The University of Iowa's Center for Intellectual Freedom is a Hot Mess

Thoughts About What a REAL Center For Intellectual Freedom Might Look Like

By Daniel Henderson (originally published on his Substack page “Things We Don't Talk About Like Politics & Religion”)

August 29, 2026

Lyle Muller, a former Cedar Rapids Gazette reporter and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, posted an interview with Vanessa Miller, who broke a story about the inner turmoil over governance and administrative confusion at the University of Iowa's Center for Intellectual Freedom. I highly recommend you watch it to understand the mess fully.

My goal isn’t to revisit the confusion and chaos surrounding the Center. The University, the Board of Regents, and the Center are tripping over each other to try and figure out who is on first. It is a bureaucratic nightmare. Vanessa lays this out clearly in the podcast.

I am much more interested in the opportunity that the state legislature, the University, and the Center itself may be overlooking. This is a classic case of missing the main point.

During Lyle’s podcast interview with Vanessa Miller, she made this statement toward the end, which I think is on the mark:

“There’s one thing that just seems to kind of stick with me. 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. 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.”

Because Republican lawmakers in Iowa fear that Iowa’s public universities lack “intellectual diversity,” they passed House File 437 in 2025. The concern, of course, is that universities are much too liberal and not enough of the faculty or course content contain conservative principles, viewpoints, and values.

They may have a point… B.U.T. (Behold the Underlying Truth)

In short, Republicans have charged the University with “indoctrinating” students with liberal or even Marxist ideas. So their answer to liberal indoctrination is conservative indoctrination.

Exchange one form of indoctrination for another…problem solved.

Simply adding a “Center for Intellectual Freedom” as an adjunct to the university and requiring students to take a couple of conservative-flavored courses in American history and government does not add to the intellectual rigor of a college education in any demonstrable way.

Since these courses will not come under the College of Liberal Arts, what will students do? Will they be forced to take two American history courses? One that is considered “liberal” and the other “conservative,” all in the name of equal time?

This approach fundamentally misrepresents the problem. Instead of asking “what do students need?” the legislature and conservative pundits are asking, “What do we need (or want)?”

Another way to put it is, “What gives us a hand up on the liberals?”

Asking The Right Questions

Taking a step back from the current morass of confusion and chaos at the Center for Intellectual Freedom, I suggest reframing the issue by asking a completely different set of questions.

Asking the right questions often helps clarify an issue, even if the questions are hard to answer. (Hint: they are)

Every institution carries assumptions: Universities, legislatures, churches, news organizations, and think tanks all operate from particular traditions and values. The challenge is not to pretend those assumptions or biases don't exist or wish they didn’t; it is to expose them to criticism, evidence, debate, and competing perspectives.

Intellectual freedom flourishes when no idea is immune from examination, including the institution's own.

The questions I pose below are hard to answer; much harder than simply asking, “How do we get equal time for conservative viewpoints at the University of Iowa?”

Here are some questions that I believe will redirect the whole nature of the enterprise: If we are going to have a Center for Intellectual Freedom, should we be asking questions like these:

·      What is Intellectual Freedom? What should be the purpose of a Center for Intellectual Freedom?

·     How does requiring college students to take an American history and government course taught by conservative professors encourage intellectual freedom? How does this counter indoctrination?

·      Why are only about 6% of state college/university professors Republicans? (about 48% are Democrats, and 42% are independent or non-affiliated)

·      Are college professors biased toward a liberal viewpoint? Does that automatically taint their instruction?

·        Is all bias bad? Is there such a thing as neutral education?

·       Can someone with a particular bias still provide balanced instruction?

·        What is indoctrination? What are the theories of indoctrination? How is this different from brainwashing?

·         Is there evidence that college students are being indoctrinated?

·      Is all indoctrination bad? For example, is it indoctrination to teach students to become good citizens in a democratic republic?

·        What is the nature of knowledge, beliefs, opinions, and values? How does human psychology affect the development of these ideas?

·         How can we teach students to identify biases and indoctrination?

·       How does society indoctrinate people through images, media, social media, and other institutions?

·         How do we teach students to break out of an echo chamber to consider alternative viewpoints beyond the ones they’ve accepted?

·         How much has social media already indoctrinated everyone through its algorithms?

This list of questions could go on and on, but I think it is clear that the concept of “Intellectual Freedom” is not a simple liberal vs. conservative binary. It is much more complicated.

What Should Students Learn at a Center For Intellectual Freedom?

This seems like a fundamental question. The Iowa legislature thinks that students need to learn conservative viewpoints because they’ve been getting liberal ones throughout their courses.

That is what happens when politicians try to solve complex problems.

Let’s outline a proposed curriculum for a Center for Intellectual Freedom that goes far beyond a conservative vs. liberal cage match. This Center could be a model for universities across the nation that are caught up in an ideological conflict. It shouldn’t be a tug-of-war over ideology but rather a true quest to understand ideology, indoctrination, and its influence in education.

I know it sounds audacious, but if lawmakers and the University want a program worthy of the name and respectful of students, it needs to go well beyond a couple of conservative-driven courses.

Course One - The Theory and History of Indoctrination

Students need a rigorous intellectual approach to indoctrination and intellectual freedom. The Center should help students consider and develop a theory of indoctrination that includes a historical review.

Part One: Theories of Indoctrination

What qualifies as indoctrination:

·         Teaching falsehoods?

