From the day Bruce Harreld was hired as University of Iowa president, his resume problems indicated a disconnect from academic culture. He admitted he would need “a lot of help, a lot of coaching” to adapt to his new position, thanks to an “unusual background” in the corporate world. Harreld paid out of pocket for media training with “top-notch” consultant Eileen Wixted, not only to improve his skills as an interview subject but also to “be as transparent and natural to the UI community as possible.” A different part-time consultant on a contract running to the end of 2015 was charged with writing a communications plan for Harreld.

The Harreld administration has been anything but transparent so far: withholding documents related to statewide polling and other work the university awarded through no-bid contracts; rushing to rename a nearly century-old children’s hospital without public input; appearing to pressure a university librarian to revise her recollection of controversial comments Harreld made at a Staff Council meeting; and combining two top staff positions in the health care unit without going through the usual process to gain prior approval from the Iowa Board of Regents.

On Wednesday Iowans learned that weeks ago, Harreld signed a lucrative contract extension for Athletics Director Gary Barta. The deal’s terms came to light only after an Associated Press correspondent asked to see the contract. Moreover, Harreld gave Barta this strong vote of confidence despite multiple lawsuits and civil rights complaints charging gender bias, as well as “a wide-ranging federal civil rights investigation into allegations that its athletics department does not provide equal opportunities for female athletes.”

The unusual secrecy surrounding Barta’s contract extension and its generous terms while the athletics department is under investigation suggest that Harreld is still operating from the perspective of a corporate executive rather than a leader of a public institution.

Since November, the University of Iowa has refused to release documents related to annual statewide polls measuring Iowans’ attitudes about the university over the last three years. Officials have cited a provision in Iowa Code allowing “Reports to governmental agencies” to remain confidential if their release “would give advantage to competitors and serve no public purpose.” But Iowa Freedom of Information Council Executive Director Randy Evans has referenced decisions by the Iowa Supreme Court and lower courts, which indicate that the exemption “was not designed to cover documents produced for the government at public expense.”

I have assumed the university was concealing documents related to the polling because the work was among several projects awarded through no-bid contracts to a company controlled by former Republican Party of Iowa Chair Matt Strawn. Peter Matthes, the university vice president who supervised those contracts, had prior connections to Strawn through Iowa Republican circles. Matthes also was involved in hiring new University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld, both as a member of the presidential search committee and as a participant in one of Harreld’s secret meetings with key decision-makers.

An exclusive report by Ryan Foley for the Associated Press yesterday pointed to a more straightforward reason to keep the poll findings secret: Iowa’s image as a “party school” had hurt its reputation “as a serious academic institution.”

They say that converts are often more zealous than people who have grown up with a belief system. So it fell to Republican State Senator Mark Chelgren, who was raised and educated in California before settling in Iowa as an adult, to push for economic sanctions over the Stanford band’s halftime performance at the Rose Bowl.

After a contentious recent e-mail exchange with a prominent alumnus, University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld vowed that he will “continue to respond to his critics via email,” because “I value direct and candid feedback from our students, faculty, staff, and alumni and if I stop responding I won’t be the kind of president this institution needs and deserves.”

That sentiment doesn’t apply to all critics, though. Iowa Freedom of Information Council Executive Director Randy Evans had received no reply from Harreld more than two weeks after urging him to release documents related to a statewide opinion poll and other work the University of Iowa awarded through no-bid contracts to a company owned by former Iowa GOP Chair Matt Strawn.

No matter how closely you follow current events, some days the news will shock you. I enclose below the biggest Iowa political stories I never saw coming last year.

Please share your own thoughts on this subject in the comments.

While working on another piece about Iowa politics highlights from the year, I decided to start a new Bleeding Heartland tradition. Writing is a labor of love for me, as for many bloggers, but let’s face it: not all posts are equally lovable.

The most important political events can be frustrating or maddening to write up, especially when there is so much ground to cover.

Any blogger will confirm that posts attracting the most readers are not necessarily the author’s favorites. The highest-traffic Bleeding Heartland post of 2015–in fact, the highest-traffic post in this blog’s history–was just another detailed account of a message-testing opinion poll, like many that came before. Word to the wise: if you want a link from the Drudge Report, it helps to type up a bunch of negative statements about Hillary Clinton.

Sometimes, committing to a topic leads to a long, hard slog. I spent more time on this critique of political coverage at the Des Moines Register than on any other piece of writing I’ve done in the last decade. But honestly, the task was more depressing than enjoyable.

Other pieces were pure pleasure. Follow me after the jump for my top fifteen from 2015.

University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld has been paying out of pocket this fall for coaching from a “top-notch” communications consultant, but his public speaking skills apparently need more work. Last week Harreld suggested to the university’s Staff Council that instructors who go to class unprepared for their teaching obligations “should be shot,” Ryan Foley reported today for the Associated Press.

It’s not the first time and probably won’t be the last time Harreld has some trouble adapting to academic culture.

