Things to know that the article doesn't mention:
Christopher Rufo was the invited speaker for the opening event,
and the interim director is UI economics professor Luciano I. de Castro[1].
In 2025 de Castro cited extreme bias in advocating for the creation of the center[2].
The sponsor of the bill to create the center, Rep. Taylor Collins, R-Mediapolis also said while working to advance an earlier bill to ban DEI spending at public universities, "the bill is needed because the three universities are spending too much on DEI officers and programs. He said the salaries for the top four DEI professionals across the regents universities add up to about $750,000 per year."[3]
"The nonprofit Common Sense Institute reported student interest and enrollment was low — with just eight students in one class. The report said enrollment is unlikely to grow unless the state mandated students take the classes, which is exactly what Republican lawmakers passed."
But despite the overtly Orwellian effort, the Democrats responded in typical ineffectual, tone-deaf fashion:
"Democratic Sen. Janet Petersen slammed that idea, arguing it will drive up costs for Iowa college students and their families."
Iowa produces 1 in 8 eggs, and the 2024 election was about egg margins. It’s more honest to concentrate on relating egg margins to Iowans prosperity, than to try promoting intellectual freedom in a country which already has a first amendment.
I checked out their website -- it was carefully clean of leaking any agendas or biases out.
I'm all for challenging assumptions and what not, but that should come with a willingness to change one's mind when confronted with compelling evidence. I see a paucity of that from the people who push this kind of stuff.
Personal insults don't move the conversation forward.
My point is simple: the opaque nature of the site is suspicious, and the wording about "debating" CEOs, etc is an interesting choice as well: rather than "engaging", "learning from", "hearing from" etc.
I'm all for what they ostensibly represent: social/poltical science and the constitution. Both subjects all citizens should be able to have critical reasoning skills about.
The fact that the current regime is flagrantly ignoring the constitution, that it's adherents don't mind at all, and that they are likely aligned with this org is worthy of scrutiny.
The University of Iowa has a Social Sciences department that has professors in for Political Science, Anthropology, Public Policy, and other fields. It’s an accredited institution.
But this isn't about the University of Iowa, it's about the "Center for Intellectual Freedom", which was created specifically to promote conservative values.
I'm all for challenging assumptions and learning about differing viewpoints, but this smells of indoctrination.
Conservatives hate colleges because they are "liberal hotbeds", but "reality has a liberal bias" and a lot of education on reality runs counter to their ideology. Case in point: studies on Critical Race Theory are considered to be blasphemous by the right but those studies are based upon the fact that the United States was built on systemic racism and is still deeply ingrained is a depressingly significant portion of the population.
This is really light on details. What exactly is this? Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I think intellectual freedom is a cornerstone of democracy and freedom. We should want people to have freedom of thought. The headline makes it seem like some crazy right wing nut job, indoctrination camp, but don't we want people to have free intellectualism?
perhaps they will provide usefull training in how to read the room, and when to duck
as I think those are generaly usefull skills no matter what you are talking about.
Charlie Kirk was killed by someone because he had an apathy for gun violence in education which, inevitably, then happened to him. In a way, the death of Charlie Kirk is an almost perfect encapsulation of his own beliefs.
If we are to listen to Charlie Kirk, then we must acknowledge that his death was merely a freak accident, and the price of freedom in this country. We should do what Charlie would want us to do, and move on.
How is this a strawman? To quote Charlie Kirk, "I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights. That’s a prudent deal. It is rational”
Maybe you should better understand the beliefs of people you willfully support? Is it not a bit embarrassing for you that strangers understand your proponents better than you yourself?
Regardless, there's something me and Charlie can agree on. His death was worth it.
You're really struggling with nuance. Yes, he judges the 2nd amendment dangers an acceptable tradeoff. That's a reasonable belief. He doesn't conceptualize school shootings et al as "freak accidents". That would be a ridiculous belief; it's a strawman. Neither is his death a freak accident. It's purposeful malignance.
Furthermore, I'm not a Charlie Kirk supporter. I don't agree with him on many or most things. I find many of his beliefs odious. The difference between me and you, is I don't think his death was worth it. It reflects a sickness in our society. A sickness that you are embracing. This Iowa university program seems directionally good, opposed to this sickness, and it was a shame that they are planning on making it mandatory.
Oh I don't embrace the sickness at all, I'm just pointing out that Charlie Kirk most definitely did embrace the sickness. He said it himself, many times and in many different ways.
If you have a problem with that, take it up with him. Well.. you should have taken it up with him, past tense. Nothing that can be done now.
"debate bros" are known for their bad faith arguments and lack of any real intellectual curiosity. They make a mockery of honest discourse. It isn't a compliment.
They shouldn't be killed for it. The allergy to even bad faith debate which apparently so incensed his shooter is a problem. Again, this is why I think it wasn't unreasonable he might be this center's namesake.
I disagree that someone unwilling to engage in good faith debate should be made the namesake of a "Center for Intellectual Freedom" because at the very least such a person is a bad example what such a center should stand for and represent.
Also, Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist and a bigot. His bad faith debate shtick was a vehicle for accelerating his racist views, which he was very successful at, and the only reason anyone wants to name this center after him is to glorify him as a martyr to that cause, in other words, for the sake of white supremacist propaganda. The party very much wants Charlie Kirk to be their Horst Wessel. That's what this is about, it's a grift.
Negative reaction to this isn't due to anyone having an "allergy to even bad faith debate" (which, itself, and ironically, is exactly the kind of bad faith debate we're discussing) but because reasonable people don't want to see buildings named after neo-Nazi shitposters.
