My employer, the University of Iowa, recently joined the reactionary national trend in higher education by creating what it calls the Center for Intellectual Freedom. Iowa’s Republican legislators, after being snookered by decades of evidence-free propaganda claiming left-wing indoctrination at colleges, appropriated a million dollars toward the creation of the center last year as a counterweight to this imaginary problem. But this center isn’t a balance for anything. It is, instead, a beachhead for the right’s attempted authoritarian takeover of higher education in the state.

But not even conservative students are buying what the Center for Intellectual Freedom is selling. Despite the center’s director personally reaching out to the many conservative student groups on campus, one of the center’s first planned classes was canceled because only one student enrolled.  Yes, you read that correctly: one student. The state could have saved some of the money it spent creating a safe space for conservative students by letting that one student enrolls in independent study.

When the two classes did get started in March, one had only 11 of 32 seats filled and the other only eight of 32.

The lack of demand for the center’s offerings should not be surprising, because the best evidence shows that, contrary to what conservative policy makers claim, conservative student’s don’t feel isolated or targeted on campus. According to a recent study from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation, only 2% of college students — and only 3% of college students who identify as Republicans — said their political views have made them feel out of place on their campus.

Thus, the right’s characterization of higher education is a fiction. Students across the ideological spectrum feel free to express themselves, think that their education is worth the cost and don’t think their views are silenced. We should believe the students who say they feel free to express themselves, not pundits who are paid to gin up disdain for higher education.

A report from Eastern Iowa’s Gazette further exposed the leaders of the center’s wastefulness and their partisan intent. According to that report, for the center’s inaugural event, its officials paid $34,000 to Christopher Rufo — the conservative who kicked off the nation’s moral panic over critical race theory — and invited all the Republicans in the state’s legislature but none of its Democrats.

The newspaper obtained email messages that included officials of the center discussing that Dave Jacoby, a Democratic state representative, demanded “the exact invite that was sent to advisory board members, regents, and others.” One of the center’s officials said in an email that Jacoby wanted to “attend in bad faith” in part because he had put the word “intellectual” in the center’s name inside quotation marks.

“Took six phone calls, four emails and repeated texts to be allowed in this ‘public’ meeting,” Jacoby wrote on Facebook after the event. “As you can see, there are many empty chairs. I serve on the Higher Ed Committee. No invite. CIF. Center for Instilling Fear. Not Center for ‘Intellectual’ Freedom.”

Regarding Rufo’s compensation, I’ll note that academics often speak for free or a nominal honorarium. And invited academic speakers are typically recognized by their peers as subject area experts who have spent years researching and teaching.

Nothing in Rufo’s record indicates he’s qualified to speak about the state of higher education. He’s done no academic research and admitted that his crusade against critical race theory relied upon misrepresentation. Even Republican allies view Rufo’s trusteeship at Florida’s New College as an unmitigated disaster, complete with faculty purges, an ousted president, a grossly ballooning budget and a significant drop in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. Despite his record of failure, my university’s new center paid him more for his hour of propaganda than most University of Iowa graduate students make in a year as teaching assistants.

The conservative caricature of college campuses as liberal indoctrination camps persists because it is useful cover for the actual threats to intellectual freedom their movement supports. American higher education is facing down a process of authoritarian capture that threatens the long-term viability of our system of higher education. For example, the Republican legislators who created the center have put forward a slate of bills this session modeled on national conservative priorities that would outlaw teaching about race and gender.

Iowa recently shuttered it program in African American Studies, during Black History Month, no less, and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department. A university interested in intellectual freedom doesn’t shutter the very departments that emerged in response to movements for broader inclusion in mainstream American life.

Even worse than the excessive cost of the center’s inaugural event and its politically curated guest list was the announcement to those who appeared that the event fell under the “Chatham House Rule,” which disallows attribution of specific statements to a speaker.

Intellectual exchange requires accountability, and it is both cowardly and hypocritical for speakers at a state-funded and brazenly partisan gathering to keep the public from knowing who said what. But the center for conservatives afraid of having their ideas held up to rigorous scrutiny is a less catchy name.  

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