Diversity in Iowa

The Chronicle of Higher Education
November 25, 2009

By David Evans
The other day, I was at a meeting of the chief academic officers from institutions affiliated with the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. IAICU serves as the consolidated voice of Iowa's private institutions (almost all of which are active members) in state and national governmental affairs, and as a clearinghouse for information-sharing and other activities that serve the common interests of those institutions.For the last two years, we've been discussing how to increase the diversity of our faculty at IAICU institutions. For many reasons, this is a very tall challenge. Most importantly, Iowa has a reputation for being not very diverse, and therefore perhaps not very welcoming to people who do not have a European-American heritage and ethnicity. In addition, most of the private institutions in Iowa are, like mine, relatively small and teaching-oriented, with all the advantages and disadvantages that status entails in terms of faculty recruitment.For IAICU institutions, then, there are a couple of major challenges. On the overall reputation of Iowa, there's not a tremendous amount 30 or so small private colleges can do, though we certainly can try harder to show the positive realities of Iowa life for all kinds of people. Iowa is, in fact, rapidly diversifying, aided by a low cost of living and, believe it or not, relatively favorable business and employment conditions. The development of substantially more attractive cities also helps: Des Moines, for instance, has in the past 20 years enjoyed a tremendous renaissance, as had Cedar Rapids prior to last year's floods. Iowa City has always been a terrific university town. Buena Vista University's own home, Storm Lake, is quickly heading towards minority-white status, which is making us an interesting laboratory for a diversifying Iowa, as described in Richard Longworth's recent book, Caught in the Middle (Bloomsbury USA, 2008).

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