The Air That We Breathe

Dear Friends,

On December 17, the University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) published a press release on its website: “CLAS to propose new School of Social and Cultural Analysis.” The new school, the creation of which will be considered by Iowa’s Board of Regents in February, would combine the departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and American Studies with the college’s African American Studies, Jewish Studies, Latina/o/x Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies programs. The college’s American Studies and Social Justice majors would be eliminated, and a new major in Social and Cultural Analysis introduced. As far as I can tell, there was no press coverage of this announcement until December 26, when Des Moines TV station KCCI put together a story on it; the headline of their accompanying web story reads “University of Iowa pushes to close departments of American Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.”

Two days later, Fox News picked it up, with a story on foxnews.com headlined “University of Iowa announces plans to close Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Department.” The day after that, in Montenegro of all places (where we’re spending winter break), a journalist friend of my father-in-law’s greeted me by telling me that he just heard from a right-wing contact in Germany that Iowa was closing its gender studies department and that this was evidence that Trump was already remaking America. If my social media feeds are anything to go by, this was pretty much the interpretation back in the U.S. as well.

Searching for those headlines on Facebook shows people posting and commenting on these stories with one of two predictable reactions: either “Welcome to Trump’s America,” or “Welcome to Trump’s America!” One group of people was dismayed and demoralized at how quickly the Republican electoral victories in November have translated into further erosion of academic freedom and higher education. Another group was elated to see such quick evidence of things being set right; it’s about time that colleges stop indoctrinating our kids. The two groups were so far apart it was as if they were on different planets, but everyone agreed on one thing: this was a sign of the times, clear evidence that Trump’s second presidential term would be—was already—consequential.

There’s only one problem with this narrative, and that’s the fact that the change has been in the works for nearly three years. Up until July of last year, I was a faculty member in Iowa’s Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Department (GWSS).¹ On March 8, 2022, our then-chair sent an email to faculty informing us that the college’s administration was forming a committee “with the charge of re-imagining connections” between the units now being folded into the proposed new school. Although our chair reassured us that the college did not yet “have a plan or structure in mind,” it quickly became clear that the college did have in mind a sort of school or “institute” that would combine the departments and programs into a new administrative unit. The 2022-23 and ‘23-24 school years were filled with committees, meetings, discussions, surveys, and reports, filling faculty calendars with time spent “re-imagining” (as the powers that be branded the project) how these historically vulnerable academic areas would be reorganized. We were all initially told that we had carte blanche to dream, that we should dream big, that we shouldn’t hold ourselves back from proposing, say, an Institute of Gender, Race, Culture, and Justice. (You’ll note that the new school will not, in fact, have such a name.)

Even if you knew this timeline, it would be natural to assume that this move was in response to, or in anticipation of, the state of Iowa’s increasingly aggressive posture to what has been imprecisely termed “DEI.” Iowa’s Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature have followed other Republican-led states in passing a series of education laws over the past few years antagonistic to anything with the merest hint of gender, sexuality, or race. We’re not Florida or Texas, but we’re not far behind. Laws passed in 2023 banned any discussion or material relating to gender identity or sexual orientation for grades K-6 in public schools, required schools to out transgender kids to their parents whether they liked it or not, forced schools to remove books that depict sex from their libraries, and stripped all information about HIV and AIDS from curriculum standards. In 2024, the state banned DEI offices and initiatives in its public institutions of higher education, including a prohibition of “any effort to promote, as the official position of the public institution of higher education,” any of a laundry list of conservative bogeymen, from “transgender ideology” to “social justice” to “racial privilege.” In a political environment like this one, is it any wonder that UI administrators would be looking, at the very least, to conceal its programs having to do with gender, sexuality, and race? Maybe, this logic goes, if these programs are hidden in a School of Social and Cultural Analysis, and if they keep very still, the legislators won’t see them.

And yet, there are good reasons to believe that this move has little to do with Iowa’s current anti-DEI campaign, whether you read that phrase narrowly, where what’s being targeted are DEI offices and initiatives, and not curriculum or academic departments, or broadly, to mean a general war on anything having to do with race, gender, sexuality, etc. in higher education. First of all, there are other units being “re-imagined,” including Rhetoric (its faculty are mostly being folded into Communication Studies), Geographical and Sustainability Sciences and Earth and Environmental Sciences (combined into a new School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability), and every foreign language department (combined into a Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures). According to the college, “bringing faculty and staff together into fewer departments will reduce costs and administrative duplication—delivering curriculum and teaching more efficiently, while preserving academic breadth and choice for students.” What’s driving the reorganization here is not that the subject matter taught by these departments and researched by their faculty is too controversial; it’s belt-tightening.

This is what faculty in GWSS were told throughout the process as well. We were informed that the initiative’s goals were to “improve coordination and collaboration across our units,” and reduce overlaps in course offerings between the programs that might confuse students. In meetings, deans told us that the current status quo was not sustainable, that there were simply not enough faculty members, nor enough majors, for these departments and programs to exist as they were. In July of 2023, the college formalized this position, requiring a department to have at least five tenure-track faculty members with a 75% appointment in the unit. GWSS, with most of its faculty on 50/50 split appointments with other departments, and American Studies, with most of its faculty having left or retired without being replaced, were suddenly going to be stripped of their status as departments. And so even though we were told that it was up to us, and our various purpose-built committees, to “dream up” how we wanted this new unit to take shape, that we would be part of a new unit was never in question. The new School (as it soon became known) was a necessary solution to an obviously unsustainable status quo. These departments and programs were simply not strong enough to exist on their own. There was no debating this point—it was basic mathematics: without the requisite number of faculty, these departments would no longer be departments. That the administrators prompting this move were the same administrators who could hire more faculty was never mentioned in said administrators’ company.

What’s my point here? Both that this move had little to do with the anti-DEI ideologues controlling statehouses in half the country, and that those ideologues are not necessary to achieve right-wing goals. This move and many such moves happening across the country say much more about the neoliberal logic of the contemporary university than they do about public institutions kowtowing to authoritarian legislators. This is not to say that those legislators are not real or dangerous. But it is a reminder that the right-wing attack on universities has been happening for decades, and it usually takes the form of austerity, privatization, bureacratization, efficiency-finding, and consultancy-backed solutions to problems that have little to do with the challenges of providing education to students who need it. These solutions are not framed as matters of ideology; the subjects covered by these departments and programs are basically coincidental. This is a matter of common-sense management of resources.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that this is wholly disconnected from right wing attacks on DEI, nor broader attacks on anything having to do with gender studies, ethnic studies, critical race theory, etc. I’m sure more attacks are coming, as our political leaders continue to realize that there is little political risk in catering to the worst instincts of the electorate. The dangers to the most vulnerable members of our society are real. I’m not a Bernie Bro condescendingly explaining that economics trumps identity. Rather, I want to point out that neoliberalism provides the palatable vocabulary that allows these attacks to succeed. Neoliberalism is the air that we breathe in the university, the game that must be played by everyone, even those well-meaning faculty members who joined committees and sat through meetings and drafted reports spelling out exactly how one of the first women’s studies departments in the country would be closed down. When the time comes for Iowa lawmakers to turn their attention to the problems plaguing higher education, they may find that their work has already been done for them.

See you next week.

1  It should go without saying that the opinions expressed here are my own and not those of the University of Iowa.