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Red State Tries To Force College Students To Take ‘Freedom’ Courses

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After years of complaining about liberal indoctrination on college campuses, Iowa Republicans are attempting to force college students to take conservative courses on “freedom.”

Earlier this month, state lawmakers snuck in a line item in an unrelated government finance bill that would mandate classes for undergraduate students at the University of Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom, a program designed to counteract what conservatives perceive as liberal bias in higher education.

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The finance bill states that all students at the university must take two classes at the center to fulfill American government and American history requirements.

It is unclear whether Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds will sign the bill, veto it, or veto the line item. Democrats in the state are hoping the governor will veto the course mandate.

The Center for Intellectual Freedom, which cost Iowa taxpayers $1 million to start up, is under the purview of the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees three public universities in the state, rather than school faculty. One university faculty member is serving as the interim director and instructor, but the center has no full-time staff.

The regents insisted there was demand for such a center, claiming that they were hearing from parents and donors that opinions were being suppressed on campus. But the center has been plagued by dismal enrollment since it opened in March. Of the two courses offered during the spring 2026 semester, one class had 11 of 32 seats filled and the other had eight out of 32 seats filled, according to the university website.

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“This is driven by the political goals of state legislators and not the interests of students or faculty,” said Sara Partridge, the associate director of higher education at the Center for American Progress. “Students and faculty are the ones who should have the greatest influence in what is taught.”

Partridge added, “It’s the academic equivalent of astroturfing. It’s a top-down effort to impose political viewpoints of conservative lawmakers.”

At the center’s first event earlier this year, panelists regurgitated common talking points among conservatives about problems in higher education: critical race theory, an academic framework about structural racism; “over-discrimination” against whites; and professors who are “crazies.”

Before the center’s launch, Christine Hensley, a regent and member of the advisory council, told an Iowa radio station that she had been hearing from parents and donors who were worried about sharing opinions on campus.

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“We — as a regent, and also from a personal perspective — have received emails from parents and donors very concerned about not having open dialogue, diverse discussion about freedom, civics and American history,” Hensley said.

But the feeling that conservative viewpoints are being stifled at Iowa’s colleges doesn’t appear to be widespread. The Iowa Board of Regents has conducted an annual free speech survey on the state’s public universities since 2021. This year’s survey revealed that 89% of students felt comfortable expressing their opinions on campus. Approximately 67% of faculty felt the same way.

“Diversity of thought at colleges and universities is already widely present,” Partridge said. “Explicitly mandating it in a certain way to align with partisan goals would only undermine researchers’ freedom and autonomy and lower the quality of education that students receive.”

The mandate also “severely limits” students, Partridge said, especially considering the university offers plenty of courses on U.S. government and history. “General education requirements are the hallmark of the four-year degree. They give students a broad-based understanding of the world,” she said. “This is not addressing an existing gap in the course catalog. In fact, it’s an area where the university already has a lot of robust expertise and offerings.”

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Forcing a conservative agenda on students who are paying so much to attend the university is especially egregious, said Democratic state Sen. Janet Petersen.

“This legislation will require families who are paying for college education for their kids, which is not cheap, that they would be forced to take these freedom classes,” she said.

Conservatives have long held the belief that college campuses are unwelcoming to right-wing ideology. But in the last several years, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the fight to remake college campuses and punish higher education institutions that don’t align with their beliefs has been supercharged.

Over the last year, the federal government has demanded that elite colleges and universities follow directives aligned with the administration’s policy priorities, including ending diversity programs and allowing the federal government to control what certain programs can teach.

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The government has also accused schools of discriminating against conservatives and Trump voters and demanded that schools turn over their demographic data to “prove” that certain students are being favored.

The Iowa legislature took notice. Republicans introduced various bills that would impact the state’s colleges and universities. Some of the proposals included banning the hiring of people from China who were on specialized work visas and requiring schools to sign agreements with the Trump administration. But most of them fizzled in the legislature before the session ended earlier this month, suggesting that their efforts were to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist.