It’s a good time to have retired from higher education.

It’s nice to be spared the up-close and personal view of the dismantled progress in making higher education accessible and welcoming to everyone.

Yet, it’s disheartening to watch university administrators and regents rush to eviscerate the core of academic work before the majority in the state legislature enforces it. No doubt the legislators will catch up; they’ve just been out of session for a while. Two recent developments — one from the regents and one from a legislator — are particularly troubling.

First, the Board of Regents is in the process of editing its strategic plan to remove references to “inclusion.” Are we really to the point where we don’t even try to include everyone in the educational endeavor? Isn’t inclusion the underlying principle of public education? How did we get here?

Second, Rep. Taylor Collins, R-Mediapolis — the newly appointed chair of a new House Higher Education Committee bent on “reform” — recently wrote a letter to the Board of Regents stating, in part, that “Iowans expect [public universities] to be focused on providing for the workforce needs of the state.”

Of course, Iowa needs well-qualified graduates in its workforce, and it is a core function of Iowa public universities to supply them. But surely the overriding core of higher education is the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, a goal much more expansive than that of simply training workers in marketable job skills.

Is it possible that Rep. Collins isn’t aware that the major advances in knowledge that drive our business, financial, health care, and arts communities — think the internet, emerging cancer treatments, musical innovation — were brought about by people inspired by education to read widely, question everything, and imagine creatively? Doesn’t he want that sort of education for Iowa’s citizens?

I’m aware these concerns will be seen as too “woke” by many. And that worries me, too. Why have we turned a word that basically means “alert” into a term of abuse?

– Lois Cox, Iowa City