But I hope it will be the last time Harreld’s critics on campus discredit themselves by reacting to the president’s missteps in a ridiculous way.

As if we haven’t heard enough lately about backroom dealings involving the University of Iowa, Ryan Foley reported yesterday for the Associated Press,

The University of Iowa has quietly awarded several no-bid contracts totaling $321,900 to a prominent GOP consultant for polling and social media services often delivered through subcontractors, a review by The Associated Press discovered.

Critics say the contracts with former Iowa Republican Party chairman Matt Strawn’s namesake company — uncovered through a public records request — look like a sweetheart deal among Republican insiders and a potential waste of money.

That’s putting it mildly.

In the spirit of the Russian proverb “Trust, but verify,” I checked last week to see whether funding the Iowa Utilities Board promised before Thanksgiving to release had reached energy centers housed at Iowa’s state universities.

Good news: the Iowa Energy Center at Iowa State University and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at the University of Iowa have both received all of the remittances the IUB collected on their behalf from gas and electric utilities. The centers do not appear to have in hand all of the interest payments to which they are entitled under Iowa Code, but IUB spokesperson Don Tormey assured me the agency “will forward the additional interest funds” to the energy centers, if any more interest accrues.

Strange news: the IUB chose an unusual way to send this year’s funding to the energy centers, and I don’t fully understand why. I’ve enclosed what I learned below, along with details on the money sent to the Iowa Energy Center and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research so far, and what may yet be owed to them.

The Iowa Board of Regents voted unanimously on Wednesday to rename the University of Iowa’s Children’s Hospital the “Stead Family University of Iowa Children’s Hospital,” to honor contributions made by alumni Jerre and Mary Joy Stead.

The regents sought no public comment on the proposal, which was unveiled with the bare minimum of advance notice required under Iowa’s open meeting law.

They also “had no discussion on the name change” before voting to approve it, Ryan Foley reported for the Associated Press.

The Steads deserve recognition for supporting a children’s hospital where countless Iowans have received life-saving care. Many people with comparable wealth are far less generous. The university acknowledged the Steads’ $20 million commitment to the hospital by naming the Pediatrics Department after the donors and fundraising campaign co-chairs in 2013.

By rubber-stamping the university’s request to rename the hospital, the Board of Regents failed to consider the opportunity cost of giving up naming rights for a nearly century-old institution in exchange for an additional $5 million pledge from the Steads.

The optics of renaming the hospital without public input are also bad, coming so soon after the regents’ pick of Bruce Harreld as president of the university. Not only has Jerre Stead had longstanding business relationships with Harreld, he and university Vice President for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard and Regents President Bruce Rastetter strongly influenced Harreld’s hiring.

The Iowa Utilities Board (IUB) announced yesterday that it “has started the process to transfer funds earmarked for the Iowa Energy Center (IEC) at Iowa State University and the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) at the University of Iowa.” The retreat came less than a week after a spokesperson had insisted, “The board will disburse the funds when they are satisfied (the centers) have answered all the board’s questions.”

Restoring the flow of money means the centers charged with promoting alternative energy and efficiency and “interdisciplinary research on the many aspects of global environmental change” no longer face possible staff layoffs or program cuts. But yesterday’s climb-down won’t erase the damage done by IUB Chair Geri Huser’s unwise and unprecedented decision to withhold funding, in the absence of any legal authority to do so. She miscalculated in three ways.

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Arguments over the appropriate U.S. response to refugees from Syria were a hot topic this week in personal conversations as well as in the news media. I saw some longtime friendships strained over heated Facebook threads about the question. Governor Terry Branstad’s order “to halt any work on Syrian refugee resettlements immediately in order to ensure the security and safety of Iowans” provoked commentaries in several major newspapers and an unusually strong statement from Iowa’s four Catholic bishops.

The U.S. House vote to in effect stop the flow of refugees from Syria and Iraq generated passionate comments from supporters and opponents of the measure. Dozens of Iowans expressed their disappointment on the thread under Representative Dave Loebsack’s official statement explaining his vote. In an apparent response to negative feedback from progressives, Loebsack’s Congressional campaign sent an e-mail to supporters the following day, trying to distinguish his position on refugees from the Middle East from that of many Republicans, and assuring that “we will not turn our backs on those in need.” (Scroll to the end of this post to read that message.)

Calls by some politicians to admit only certifiably Christian refugees from the Middle East triggered strong emotions in many American Jews this week. I saw it on my social media feeds, where many people reminded their non-Jewish friends and acquaintances that the U.S. turned away a ship carrying hundreds of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a rare statement on a political matter (enclosed below), urging “public figures and citizens to avoid condemning today’s refugees [from Syria] as a group.”

