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CEDAR FALLS — Despite strident pushback from its sole Democrat, Iowa’s Board of Regents is on track to approve an inaugural 26 advisory council members for a new legislative-mandated University of Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom — some of whom were suggested by Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Of that list of council members — nearly three times longer than the minimum nine members required by House File 437, which mandated the UI center — half are based in Iowa and half are not. The vast majority — all but two — are men.

Christine Hensley, Iowa Board of Regents (Contributed)

To the requirement in Iowa Code that the council be politically balanced, regent Christine Hensley said, “We are in a good place for that” — with 11 Republicans, three Democrats and 12 who are independent.

“It's important that we have political balance, which we do,” Hensley said in sharing the breakdown. “I just wanted to be on record indicating that we have complied with that.”

But of the group identifying as independent, at least seven have expressed conservative ideology either on social media or otherwise — with several making meaningful donations on the political right.

Robert Lowry, for example — among the independent appointees — is editor-in-chief of the National Review, a news and opinion magazine that since its founding in 1955 has “defined the modern conservative movement and enjoyed the broadest allegiance among American conservatives.”

Another of the independent appointees is Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus of English at Emory University who in 2023 was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to serve on the board of trustees for the New College of Florida during a controversial shake-up.

As a contributing editor of First Things — a magazine published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life aimed at advancing a “religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society” — Bauerlein has written of his opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“The Trump executive orders against DEI in higher education are just a first step in eliminating this insidious practice,” he wrote in February.

Pushing back against the assertion of balance, regent Nancy Dunkel on Wednesday asked not just about the members’ politics, but their gender, and their residency.

“We have two women out of 26,” Dunkel, the board’s sole Democrat, said — noting both the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have female presidents. “We get two women? Here we have two women presidents. It doesn't even make sense why we would only have two women.”

To the political piece, Dunkel asked, “Did you say there are three Democrats?”

“I really wish that it could be more politically balanced, in my opinion, than just the Republicans and the independents,” she said, turning her attention to the fact that so many have no Iowa connection.

Regent Nancy Dunkel (left) and Abby Crow listen to University of Northern Iowa president Mark Nook during the Iowa Board of Regents meeting at the University of Iowa's Levitt Center for University Advancement in Iowa City on June 2, 2022. (Jim Slosiarek/The Gazette)

“We don't even know these people and those of you that are on the board, you're having your vote diluted by bringing non-Iowans,” Dunkel said.

Hensley defended the choices by noting Gov. Reynolds helped pick appointees.

“We worked closely with the governor's office,” she said. “The governor has given us a number of names that have been included in here. She worked directly with Governor DeSantis to get the names of individuals that had been involved in the Florida centers.

“So I don't think it's important at this point that we have to know them personally,” Hensley said, backed by fellow regent David Barker.

“All of these people have extensive records,” he said. “It's easy to Google all of them and find that they are incredibly qualified.”

“We don't even know them,” Dunkel interrupted.

“You look these people up, their reputations are immense,” Barker said.

Regent David Barker speaks during a meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents in Iowa City, Iowa on Wednesday, June 11, 2025. (Nick Rohlman/The Gazette)

Dunkel raised questions about the center’s budget and whether any of it would be spent flying council members to town for meetings.

“I'm just going to lay this out very honestly,” she said. “Several of us in the past and now travel south sometimes during the winter, but we always fly back on our own dime for these meetings — that's how important is. So I would expect that we don't have an advisory board that is going to be paid or reimbursed for their travel to come to Iowa for a meeting when we, as Iowans, don't have that luxury.”

Board staff said all those details have yet to be worked out — starting with the board’s official approval of the advisory council on Thursday.

National appointees

In addition to the Iowa-based names made public last week, the board added 13 more based outside Iowa. They include Carlos Carvalho — president of the new private University of Austin, founded in hopes of “fostering an environment of intellectual freedom and pluralism.”

Carvalho, who founded the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas, was a strong supporter of the University of Austin project — conceived back in 2021 by a handful of high-profile conservatives like author Niall Ferguson, billionaire investor Joe Lonsdale, Free Press founder Bari Weiss, and Pano Kanelos — who was the university’s first president and upon Carvalho’s hire was appointed to chancellor, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Carvalho was among the UT professors looking to open a “Liberty Institute,” funded by the Legislature and focused on civic education and intellectual diversity, according to the American-Statesman. The university in 2023 did launch a version of the center, the Civitas Institute, along with a School of Civic Leadership to house it, espousing “independent thought, civil discourse, free speech, reasoned deliberation and intellectual curiosity are central to our ethos.”

In appointing Carvalho as University of Austin president in May, the American-Statesman reported that Kanelos said Carvalho “believes that students are not vessels to be filled with dogma, but minds to be sharpened with disciplined thinking and exposure to fundamental questions of human life.”

Other appointees include:

Joshua Katz, a former Princeton University professor and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. While at Princeton, he faced criticism for his controversial take on the Black Justice League and was terminated from the university for alleged dishonestly in a misconduct probe, according to the Wall Street Journal. His allies, according to the Journal, slammed that decision as pretext to silence his unpopular views.
Sergiu Klainerman is a mathematician at Princeton who has made modest campaign contributions to Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell, according to public records.
Rich Lowry is the editor-in-chief of the conservative National Review publication.
Iván Marinovic joined Stanford Graduate School of Business as an assistant professor of accounting in July 2011. He and another council appointee — Dorian Abbot — faced backlash over an editorial they cowrote in Newsweek in 2021 arguing for more attention on academic excellence and individual achievement in university admissions and criticizing some aspects of DEI.
Nicola Giuseppe Persico is a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University. He’s written that “diversity at the top won’t automatically lead to more diverse leaders throughout the organization.”
Joshua D. Rauh is a finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Harald Uhlig is a German microeconomist and professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Uhlig in 2020 criticized the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter and later faced allegations of discrimination in the classroom. He was put on leave temporarily but reinstated after investigators found no basis for a disciplinary proceeding.
Dorian Abbot is a University of Chicago professor who faced criticism for his editorial in Newsweek in 2021.
Mark Bauerlein is a professor emeritus of English who DeSantis named to the board of trustees of New College of Florida.
Daniel Albert Bonevac is a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2016, Bonevac joined 145 other scholars and writers in declaring their support for Donald Trump for president. Last year, Bonevac joined another professor in filing a lawsuit in federal court demanding the right to fail students if they miss class for abortion care, among other things.
Thomas Gallanis is a George Mason University professor, having previously taught at the University of Iowa. Earlier this year, he was accused of having too few women on a law panel.
Wilfred M. McClay is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank.

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

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