As a law professor, I am a strong defender of free speech. Defending free speech as a constitutional principle means defending the right of people to speak even when I disagree with their message.

As a Democratic state representative from Iowa City, I recently heard a lot about how Iowa Republicans believe they are victims of First Amendment violations. The Iowa House Government Oversight Committee held hearings to review complaints that the regent universities had infringed on conservative students’ free speech rights. In the University of Iowa case, the College of Dentistry dean admitted the college was wrong to schedule an inquiry for a student who criticized the college’s statement opposing an Executive Order issued by then-President Trump.

I readily concede that the UI made a mistake. Under the First Amendment, a state university should not punish anyone for commenting on a matter of public concern. It is antithetical to the university’s educational mission to foster debate. I was glad to see that university officials immediately recognized their mistake and reversed course.

But there is another side to this story. Iowa Republicans claim they are victims of free speech violations, but they are also perpetrators. Several of them introduced bills that blatantly violate principles of free speech and association.

Here are just a few of the egregious examples from the first five weeks of the legislative session:

• A Republican Senator introduced SF 292, which requires the state Board of Regents to “conduct a survey of all of the employees of the institutions governed by the state board of regents to determine the political party affiliations of all such persons.” This might very well violate the First Amendment right of association.
• A Republican Representative introduced HF 222, which would reduce funding from Iowa public schools that teach materials from the 1619 Project — a journalistic work that tells the history of the United States from the perspective of Black experience. The bill reeks of indoctrination, saying that the 1619 Project “attempts to deny or obfuscate fundamental principles on which this country was founded,” and that the state has an interest in “forming young people” into “patriotic citizens.”
• A Republican Representative introduced HF 106, which would require the UI and Drake law school faculties to become members of the Iowa Bar. This bill likely violates the First Amendment right of association.
• Finally, the House education committee, led by Republicans, voted 12-9 to advance SF 41 — a bill that would make Iowa the first state in the nation to eliminate tenure at the state’s universities. The whole reason for tenure is to protect free expression It allows faculty to challenge entrenched ideas without fear of reprisal, and it protects liberal and conservative speech alike. The elimination of tenure would destroy our state universities and the tremendous value they bring to our state and our economy.

Iowa House and Senate leadership should have pronounced these bills dead on arrival. Instead, they breathed life into them by assigning them to committees and allowing them perhaps to advance to the floor. Even if these bills don’t ultimately pass, they damage our educational system every time they are publicly debated.

When conservatives believe their free speech rights have been violated, they are right to call it out. But our Republican state legislators also need to clean up around their own doorstep. And they should certainly stop playing the victim when they hold all the political power in the state and are wielding it to suppress the free speech of thousands of Iowans.

–Christina Bohannan, Democratic state representative, Iowa House District 85; University of Iowa Law Professor