I’ve seen many people object to that analogy, saying reluctance to admit Syrian refugees is grounded in legitimate fears for public safety, unlike the prejudice that influenced U.S. immigration policy during the 1930s. But as historian Peter Shulman explained in this commentary for Fortune magazine,

Opposition to Jewish refugees was not simply timeless bigotry. With today’s talk of “Judeo-Christian” values, it is easy to forget the genuine alienness and threat to national security these refugees represented. […]

Behind these [1939 poll] numbers [showing widespread hostility toward Jews] lay a toxic fear of Jewish subversion. For decades, Jews had been linked to various strains of un-American threats: socialism, communism, and anarchism, of course, but also (paradoxically) a kind of hyper-capitalism. Many believed that the real threat to the United States lay not from abroad, but within.

One author of a recent letter to the Des Moines Register called for vetting Syrian refugees at the U.S. facility for holding suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay: “My Irish ancestors went through a similar process at Ellis Island. The vetting procedure was very different for them. They were checked to be sure they weren’t carrying diseases into America. We need to be sure that the refugees coming into our country don’t come with a mind disease goal of killing us, instead of seeking a new life for themselves, like my Irish ancestors did.” Here’s some news for letter-writer Janet Boggs: when the first large waves of Irish ancestors entered this country during the 1840s and 1850s, many native-born Americans considered them and other Catholic immigrants an existential threat to this country, not harmless migrants seeking a better life. Read up on the Know-Nothing Party.

Today’s Sunday Des Moines Register includes a letter to the editor from Republican State Representative Steve Holt, who thanked Branstad for making “the safety of Iowans” his priority. Holt warned, “If we expect Western civilization to survive, we must abandon political correctness and educate ourselves on the realities of Islam, and the instrument of its implementation, Sharia law.” Holt represents half of GOP State Senator Jason Schultz’s constituents in western Iowa; Schultz has been beating the “Sharia law” drum for months while agitating against allowing any more refugees from the Middle East to settle in Iowa. UPDATE: I should have noted that today’s Register also ran a letter to the editor from Democratic State Representative Marti Anderson, who made the case for welcoming refugees. I’ve added it after the jump.

Speaking of security risks, yesterday Ryan Foley reported for the Associated Press on questions surrounding the threat assessment teams many universities formed after the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech. I didn’t know that the University of Iowa sent “a detective with the campus threat assessment team” to a fake news conference communications Professor Kembrew McLeod organized in August to poke fun at efficiency measures outside consultants recommended for Iowa’s public universities. I had forgotten about the lawsuit stemming from false accusations that a whistleblower employee in the Iowa State College of Engineering’s marketing department might be a “potential terrorist or mass murderer.” Officials spreading such rumors about the employee included the former boss whose shady conduct he had exposed. Excerpts from Foley’s article are below, but click through to read the whole piece.

A poll in the field this week is measuring Iowans’ views of the University of Iowa and whether certain changes would increase the perceived value of a degree from the university. The phrases enclosed below reflect what one respondent was able to recall from the survey, which lasted approximately 15 minutes.

I hope to update this post with much more detail about the question wording. If you receive this call (or any message-testing poll), please take notes and send them to the e-mail address at the bottom right of the Bleeding Heartland front page.

The survey included at least one question about the performance of the University of Iowa’s new president, Bruce Harreld. In interviews with Iowa Public Television and Iowa Public Radio today, Harreld said he has been “building trust” by meeting with as many stakeholders on campus as possible. He also endorsed a plan to seek more state funding for the university next year. Jeff Charis-Carlson reported for the Iowa City Press-Citizen on November 6 that the “faculty vitality” proposal would provide $4.5 million for recruiting new faculty and increasing salaries of tenure-track faculty during the 2017 fiscal year. Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter orchestrated adding $4.5 million to the budget request for the University of Iowa a few days after the regents hired Harreld. The move was widely perceived as an effort to placate those who disapproved of the hiring before a scheduled meeting of the Faculty Senate. Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program will broadcast the full episode with Harreld this Friday and Sunday.

As if the “fix was in” camp needed any more ammunition: weeks before the nine members of the Iowa Board of Regents interviewed finalists to lead the University of Iowa, Board President Bruce Rastetter arranged for Bruce Harreld to meet with four other regents at the Ames office of Summit Agricultural Group. Rastetter is the CEO of that company. Earlier in July, he and three search committee members had met Harreld for lunch in Iowa City after Harreld spoke to senior staff at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics, at the invitation of the search committee chair.

Follow me after the jump for more on today’s explosive revelations, as well as yesterday’s decision by a University of Iowa’s faculty group to censure Harreld “for his failure of professional ethics.”  

New details emerged this week about J. Bruce Harreld’s contacts with some members of the University of Iowa’s search committee in early July, weeks before he officially applied to become the next university president.

Inconsistent official statements about Harreld’s first campus visit will raise more suspicions about special treatment for the man the Board of Regents hired two weeks ago, over the opposition of university faculty and students.  

