Leaders of the controversial Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa have two years to determine how they can comply with a state law requiring students to take two center courses. But getting there will not be easy. They will have to maneuver through confusion over how to comply with the law and sometimes bitter biases about the center, which, so far, has focused on conservative principles at the expense of liberal ideas. “There’s one thing that just seems to kind of stick with me,” The Gazette higher education reporter Vanessa Miller said during a Tuesday afternoon live Zoom meeting to discuss recent reporting she has done about a series of emails that reveal disorganization and the center’s interim director’s frustration with University of Iowa and state Board of Regents officials. “It feels like everybody is coming into this from their respective sides with their own biases and their own assumptions about the other person’s biases,” Miller said. “So, instead of people coming together, trying to sort of solve a problem to make something work and function, people are coming into it with all this baggage and sort of, like, pent-up anger.” For example, she said: “Some of the Advisory Council members make little side comments during their board meeting about how much the university hates them. I’m sure they’ve not really talked with anybody at the University of Iowa, you know what I’m saying? So, there’s just some assumptions and too little discussion, probably. Too little, like, real conversation of people coming together.” The Iowa Legislature established the Center for Intellectual Freedom in 2025 after Republican lawmakers who control both chambers of the Legislature complained that University of Iowa professors are too liberal and that conservative voices are not given a fair chance to be heard on campus. The center's stated purpose is to teach a version of American values that conservative thinkers can control. Moreover, the University of Iowa does not run the center under state law. The Board of Regents does. Students did not show much interest in the center during its first year. The center has until June 2028 to become fully organized with a full-time director. That is when state law says students must take a three-credit American history course and a three-credit American government course to graduate. Miller has reported that the center's catalyst, interim director and University of Iowa economics professor Luciano de Castro, wrote several emails earlier this year in which he accused the University of Iowa administration of not supporting the center. Her subsequent reporting showed that former U.S. Rep. Greg Ganske was surprised to learn that what he thought would be a public lecture for the center, with press coverage, had been scheduled for a class of 11 students behind closed doors. Also, the Advisory Council seeking a permanent director for the center is not using a consulting firm, Miller reported. She also reported that the regents unveiled on July 21, the date this podcast was recorded, plans for a new Center for Intellectual Freedom governance committee that is to include de Castro and regents President Robert Cramer, Steve Lacy and Christine Hensley. That committee is to conduct annual performance reviews of the center’s director and send employment recommendations to the Board of Regents for approval, board documents made public showed. The governance committee will receive reports and recommendations from the center’s Advisory Council, the documents showed. Below is a transcript of the interview with Miller, with some minor editing. Lyle Muller 00:32 Our guest is Vanessa Miller. And I asked Vanessa to come and talk to us because I’ve just been impressed with the reporting that she has been doing this week on the Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom. And to give you a little bit of background, I have poked at that center. I’ve not been a fan of it, and so my position is known, We will not pester Vanessa for that unless she wants to offer it, but we want to keep her ability to do some fair reporting, and also trustworthy reporting, which it really is. And I think, Vanessa, before I get too deeply into this. I think that what really gives you reporting authority is the depth that you’ve gone to really be fair and explore all of the options. The Gazette, on Sunday, gave you three full pages, almost. So, you got the front page, two full pages inside, and when I got — I actually read it online early, and I couldn’t put my tablet down when I was reading the story. I sent you a note right away, and I thought, we have to get you on. So, thank you for doing this. Vanessa Miller 01:43 Yeah, no worries, thanks for having me. Lyle Muller 01:45 How long you been working on the story? Or the series of stories. Vanessa Miller 01:50 I’ve been covering the center since they started talking about it, so for a long time, and every time something emerges, something new emerges in it, I would put in a public records request. So, I’ve gotten some emails along the way, like, we got a bunch of documents around the big, inaugural event that they held in December. But then in June, on June 8th, they held one of their advisory council meetings. And there were just a lot of stuff that was said during it that made it very clear that, like, a lot was happening behind the scenes. There were, like, you know, Richard Lowry (University of Texas-Austin associate professor of finance and center advisory council member) was sort of hinting at: a lot of stuff happened with that search process, but we don’t want to get into that here. And so, all of the little, hints that they were dropping in that meeting made me, sort of, that day, put in a public records request for all the emails that I could get. And then, so not this… not last week, but the weekend before, on Friday afternoon, they provided me, like, the dump of around 300 emails, 300 plus, and so, I started to read through them that night. And, I got to page 25 and I called Zach, and I was like, I’m sorry, they’re… I’m not even… I haven’t even started in on these emails, and I can tell you right now, there’s a bunch of stories here. I was like, I’m just gonna need some time, and so they gave me the following week to just not do other stories, to just focus on reading through the emails, organizing them into stories, figuring out what we had. So, really, only a week, and then we started getting the content out there. Lyle Muller 03:36 And to interrupt you there, Zach is a reference to Zach Kacharski, who is the editor of the Gazette. Vanessa Miller 03:44 Yeah. Lyle Muller 03:45 We worked with him together, too, in the same Iowa City office, all those many, many years ago. Vanessa Miller 03:51 Yes. Lyle Muller 03:52 So, 300 documents, 300 emails? Vanessa Miller 03:55 Yeah, around 300 emails, and honestly, every single one of them was interesting. A lot of times, you get emails that are… amount of emails that are that size, and many of them are, like, duplicates, or just, like, news articles that have been shared that hit the keywords you requested. And, you’ll get, like, 20 to 25 interesting emails out of 300. But I… every single email was interesting. Lyle Muller 04:19 Did the emails reflect anything that you had seen in the regular public packet that the Board of Regents released? Vanessa Miller 04:27 Well, so, in terms of the Board of Regents itself, it usually just puts out a one-liner in its agenda that says, update on the Center for Intellectual Freedom, and then Christine Hensley, who is the… she’s a regent and also the chair, obviously, of the Advisory Council will give a verbal update. And so, no, within the Board of Regents agenda, I had not seen anything like what I was seeing in the emails. They’s been painting, like, a pretty, you know, rose-colored glasses type of view of what was going on at the center in terms of their goals, and how great the first event went, and all that stuff. Thanks for reading Lyle Muller Doesn't Have a Fancy Column Title. This post is public so feel free to share it. Lyle Muller 05:11 Luciano de Castro, the interim director of the Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom, has grievances, and he is the main catalyst behind this center. But, one of the emails that you received said, and I’m quoting it, “in all the months since the Center’s establishment, not a single concrete action of support from university administrators has been identified.” And then he, you write here that he was slamming the UI public assertion that “we want the center to succeed” and his quote, “that might be true if success means nothing.” So, there was a real sense of frustration there. Was that sense of frustration evident throughout all of his emails? Vanessa Miller 05:58 Oh my gosh, yes, every single one. I mean, he sent lots of emails to, Mark Braun, to Christine Hensley, those two primarily, and then to Richard Lowry. Lyle Muller 06:09 Braun, the Executive Director of the… Vanessa Miller 06:11 Yeah, executive director of the Board of Regents, just repeatedly expressing his frustration, and I mean, I was kind of taken aback by one of his emails where he asked Christine Hensley to ask Mark Braun to act professionally by including him in more of the communications. He was frustrated that Mark Braun was sort of asserting himself in different ways in the center. You know, the law does say the Board of Regents needs to provide approval over all these things. I think what this sort of, conflict between them all shows is that, although legislators passed a law, you know, creating this center, there’s no… there’s no roadmap for how a center functions within a University of Iowa campus that it doesn’t report to, and that doesn’t govern it. So they do have to get approvals from somewhere: I guess the Board of Regents, according to the
