Meeting Rundown

The Iowa Board of Regents will meet September 16-17 at UNI’s Maucker Union in Cedar Falls. Selected agenda items are outlined in brief below. Open session portions of the meeting will be livestreamed on the Board’s YouTube channel. 

Meeting Background
The September meeting represents the first on-campus meeting of the new academic year and the meeting where the Board considers its fiscal requests to the Iowa General Assembly. These include the FY 2028 State Appropriations Requests and the FY 2028 State Capital Funding Request. The Board is required by Iowa Code to make requests for state appropriations to the Iowa General Assembly prior to October 1 every year. 

FY 2028 State Appropriations Requests
The Board will consider FY 2028 operating and other state appropriations request for the Regents enterprise near the end of day two. State appropriations for the Regent universities are typically included in the education appropriations, economic development appropriations, and agriculture and natural resources appropriations bills passed each year by the Iowa General Assembly. 

This year, the Board’s request includes $10 million in new, incremental funding. Money for the University of Iowa’s Rural Physician Pipeline and Iowa State University’s AI-Ready Workforce and Innovation Initiative is included in the request. The Board will consider these requests Thursday morning following presentations from the three university presidents. 

Read more on FY 2028 State Appropriations Requests

Center for Intellectual Freedom Committee
This meeting marks the first for the new Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) Committee. The committee was created this July to provide oversight of the Center on behalf of the Board and make recommendations to the full Board. The CIF Committee is chaired by Regent Hensley, who also is chair of the CIF Advisory Committee, and is scheduled to meet Wednesday at 3:10 p.m.

Academic Affairs Committee
The Academic Affairs Committee will consider numerous new programs, including an MS in Machine Learning at ISU and three new degrees at UI. In addition, UI’s Institute for Cancer Drug Discovery and Development (CANDID) will be considered. Further, UNI will present on its Center for Civic Education and request full Board approval to create the Chuck and Barbara Grassley Center. The Academic Affairs Committee is scheduled to meet Wednesday at 1:15 p.m. Further discussion of the Grassley Center will occur late Thursday morning. 

Read more on ISU’s proposed MS in Machine Learning

More on CANDID, UI’s proposed cancer drug discovery and development institute

Property and Facilities Committee
The Property and Facilities Committee will review its annual facilities reports, which include the facilities governance report, five-year capital plans and the institutional roads program. The five-year capital plans include state capital funding requests for FY 2028, which include dollars for major facilities projects and building deferred maintenance. This year, capital requests include money for the UNI Commons modernization project, UI’s nursing simulation initiative, and ISU’s Black Engineering remodel. The Property and Facilities Committee is scheduled to review these requests and the UI and ISU Registers of Capital Improvement Business Transactions at 11:15 a.m. on Wednesday. 

Governance, Evaluation and Human Resources Committee
The Governance Committee will consider the appointment of Tim Day as Senior Policy Advisor and Chief of Staff to President Cook at ISU as part of personnel appointments. Day has been an ISU faculty member in biomedical sciences for 26 years and has served ISU as its Faculty Athletics Representative to the National Collegiate Athletics Association since 2010. Further, the committee will consider approval of ISU’s Veterinary Clinical Services Incentive Plan (VCSIP) as a permanent program. VCSIP, in place as a pilot program since 2022, allows ISU to share service fee revenue with eligible faculty as incentive payments. The Governance Committee will consider these items and others Wednesday at 11 a.m.