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Congratulations to Hawkeyes and commiserations to Cyclones over the outcome of yesterday’s big game. Not being a football fan, I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I watched Iowa play Iowa State. The last time I focused on the Cy-Hawk game was in 2013, when Iowa running back Mark Weisman’s decision to play on Yom Kippur (the most important Jewish holiday) was a big topic of conversation for central Iowa Jews.

The hoopla surrounding yesterday’s game reminded me of a good commentary by “Civic Skinny” in the Des Moines-based weekly Cityview last month. Skinny called attention to how rapidly athletic budgets have grown at Iowa and Iowa State in recent years, and how the athletic departments “continue to find ways to spend” the extra money, “without shipping any to the libraries or the English departments or any other academic endeavors at the two big universities.” I would bet few Iowans know that for many years, Iowa and Iowa State “regularly subsidized the athletic departments with money from the general fund.” I recommend clicking through for all the data in the original piece; excerpts are after the jump.

For two days, the Des Moines Register reported the Des Moines School Board District 1 race as “too close to call,” but Shane Schulte finally conceded to Heather Anderson on Friday. Schulte had earlier indicated plans to seek a recount, but truthfully, the race was never too close to call. When all the precincts reported on election night, Anderson led by 36 votes out of a little more than 2,500 ballots cast. The next day, her lead in unofficial returns grew to 46 votes. That’s a close election, but not close enough for a recount to have a realistic prospect of changing the outcome. Recounts of two Iowa Senate races in 2010 did not overturn Mark Chelgren’s twelve-vote lead out of more than 19,000 ballots cast or Tod Bowman’s 70-vote lead out of nearly 20,000 ballots cast. Two years later, Republican leads of fewer than two dozen votes in Chris Hagenow’s Iowa House race and Mike Breitbach’s Iowa Senate race both held up after recounts of roughly 17,500 ballots and 30,000 ballots, respectively.

Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, conservative pundits and Republican politicians have predicted that “Obamacare” would force many businesses to drop health insurance coverage for their employees. This week, the Des Moines Register’s Tony Leys covered the latest data on employer-provided insurance in Iowa. The Clive-based David P. Lind Benchmark research firm surveyed 1,001 employers and found that only 1 percent (mostly “companies with fewer than 10 employees”) stopped offering health insurance coverage this year. The cost of insuring employees in 2015 increased by an average of 7.7 percent, up from the 6.8 percent increase in 2014 but “significantly lower” than typical price hikes “Iowa employers faced a decade or more ago.” Michael Ralston, who leads the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, told Leys “he heard more complaints about insurance costs years ago, when employers’ health insurance prices were rising at more than double the current clip. He still hears grumbling about the complex requirements of the Affordable Care Act, but not as often as in the years after it passed in 2010.” Scroll to the end of this post for more excerpts from Leys’s report.  

Contradicting official documents released less than a week ago, Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter announced yesterday that “he will seek $4.5 million in additional funding for the University of Iowa” during the 2017 fiscal year after all.

The three-sentence news release is intriguing on several levels:

1. The way it conflates Rastetter’s personal opinion with a shift in Board of Regents policy.

2. The unusual timing of a state government body announcing a policy change on a public holiday.

3. The unconvincing attempt to give newly-appointed University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld some credit for the conciliatory move.

4. The effort to spin a relatively small funding increase as a significant investment in the university’s “strengths” and “core mission.”

The newly-appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, said yesterday,

“I will be the first to admit that my unusual background requires a lot of help, a lot of coaching,” Harreld told reporters after the Iowa Board of Regents voted unanimously to give him the job. “And I’m going to turn to a whole lot of people that were highly critical and really tough on me the other day and ask them if they would be great mentors and teachers (to me). And I suspect and hope all of them will.”

Others are better-equipped to help Harreld adapt to a leadership role at a research university, a setting where he has never worked, aside from some adjunct teaching.

But having spent some time in academic culture, I offer Harreld this suggestion: stop passing yourself off as the sole author of published works to which others contributed.

I used to loathe the end of January. Around that time, anxiety-ridden managers would start suggesting that I help organize the Black History Month activities for February. Bless their hearts. They either genuinely felt our staff needed to be more conscious of the contributions African Americans made to society, or somewhere in their manager handbook, this was mentioned in the cultural sensitivity part.

Growing up, I was always slated to read the “I Have A Dream,” speech in class or chosen to explain how the Underground Railroad operated without physical tracks. Back in 1st grade, when our progressive music teacher wanted us to learn about soulful pop music, she wrote a play and cast me as Michael Jackrabbit, the moonwalking bunny with a culturally ambiguous face.

All of this was a version of tokenism that I had become accustomed to before I even knew tokenism was a thing. Tokenism is race and gender agnostic. No one is safe. Consider the exemplary woman who has broken into the good ‘ole boys club of corporate America, or the lone gay man at a job  brimming with tough guys and their laughable displays of machismo, or in my case, the prototypical black face in nearly every social group to which I’ve belonged. Anyone can become a victim of tokenism, but it will always befall the Only One in the Room, a phrase that I’ve borrowed from a recent NPR article. The article, “On Wyatt Cenac, Key & Peele, And Being The Only One In the Room,” describes situations wherein there is only one minority in a group, otherwise known as the last 20 years of my life. Life is hard for the token, and it’s hard for the Only One. When you are both at once, it feels like playing a game of chess while balancing on a high wire.

