arrest.
Listen once again to President Wilson’s words: “(It’s) the university’s responsibility as a public institution ‘to support all of our students, faculty, and staff regardless of their race, religion, sex, nationality, or political beliefs.’ To do so we must infuse a culture across our campus that rejects the use of litmus tests to determine which faculty, staff, and students we support. We help them all.”
Anti-DEI is small potatoes cooked up by small minds. Really nothing more than an epidemic of political witchcraft seeking to restrict academic discovery and professionals plying their trade. If you miss the point, listen to the Ezra Klein episode. You will be a changed person.
Top image of bookshelf is by marhus, available via Shutterstock.