In early June, Iowa’s state legislature passed a bill mandating that all university students take two courses, one in U.S. history and one in government, to meet general education requirements. The courses must be broad enough to count as introductory surveys— no special topics or advanced studies may qualify—and restrictions govern who can craft and run them.
Politicians in the Hawkeye State took this step because general education at public colleges and universities is a sprawling market of a thousand options, from which each student crafts a custom education. At the University of Iowa in Iowa City, a freshman can take “Black Television Culture” or “Native American Foods and Foodways” to meet the Understanding Cultural Perspectives requirement. At Iowa State University in Ames, “Racism in American Popular Culture” and “French and Francophone Animation” fulfill the Arts and Humanities requirement. The University of Northern Iowa has a Human Condition (Domestic & Global) requirement that students can meet with courses such as “People of the Great Lakes,” “Global Skills,” or “Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies.” When the law goes into effect in 2028, students in Iowa’s four-year institutions will no longer be able to meet their history- and civics-related requirements with such boutique and ideological offerings.
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“Iowa makes history and civics great again,” wrote State Representative Taylor Collins, the legislation’s main author. Ignorance of U.S. history and civics among American adults is “shocking,” he added, citing Iowa schools’ “Absurd options” for general education requirements that are “far removed from a true liberal arts education.” Collins spoke in similar terms when we met at a gathering in Iowa City last year to talk about higher education. His was not the language one usually hears local officials apply to top public institutions in their states.
Collins, 30, is in his second term in the Iowa House of Representatives. Remarkably, in addition to authoring such important legislation, he already chairs the Higher Education Committee. Ten years ago, he was an undergraduate at Iowa State, majoring in business and minoring in political science while serving as president of the College Republicans. He fulfilled the state’s general education requirements with courses in sexuality and global studies, “which were a big waste of time,” he told me in one of four subsequent interviews.
“I always wanted to go into politics,” he said. So he proceeded to law school after graduation but lasted only a week before dropping out and enlisting in Kim Reynolds’s campaign for governor. He joined the Reynolds administration after her win, working for the lieutenant governor as an aide and speechwriter, but he found the internal politics in Des Moines unsatisfying, especially after Covid-19 hit in early 2020. He returned to his home county and learned that the local representative was retiring in 2022. He wound up running uncontested, taking a seat in the lower chamber in January 2023.
Soon after, Collins found himself charged with moving an anti-DEI bill through the House. Collins doesn’t say so explicitly, but his outspokenness likely helps explain why such a controversial endeavor was entrusted to a twentysomething freshman member. Many Republicans who attended Iowa schools still “romanticize them,” he told me. They have a hard time accepting that the campuses they fondly remember no longer exist. Others resist meddling in college affairs because they believe in limited government. Collins considers this attitude “a great gift to university leaders and the crazies on campus.” Some Republicans still worry about bad press, but “unless you’re getting attacked,” he laughs, “you’re probably not doing your job.”
The young upstart took the lead on the initiative—and the heat. When Collins put the proposal forward, reaction was swift. Iowa Democrats and school leaders warned that the anti-DEI bill would hamper the recruitment of students and faculty and hurt needy students, and threaten accreditation, too. Collins responded by citing accounts of “privilege walks” and other DEI practices, along with the hefty annual salaries of DEI officers, more than $750,000 in four cases, he reported.
Collins’s colleagues were persuaded. The bill stalled for a year but was signed into law in May 2024. Apart from ensuring “colorblind admissions and hiring,” the law prohibits:
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.
Collins credits the Manhattan Institute with helping to compile this list. He suggests another factor that helps explain why woke practices persist even at universities in solidly red states. “Some of my colleagues are much older than I am, and they come from rural areas where nobody talks this way,” he explains. They don’t know what “heteronormativity” and “intersectionality” mean and can hardly believe it when told that such notions are now core dogma in the humanities and social sciences. Asking longtime Republican legislators from farming and small-town districts to reform the university—to expel the insidious ideology of identity politics—is like sending green recruits to far-off lands to battle veteran guerrillas.
Collins went to great lengths to help spread the word to fellow lawmakers. He produced a glossary of woke terms and distributed it to potential allies in the House, and collected slideshows from the University of Iowa’s DEI office that shocked members when they saw merit-based judgments cast as a form of white supremacy. Collins’s colleagues shared his irritation that this was going on at taxpayer expense, and that college officials were telling legislators that they shouldn’t do anything about it.
The debate over the anti-DEI bill continued in the press. A Democratic colleague in the House stated on Iowa Public Radio that “diversity” merely means “people different from you,” while “equity” signifies fairness, and “inclusion” is just a matter of “welcoming women . . . people of color, the LGBTQ community. . . . I don’t know what’s so scary about that.” Another Democrat called the bill “a deliberate choice to structure society in a way that benefits only one particular group while denying opportunity to others.” A member of the Iowa Legislative Black Caucus said the bill was about “censorship, exclusion, and erasing important conversations that prepare students for the real world.” The caucus issued a separate letter to colleagues calling DEI a “moral obligation.”
Collins responded forcefully to these contentions. DEI programs are “ideological enforcement centers that suppress the pursuit of truth, and most importantly, merit,” he said. He spoke of DEI as a “radical program,” called gender studies and social justice majors “garbage degrees,” and sent a letter to presidents of the three state universities that concluded, “Clear and decisive action from each of you is the only way we can ensure that DEI is DOA in the State of Iowa.”