By a unanimous vote, the Iowa Board of Regents today named J. Bruce Harreld as the next president of the University of Iowa. Of the four finalists for the job, only Harreld had never worked in academic administration. Up to now, his experience at universities has been limited to some adjunct teaching.

I’m going on record now: this experiment will not end well.

Proud Cyclones have been lighting up social media this week with links to Daniel Luzer’s commentary for the Washington Monthly blog about Iowa State University as a contender for the “best college in America” title. Luzer’s post is three months old, but it flew under my radar (and that of many other Iowans) at that time. To support his point, he cited Rebecca Schuman’s piece for Slate on February 10 of this year. She observed:

Additionally, let me offer a hearty congratulations goes to the proud trend-resisters at Iowa State University, who have increased faculty hiring while others have slashed it, and decreased administration while others have bloated it. […]

After all, it turns out that focusing on academics helps student retention more than climbing walls, anyway. That’s the good news out of Iowa State University, which, according to the report by the Delta Costs Project at the American Institutes for Research, is the only-only-institution of higher learning in the entire country to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty and shrinking its administration. ISU President Steven Leath explained to the Des Moines Register that ISU wanted to “run a very lean operation and put as much into direct support of students and faculty” as possible, boosting full-time faculty hiring by an astounding 41 percent. (No riot-inducing tuition hike yet, Rex Ramsier!)

Indeed, Iowa State is being lauded as one of the most efficiently run universities in the nation-and its student retention is up 3 percent since 2005. This might not be a spectacular number, but it’s a better increase than its rival, the University of Iowa, a prestigious flagship Research I institution (that, according to the Delta Costs Project, has added much fewer full-time faculty members and many more staff positions).

Praising Iowa State for its “very real focus on hiring tenure-track faculty and keeping students enrolled from year to year,” Luzer pointed to a 2011 report in Washington Monthly about the trend toward administrative growth at U.S. colleges and universities.

The Bleeding Heartland community includes many Iowa State alumni and more than a few faculty at ISU and other Iowa colleges and universities. I’m interested in hearing your perspective on the points Schuman and Luzer raised.

Contact: Julian Boggs | 859.358.2980 | jboggs@environmentiowa.org

Des Moines, IA—Increasing America’s use of plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid cars would dramatically reduce emissions that cause global warming and air pollution and would curb dependence on oil, according to a new white paper released today by Environment Iowa.

“With more Americans focused on the environmental and economic consequences of our oil dependence, carmakers are scrambling to offer customers the cleanest, most fuel efficient cars”, said Environment Iowa Federal Field Associate Julian Boggs.  “Dramatically ramping up electric vehicles can bolster America’s efforts to wean ourselves off of oil and to reduce pollution that causes global warming.” 

Plug-in vehicles are being profiled in an unprecedented way at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week. A “plug-in” car is one that can be recharged from the electric grid. Some plug-in cars run on electricity alone, while others are paired with small gasoline engines to create  plug-in hybrids. Many plug-in hybrids can get over 100 miles per gallon, while plug-in electric vehicles consume no gasoline at all.   Plug-in vehicles produce no direct tailpipe pollution when operating on electricity and there is already a vast electric power infrastructure to fuel them.   As renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, meet a larger share of our electricity needs, electric cars could contribute to little or no air pollution. 

Political activity slows down a bit during the summer, but there are still plenty of things to do if you’re not spending hours a day training for RAGBRAI. Read all about it after the jump. As always, post a comment or send me an e-mail (desmoinesdem AT yahoo.com) if you know of something I’ve left out.

If you live in the first Congressional district, consider attending one of Bruce Braley’s town-hall meetings on health care reform in Dubuque,  Oelwein, Davenport and Waterloo (click “there’s more” for details). According to a statement from his office,

Braley will discuss the draft House health care reform bill, listen to constituents’ concerns, and take questions.  Braley is a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the committee in charge of authoring healthcare reform legislation.

Braley’s town hall meetings on healthcare reform are free and open to the public.

Attendees are strongly encouraged to RSVP at: http://braley.house.gov/townhall.

Speaking of health care reform, Moveon.org is looking for people to help deliver petitions this Thursday, July 9, to the Iowa offices of Senators Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley. Click here to sign up.

UPDATE: I added information about Governor Chet Culver’s upcoming appearances in eastern Iowa to highlight I-JOBS and Rebuild Iowa projects.

I support Senator Patrick Leahy’s call for a “truth commission” to investigate abuses of power by officials in George W. Bush’s administration. People who participated in or encouraged official law-breaking need to be held accountable, or at least exposed to public scrutiny.