So, I can't find anything on Wikipedia at least about Kirk being a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist, and I'm not sure what you mean by unwilling to debate. (Like did he turn down debates or...?) But I can see how the optics of having someone with his views named on the center might be bad.
Still, I find it hard to get past the fact that: he was killed because of what he believed, not because he endangered anyone, not in self defense. Can you not see the connection to this center?
>So, I can't find anything on Wikipedia at least about Kirk being a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist, and I'm not sure what you mean by unwilling to debate. (Like did he turn down debates or...?)
You know exactly what I'm talking about, you're just feigning ignorance and I'm not interested in playing the game.
>Can you not see the connection to this center?
There is no connection beyond white supremacists wanting to turn someone who was, at best, a mid-level right-wing influencer into a martyr for their beliefs in order to normalize those beliefs and galvanize hatred and retribution against their enemies. Which they tried to do but it all burned out in a few days of right-wing hate speech on Twitter.
But if you're looking for a political activist killed for their beliefs, there are plenty to choose from - MLK Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Manuel "Tortuguita" Terán, Sean Kealiher, Joe Hill, Yanar Mohammed, Muhsin Hendricks, Harvey Milk, and others. People who actually tried to advance the freedom of actually oppressed groups, instead of the grudges of white men.
I'm not responding further to this thread. I'll give you whatever gotcha reply you have at the ready and bid you good night.
>You know exactly what I'm talking about, you're just feigning ignorance and I'm not interested in playing the game.
Ironically this is a "bad faith shtick." You made a claim that has no basis in reality and failed to back it up. Charlie Kirk was many thing, but a neo-Nazi he was not.
He called for the military to use "lethal force" against migrants at the southern border. He also repeatedly demanded "Nuremberg-style trials" for medical providers who offer gender-affirming care.
In the sense that it doesn't work? Well it definitely works, gender affirming care like TRT helps men all the time. Breast implants help women after breast cancer related mastectomies. Vaginoplasty also commonly helps traumatic rape victims, too.
Or, do you mean debunked as in debunked in helping people with gender dysphoria? Because that's wrong too, we know that gender affirming care leads to less suicide in that population.
Because suicide is so rare and the number of people receiving gender affirming care is so low it is nearly impossible to get population sizes to demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in suicide.
We can instead show a statistically significant reduction in depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking. In every other medical context this is used as a strong shorthand for "reduces suicides." It is completely reasonable here as well.
The research community is happy to use "reduces suicides" as shorthand for "reduces depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation in statistically significant amounts." It is only in this one context that people insist that this is somehow misleading and therefore actually gender affirming care is evil.
But okay. Imagine that in this circumstance it really is the case that gender affirming care doesn't reduce suicide rates (rather than this just being difficult to collect data about). It merely reduces depression and anxiety and suicidal ideation in people. Oh no. That still sounds good to me.
He's not me, but from our understanding it reduces suicide as he explained.
Also, you pulled the 95% number directly out of your asshole. Most people don't give a shit if someone gets hormones prescribed by a doctor. You care for reasons that are unclear and you have failed to explain. I'm guessing because they're stupid reasons, and you know it, and you don't want to embarrass yourself so you figure you can just not say anything and hope nobody notices.
It is so incredibly rich to be talking about a "substantitive argument" when you haven't even brought AN argument. You just said "uh it don't work" and "durr people don't like this" and then refused to elaborate further.
Yes, you should stop responding because obviously you are far out of your depth and liable to humiliate yourself.
Having “some gun deaths every single year” was a cost worth paying. The alternative, under gun control laws preventing school shootings, is not “rational”.
State legislators in Iowa are mad that faculty lean left. So they created this institute that expressly hires conservatives and has conservative leaning curricula. But students would rather take a history class from a historian than some reactionary weirdo who thinks that all historians are communists. So the university is mandating students to take courses from this program.
This is the opposite of free intellectualism. It is faculty hired for their political beliefs and curricula created for political ends and mandatory enrollment so students must be exposed to these ideas whether they like it or not.
Not often I get to quote the greatest cartoon of all time, the Venture Bros, on HN, but hey it's appropriate:
> Catclops: Tourism has skyrocketed at the Well of Bitter Sorrows and Ünderbheit Birth Crevasse since you enacted the mandatory attendance edict.
> Baron Ünderbheit: Told you.
So, we've reached the point where, convservatives, generally speaking, are a direct analogy to a cartoon super villian. We are a stupid, stupid species.
War is Peace, Government Mandated is Intellectual Freedom. Somehow it surfaced in my memory how in USSR they were explaining that the elections with only 1 candidate, put on the ballot by the Party, were the pinnacle of democracy.
Not to be that guy, but you know this is gonna hit Iowa and Iowa State in the recruiting department. Athletics was part of the way some of these schools thought they’d make up for cuts in research and declining revenue elsewhere given increasing costs. “We’ll just get rich off football and basketball!!!”
realistically though, the rest of the B1G is definitely going to negatively recruit against this. Just like they are being told to negatively recruit southern states around the voting rights act stuff. Not that Iowa State cares about the B1G but they are generally going after the same guys. Now the B1G schools have wayyy more money, and the recruiting high ground.
Even if it doesn't affect the students, it'll allow other countries to say that their Center for Uighur Freedom is no different to the US' Center for Intellectual Freedom.
Uhh so this is an Iowa thing, and China has already been running reeducation camps without feeling a need to justify itself by comparison. Also it's confusing why you think some other country would say this given that there's nothing in common between the two things, except being "mandatory", but not really. Like, who would be the target audience of such a statement?
1 https://www.thegazette.com/news/gop-invited-to-center-for-in...
2 https://www.thegazette.com/news/education/university-of-iowa...
3 https://www.iowapublicradio.org/state-government-news/2023-0...