·         Teaching only one side of an issue?

·         Discouraging questions?

·         Grading students according to political conformity?

·         Presenting moral claims as unquestionable facts?

·         Emotional manipulation?

·         Social pressure rather than evidence?

What are the leading theories of indoctrination?

·         Content Theory

·         The Method Theory

·         Structural Epistemic Theory

·         Ideological Theory

Students can investigate scientific studies on indoctrination in education and society. Philosophers have addressed this issue and should be considered. A genuine center would expose students to all of these competing theories.

Part Two: The History of Indoctrination

History provides abundant examples.

Left-wing examples include:

·         Soviet Marxist education

·         Mao’s Cultural Revolution

·         Political litmus tests in Communist universities

·         Left-wing political correctness on university campuses

Right-wing examples include:

·         Fascist Italy

·         Nazi Germany

·         Segregation-era Southern textbooks

·         Religious fundamentalist schooling that prohibits questioning

Historically, indoctrination has been abundant in all ideologies. The mechanisms are remarkably similar regardless of ideology, and patterns emerge:

Indoctrination requires certain conclusions to become unquestionable. Alternative viewpoints become suspect and discouraged. Loyalty becomes more important than inquiry, and identity replaces evidence.

That becomes indoctrination regardless of the ideology. Spotting this type of indoctrination in history will help equip students to identify it in their world of social media and education.

Course Two - Intellectual Freedom in the Social Media and AI Age

Today, classrooms compete with TikTok, YouTube, X, Reddit, podcasts, AI assistants, recommendation algorithms, political campaigns, influencers, churches, corporations, and foreign disinformation operations.

The central question becomes: How do you know when your opinions are truly your own? What would such a course entail?

Course Content -

·         Human Cognition: confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, tribal identity, and emotional reasoning for starters.

·         Persuasion & Propaganda: Religious institutions, Advertising, Public relations, Edward Bernays’ book “Propaganda,” Cold War propaganda, Television, Political campaigns.

·         Media Literacy: Who owns media? How headlines work, Clickbait, Outrage economics, Framing, Selective omission, and Visual persuasion.

·         The Attention Economy: Infinite scrolling, Dopamine loops, Engagement algorithms, Rage bait, Echo chambers, Filter bubbles, and Algorithmic amplification.

·         AI & Intellectual Freedom: What gets left out? Who trained the model? What sources dominate? Can AI hallucinate? Should students trust AI? How should AI be cited? How can users interrogate AI?

·         Digital Manipulation & Intellectual Resilience: Bots, Deepfakes, Influencer marketing, Foreign disinformation, Microtargeting, Habits of Mind, Reading opposing viewpoints, Delaying emotional reactions, Separate identity from opinions, Verify before sharing and Recognize uncertainty.

This list is obviously not comprehensive, but it starts the conversation about whether humans even have intellectual freedom with so many competing external influences.

In many ways, this is the kind of education universities have long aspired to provide. The technologies have changed dramatically, but the underlying challenge remains the same: cultivating citizens who can think critically in a world where countless actors such as governments, media organizations, corporations, social movements, and increasingly AI systems are competing for their attention and assent.

Given today's information environment, a course like this could become one of the most relevant offerings on any university campus.

A Short Reading List for the Center for Intellectual Freedom

If the Center is to be intellectually credible, it can't simply become a repository of books that confirm one political viewpoint. Instead, it should expose students to the best thinkers who have wrestled with truth, authority, education, propaganda, freedom, and the psychology of belief. Here is a short list for starters (many more could be included):

Liberal and progressive perspectives:

·         John Dewey

·         Martha Nussbaum

·         Paulo Freire

·         Hannah Arendt

·         Nadine Strossen

·         Timothy Snyder

·         James Baldwin

Conservative and libertarian perspectives:

·         John Stuart Mill

·         Jonathan Haidt

·         Stanley Fish

·         Thomas Sowell

·         Yuval Levin

·         Greg Lukianoff

Foundational philosophers:

·         Plato

·         Socrates (through Plato)

·         Karl Popper

·         Alexis de Tocqueville

Final Suggestions

How about a few more courses or seminars offered through the Center for Intellectual Freedom with titles like:

·         Cancel Culture & Political Correctness on the Right & the Left

·         Political Polarization & Psychology

·         Speech Codes on College Campuses & Free Speech

·         Can Education Be Neutral & Bias-Free?

If the University of Iowa adopted a curriculum like this, the Center for Academic Freedom could become something much more ambitious: a national model for teaching how to think about freedom of inquiry rather than what to think about politics.

That would make it difficult for either the legislature or the university administration to claim the Center as a partisan victory, and that is precisely what would give it lasting credibility.

A successful Center for Academic Freedom ought to produce graduates who can recognize indoctrination in progressive activism, conservative activism, media, churches, corporations, political campaigns, social media, and even in themselves.

That last point is the hardest. Intellectual freedom ultimately requires intellectual humility.

·         The question is never merely: “Are they indoctrinating people?”

·         The deeper question is: “How do I know I am not being indoctrinated?”

Something tells me Iowa Republican lawmakers had nothing like this in mind when they passed House File 437. Sadly, they missed the main point by an Iowa country mile.

You can read and/or subscribe to Daniel Henderson’s Substack page “Things We Don't Talk About Like Politics & Religion” at https://hendersond.substack.com/