Judging from this report by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, we have a lot more to learn about how Justice Department attorneys twisted the law to serve King George:

An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.” According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials-Jay Bybee and John Yoo-as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. […]

[T]he OPR probe began after Jack Goldsmith, a Bush appointee who took over OLC in 2003, protested the legal arguments made in the memos. Goldsmith resigned the following year after withdrawing the memos, and later wrote that he was “astonished” by the “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned” legal analysis in the memos by Yoo and Bybee, including their assertion (challenged by many scholars) that the president could unilaterally disregard a law passed by Congress banning torture.

OPR investigators focused on whether the memo’s authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted.

Too bad this report didn’t come out in time for University of Iowa Law School faculty to ask Yoo about it when he was in Iowa City last week.

Do any Bleeding Heartland readers happen to teach at the U of I Law School? I’d love to hear how his talk went. Please post a comment or send me an e-mail (desmoinesdem AT yahoo.com) if you heard Yoo speak or took part in protesting his appearance.

UPDATE: Daily Kos user Vyan has much more background in this diary and speculates that Yoo and Bybee could be disbarred for their role in writing the torture memos. I would be very surprised if it comes to that. I don’t think state bar associations like political controversies.

SECOND UPDATE: A little bird tells me that Yoo’s appearance in Iowa City was uneventful, and no one present asked him about the torture memos. I have to question why any university would invite a “newsmaker” to speak if no one’s going to ask about the controversy that made the person famous. Mr. desmoinesdem wonders if Yoo insists on a promise not to ask about the torture memos before agreeing to speak to any audience. Anyone out there know the answer?

The Board of Regents on Thursday voted not to give a raise to University of Iowa president Sally Mason after her first year on the job because of problems related to a sexual assault investigation last year. She still has a chance to earn large performance bonuses if she meets unspecified targets in the future, though.

Mason fired the dean of students and the university’s lead attorney last week for their handling of the sexual assault case. On Friday she implemented new policies regarding how staff are to deal with reported sexual assaults.

Attorney Marc Mills continues to insist that he was fired without cause and was not leading the university’s investigation into last year’s assault. I don’t know enough of the facts to make a judgment about whether he or Philip Jones deserved to be fired. I do agree with the Iowa City Press-Citizen that the Regents should not have held Mason’s performance review in closed session.

Also on Thursday, the Regents ordered state universities to follow U.S. code regarding display of the flag. Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa already do that, but the University of Iowa has sometimes lowered the flag as a sign of respect when longtime staff or faculty die. Most recently the flag was flown at half-staff after political science professor Arthur Miller took his own life, which drew criticism because of the criminal investigation surrounding Miller.

I know we have plenty of U of I graduates in the Bleeding Heartland community. How do you feel about all this?

Two months after the Board of Regents ordered an external investigation of how the University of Iowa handled a sexual assault case last year, two senior university officials got the ax:

University of Iowa President Sally Mason today fired Phillip Jones, 67, vice president for student services, and Marcus Mills, 52, vice president for legal affairs and general counsel.

Mason’s actions came after the Stolar Partnership last week released a report to the Iowa Board of Regents that heavily criticized Mills’ and Jones’ actions after the alleged sexual assault at Hillcrest Residence Hall on Oct. 14, 2007. The review by the St. Louis law firm found “numerous and substantial flaws” in not only the U of I’s response to the assault, but also in its policies, procedures and practices.

According to the Des Moines Register, Mason fired Jones and Mills after they refused to resign, and neither will receive severance pay.

It’s likely to be a career-ending action for Jones, who had worked at the University of Iowa for 40 years. I don’t know him personally, but I have heard good things about him from faculty and former students in Iowa City. Jones refused to comment when contacted by the Register.

Mills spoke out, though:

Mills said Tuesday night he believed he was unfairly singled out in today’s dismissal and in the Stolar report.

“I believe I handled the matter to the best of my ability under the circumstances,” Mills said in a phone interview.

He said he disagreed with the Stolar report’s assessment of his actions. He said he did not have a conflict of interest in acting as U of I general counsel and liaison with the alleged victim’s family.

Mills said investigators did not allow him to give his version of six phone conversations he had with the alleged victim’s father. Mills also disagreed with the law firm’s assessment that he should have asked a judge to permit the U of I to release documents pertaining to the report, he said tonight.

“I’m disappointed that the president and the regents didn’t have an opportunity to get a fuller view,” Mills said.

What do you think? Did Jones and Mills deserve to lose their jobs, or were they scapegoated? Should anyone else be sacked over the way the university dealt with this case?

The Board of Regents delayed Mason’s first performance review until after investigators finished their report. I doubt they will fire her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she gets no raise, or a smaller raise than the Iowa State and University of Northern Iowa presidents.

Possibly the only person in Iowa who cares less about the Iowa/Iowa State game than I do is Mr. desmoinesdem.

But for those of you who do care, feel free to share your predictions and/or trash talk.

