The Iowa Board of Regents instructed the state’s public institutions of higher education to completely remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) from their online presence.
The development came during the Board’s meeting on Thursday.
“All of us — regents, university administrators, faculty and staff — must examine what we are doing now and what we will be doing going forward to ensure that we are following the spirit of the laws and executive orders, not just the words on the paper,” said Board President Sherry Bates.
[RELATED: East Carolina University to no longer require DEI for students to graduate]
The Board ordered the state universities–the Universities of Iowa, Iowa State, and Northern Iowa–to remove web pages related to DEI, both their currently available and archived versions. The pages could later be reintroduced if certain conditions are met.
Bates also stated that “[t]here has been work done on the university webpages, but a simple search shows there is a lot more work to do . . . For some, it may look like nothing has been changed. This is not the case, but the changes must be made.”
Besides scrubbing DEI online, the Board is also telling the state’s universities to identify federal contracts that are related to DEI.
A Board of Regents spokesperson directed Campus Reform to a video of President Bates’s remarks.
On Jan. 20, his first day in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order removing DEI from the federal government and all related contracts.
Before the Thursday Board meeting, Iowa’s three public universities had changed admissions documents to no longer allow students to choose from a broad range of genders, instead requiring them to just state if they are “male” or “female.”
[RELATED: University of Cincinnati dismantles DEI initiatives to comply with federal order]
The University of Iowa also announced on Dec. 17 that it will be shutting down its Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.
The Board of Regents’ development comes as multiple other colleges and universities are shutting down, revising, or rebranding their DEI offices as initiatives, as well as several corporations such as Meta and Amazon.
Campus Reform has reached out to the Board for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
This article was originally published at campusreform.org
Author