His critics did have a point, however, when they warned that accreditation was a concern. In 2024, the accreditor of Iowa’s institutions, the Higher Learning Commission, included diversity elements in its criteria of evaluation. So one year later, Collins sponsored the Accreditation Autonomy Act, which stated, “An accrediting agency shall not take any adverse action against a public institution of higher education for complying with a state law or refusing to violate a state law.” Collins also combed through existing state regulations and removed the names of any specific accreditors, thus ensuring freedom of choice on the part of the state the next time an evaluation is due. His actions, along with President Trump’s Executive Order on DEI, did not go unheeded. In 2024–25, the Higher Learning Commission revised its criteria, deleting most of the diversity elements among other changes.
Still, higher education personnel in the state remained committed to the DEI system. The University of Iowa president told lawmakers afterward, “I can’t imagine getting rid of the word diversity.” Real reform required a change in personnel, too. Since they couldn’t trust existing departments to respect the new vision, Collins and his colleagues passed the Center for Intellectual Freedom Act in June 2025, creating an independent academic unit authorized to hire its own faculty and develop its own courses. The Center for Intellectual Freedom now exists as a fledgling part of the University of Iowa, under the supervision of the Iowa Board of Regents rather than local campus leadership. Wilfred McClay, Joshua Katz, other academic conservatives, and I serve on the board’s advisory council. We are currently searching for a permanent director. The bill also established a disciplinary focus for the Center: “teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.”
The June 2026 legislation requiring that every student take U.S. history and government courses gives the Center for Intellectual Freedom responsibility for those courses in Iowa City, which means it will reach more than 5,000 undergraduates a year and draw enrollments from some of the most ideologically skewed departments. “We cannot leave the responsibility of passing along the foundations to university leaders,” Collins insists. “There’s been a total retreat from great books into fields that serve professors’ pet interests. We must put the true traditions of our history and civics back into the core.”
After the Center for Intellectual Freedom Act passed, House members urged the Board of Regents to ask schools to conduct a Workforce Alignment Review that would accomplish three goals: identify low-enrollment programs and their operational costs; determine a program’s relevance to employment needs in the state; and recommend reorganization or closure of programs that fall short. The proposed review had the appearance of an accounting enterprise—one that would tally the number of professors in a department and their compensation, the number of enrollments and majors, and jobs awaiting graduates in the field. The results, however, would inevitably support the corrections that state Republicans sought, given that some of the most ideologically biased departments are deeply unpopular with students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, in 2021–22, only 6,658 of the 2,015,035 bachelor’s degrees conferred were in “Area, ethnic, cultural, gender, and group studies” combined. These departments look viable only because many of their DEI courses satisfy general-education requirements. Without these captive students, they will starve.
The alignment review will certainly show the impracticality of heavily ideological departments. For example, in March 2026, when the Daily Iowan reported that the school’s Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies would close, it noted that only 12 of the roughly 22,000 undergraduates signed up for it as their primary major. In November 2025, the Board of Regents recommended that dozens more programs be terminated. Many were in wholly nonideological areas such as foreign languages and special subfields of the health sciences, but others were in politicized fields like American studies, social justice, and global studies. This bureaucratic approach does the work of ideological reform without opening up messy culture-war debates, especially because school leaders, who often cope with tight budgets, are quietly happy to see certain cost-ineffective units shut down.
The Iowa story illustrates how multipronged planning and execution can produce effective higher-education reform. Curriculum, accreditation, personnel, new programs, legislative maneuvering, and cost-benefit analysis all come into play, requiring academic knowledge, political savvy, and sheer stamina.
That complexity helps explain why conservative reform efforts have so often stumbled. One of the great frustrations for conservatives in higher education has been the persistence of super-blue campuses in red states. Professors and administrators have promoted multiculturalism, militant feminism, DEI, LGBTQ activism, and other left-wing causes, dressing them up in theories of patriarchy, heteronormativity, postcolonialism, and other absurdities—all in defiance of the voters who fund their institutions. Not anymore.
Conservatives recognize that maintaining traditions is essential, so why don’t our state-funded institutions require courses in Western civilization and American heritage as part of general education? Why do they mimic colleges in California, where UC–San Diego offers 60 courses, including “Race, Gender, and Computing” and “Race and Racisms,” that fall under a DEI requirement that has the same status as the basic science requirement?
Iowa’s higher-education reforms show that a hands-on approach to general education can work. Campus officials issued dire warnings about the dangerous effects of reform, but none have come to pass. There have been no accreditation challenges, and recruitment hasn’t lagged—in fact, it has increased. The press has aired criticisms of the Center for Intellectual Freedom and the elimination of ideological “studies” programs, but students don’t seem to mind.
Similar reforms have taken place in South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Ohio, where legislators have mandated study of documents of the American Founding as part of general education. Florida, Utah, and Texas have also added study of the legacy of Western civilization.
The ingredients for reform are clear: state politicians willing to exercise their power; experienced guides who understand the mores and rituals of academia; laws on general education and accreditation that support traditional learning; and new academic units empowered to carry out the changes. Faculty, Democrat politicians, the American Association of University Professors, and unsympathetic journalists will object. But when the right pieces are in place, their resistance proves frail and unpopular.