This is also an open thread for anything else on your mind this weekend.

University of Iowa Arthur Miller’s body was identified on Wednesday, a week after he was reported missing and three days after his corpse was found in an Iowa City Park. Miller was under investigation for allegedly offering female students higher grades in exchange for sexual favors.

Miller placed a phone call to the Cedar Rapids Gazette shortly before he disappeared. In that call,

Miller said he believed the allegations and the investigation were part of a vendetta against him by Linda Maxson, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Miller said he and Maxson had a running feud over the closure of an institute Miller founded. The Iowa Social Science Institute closed in 2002 upon recommendation by a committee with UI and external members, UI spokesman Steve Parrott said.

Miller said in the call that after the allegations were made, “not a single university administrator, not even the chairman of my department, came to me and asked me if I were OK,” if he had problems or was sick.

Miller also said that during his meetings with UI officials about the investigation, he thought these were sexual harassment charges that would be handled with an internal hearing or negotiation. He said he was surprised to be arrested.

“It’s been very depressing to me now that this has all gone public,” Miller said, adding that even if the charges are proved unfounded, he felt his reputation was ruined.

I feel very sorry for Miller’s wife and two young children (one four-year-old and one four-month-old). No matter what the outcome of the investigation, those children would have been better off knowing their father as they grew up.

The autopsy determined that Miller died of a self-inflicted wound from a rifle. The Des Moines Register reported that Miller had tried to buy a pistol or revolver in June, but Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek denied the permit application:

When a routine background check yielded a letter from the university informing him of multiple investigations tied to the political science professor, Pulkrabek got involved personally and called the university’s legal counsel.

“He gave me some additional (non-public) information that was enough for me to deny the permit,” Pulkrabek wrote in an e-mail circulated this week to other sheriffs. […]

Iowa law gives sheriffs the authority to decide who receives gun permits and to impose restrictions on those who want to carry concealed weapons.

But at least 35 states – including Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri and Nebraska – now mandate that concealed weapons permits be approved, provided applicants meet a set of criteria laid out in state law.

Groups such as the Iowa State Rifle and Pistol Association and IowaCarry.Org supported legislation last year that would have made Iowa’s permit process more uniform and taken the discretion away from sheriffs. The legislation died under heated opposition from many in law enforcement, including the Iowa State Sheriffs and Deputies Association and the Iowa attorney general’s office.

Miller was able to buy a rifle after being denied a handgun permit because his name was not on a federal list that gun dealers are required to check before selling rifles.

As it turned out, Miller was planning to kill himself, but the sheriff had reasonable grounds to worry that he might be a danger to others. I hope legislators will not agree to relax Iowa’s law regarding permits for concealed weapons.

Do you think a University of Iowa professor could explicitly ask students to expose their breasts in exchange for better grades without being reported almost immediately?

I don’t pretend to be any kind of medical expert, but upon reading this story my first thought was that Professor Arthur Miller might be going through early-stage dementia, which can manifest in inappropriate sexual behavior.

It’s amazing that a longtime professor would send students e-mails asking them to show him their breasts. (CORRECTION: It appears he used vague language in the e-mails rather than directly asking students to take off their clothes.) It seems that the university would have booted him long ago if he had a history of doing that. What do you think?

UPDATE: Some of you disagree with me in the comments. I think we will soon find out if Miller had a long pattern of this behavior, because if so, women who took his classes within the past 10 to 20 years will start coming forward.

I don’t know what to think about this story from today’s Des Moines Register:

Regent Michael Gartner of Des Moines proposed studying the potential sale of the U of I’s “Mural” as a way to pay for $16 million in damage from June’s record floodwaters that entrenched the arts campus next to the Iowa River. The entire campus has an estimated $232 million in flood damage.

The Iowa Board of Regents decided at its meeting Thursday to research how much the 8-by-20-foot abstract painting would fetch if sold to a museum.

The piece is a prized painting for the university’s museum, acquired nearly 60 years ago when it was not nearly worth its estimated $100 million in value today. The idea of selling it brought strong sentiments from the U of I president, the art community and a state leader about the value of art and why it matters for universities to hold onto such treasures.

Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, who heads the Rebuild Iowa Office to recover from the flood, said there are options for paying for recovery besides selling artwork.

“I think selling off our assets that we probably could never purchase again would not be something I would like to see happen,” Judge said Thursday. “I would like to think we would rebuild that art center, that that painting along with the other great paintings will be hanging there for my grandkids to see, just like I did and just like my children did.”

The rest of the article goes through a lot of the pros and cons of selling this painting. My instinctive reaction is that it would be wrong to get rid of this irreplaceable piece.

On the other hand, the flood damage to the University of Iowa campus and the arts area in particular was so extensive that maybe this sale is justified. I don’t know how much of the reconstruction will be covered by insurance.

What do you think?

I have to believe that a few people at the University of Iowa will lose their jobs when the St. Louis law firm hired to examine the university’s handling of an alleged sexual assault turns in its report:

The Iowa Board of Regents hired the firm Monday to assure Iowans of an independent investigation after it was revealed the U of I failed to turn over key documents in a previous probe conducted by the regents.

[…]

Two former U of I football players have been charged with sexually assaulting a former female student-athlete in an unoccupied room in Hillcrest Residence Hall. Abe Satterfield and Cedric Everson, both 19, have pleaded not guilty of second-degree sex abuse. Satterfield has also pleaded not guilty of third-degree sex abuse. Both are scheduled for trial Nov. 3 in Johnson County.

[…]

The jumping-off point for the investigation will be two letters written by the alleged victim’s mother that criticized the U of I’s handling of the complaint, Mersman said. The mother alleges that the athletic department tried to keep the report in-house and that university officials did not support the alleged victim.

The revelation this month that the U of I did not disclose these letters during a previous regents investigation of the incident led to the new probe.

[…]

U of I President Sally Mason apologized and said the letters weren’t turned over because of an incorrect interpretation of a federal student privacy law. The firm will also review how state and federal laws may have played into the handling of the case, Mersman said.

The University’s president, Sally Mason, doesn’t need any extra headaches this summer, when flooding caused unprecedented devastation on campus. At least 20 major buildings connected to the university were damaged.

But if alleged crimes committed by athletes are not thoroughly investigated and prosecuted, there will be long-term damage to the university’s reputation.

Rekha Basu’s recent column about this incident goes over some of the more outrageous facts already known about this case, such as:

The mother wrote that her daughter reported the rape allegation within three days to university officials, but they told her she’d get quicker action if she didn’t make a formal complaint.

Not only did that not happen, but she was harassed, followed, and taunted every day by athletes, including the two accused men, Cedric Everson and Abe Satterfield, according to her mother. She even found Everson living three doors down the hall from her. The federal Jeanne Clery Act requires universities to have policies to warn the whole campus about accused rapists.

No one seemed to be leading the probe and no advocate was assigned to her daughter, the mother wrote, leading her daughter to go to police three weeks after the incident. Only after that was evidence collected from dorm rooms.

State Senator Matt McCoy is furious:

It’s baffling that Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness is quick to dismiss the possibility of obstruction-of-justice charges against university officials. As McCoy puts it, “She’s ignoring the fact that there may be criminal liability for covering this up.”

McCoy will meet with his caucus Tuesday, and hopes to send a strong message to Mason and the regents that legislators are not happy. He says they have a role as funders of state universities, who also confirm regents.

The unspoken piece of this is the exalted status the university gives its athletes. “It all comes down to money,” says McCoy. “… A lot of their reputation as a university is built around them.”

On a related note, Marc Hansen raises important questions about the role of alcohol in crimes committed on the U of I campus:

The university police department filed 535 charges against students in 2007. Four hundred sixty-seven — 87 percent — were alcohol- or drug-related.

Let’s break it down: 236 were for public intoxication, 86 were liquor-law violations, 38 were for drunken driving.

When you’re talking about alcohol-related “incidents” on campus, the number topped 1,000 for the fifth year in a row in 2007. While that might not seem like an epidemic at a school with 30,000 students, these are the incidents we know about.

If you look at the 18 football players arrested since April 2007, nine of the 23 charges were directly related to alcohol. How many others were indirectly related?

How many across campus? How many disorderly conducts? How many interferences with official acts, assaults, thefts?

Going by campus police interviews, it now looks as if alcohol played a part in the high-profile alleged sexual assault of a female student last fall.

Alcohol can be involved in sexual assault in many ways, according to a report published by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2001.

While underage drinking and sexual assault take place on every college campus, the University of Iowa should be taking steps to reduce binge drinking and obviously cannot condone any special treatment for athletes accused of committing crimes.

I shook my head when I read this story in Tuesday’s Register about the fraternity that shut down its U of I chapter because several members were arrested for dealing marijuana:

Four Delta Upsilon members were charged in December with drug violations after police raided the fraternity house and found 650 grams of marijuana, cash, packing materials, scales and drug-deal ledgers, court records state.

Hey, college students: you may think pot should be legal, and I may think pot should be legal, but pot is not legal, and selling pot is definitely not legal. Keeping detailed ledgers of your transactions is not a good idea.

These students who were arrested should know that it could have been worse, however. The year after I graduated from college, two guys who lived in my dorm were arrested for selling drugs to a fellow student who had named them when he got caught with possession. They also had detailed business ledgers on their computers, which the police confiscated.

What they didn’t realize, and probably no one in my dorm realized, was that an elementary school was up the street a few blocks. Most people living in the dorm would never have a reason to walk in that direction, because the rest of campus was the other way. But the state where I went to college had one of those laws doubling prison terms for drug offenses committed within X feet of a school.

The guys were not selling to grade school kids. They were just making some extra cash selling to other college students. But they went away for a long, long time.