Why are university administrators silent about the forced closing of the State Historical Society library and archives in Iowa City, or SHSI-IC? And why do some faculty in the School of Library and Information Sciences prohibit students from talking about the issue in class? 

Their silence is deafening. 

The university and the State Historical Society have deep and longstanding interconnections. UI students and faculty have a stake in maintaining access to the historical society’s collections for teaching and research.

In June, Kim Reynolds’s administration announced without warning it would close the Iowa City institution, whose history goes back to the mid-19th century. It immediately restricted hours of operation, gave termination notice to all staff, and said the doors would close on Dec. 31. 

Under this plan, the priceless historical collections will be dispersed to the Des Moines branch, “deaccessioned,” or disposed of. UI students and faculty, along with Iowa citizens across the state, will be severely affected. Access to this history will be impaired in the short and long term. 

Although an Iowa District Court issued an injunction prohibiting the removal of the collections for now, some had already been moved. 

State officials, including the State Archivist — who has no formal archival training — continue to pull the wool over the eyes of the public about what impact closing the Iowa City facility will have.  

The rationale or “duplication of services” and budget constraints sound very much like the Trump/Elon Musk agenda. And shutting down the state history journal, the Annals of Iowa, because the governor or some in her administration did not like some articles they saw as “woke,” echoes a broader attack on any history with a critical edge.

But I want to address a couple of misperceptions that pertain directly to the university’s interest in maintaining access to these collections. First, by longstanding agreement between the University Library and the State Historical Society in Iowa City, complementary and non-duplicative collecting policies have been maintained to the benefit of both institutions. 

That has meant, for instance, that the University Library does not collect state history journals from the surrounding states and across the country.  SHSI-IC does that and maintains that collection, which directly benefits the research of Iowa students and faculty. The academic history journals of other states frequently carry some of the latest state-level research directly relevant to work on Iowa’s history and useful for comparative purposes. For State Archivist Tony Jahn to suggest the irrelevance of published histories of other states shows profound ignorance of the nature of historical research and the importance of comparative work to Iowa’s history.

Second, we should not underestimate the importance of having these incredibly valuable primary sources, some dating back 160 years, available locally for student and faculty research. The society’s archival and library collections are deeply intertwined and are typically used in conjunction with each other by student and faculty researchers. 

Even if access to these collections were to be maintained in Des Moines, the net effect will be that barriers and costs for UI students to use the sources will soar, and the material will not be used as it is today. 

In addition, the pedagogical value is inestimable in being able to introduce students to the range and richness of diverse and tangible primary sources — such as Civil War diaries, the letters of farm homemakers, the oral history accounts of labor union activists, the minutes of women’s clubs, and the personal papers of local and state political figures. 

Our students, faculty, and countless Iowans from around the state have used these records to write everything from research papers to dissertations and countless published books. These have brought credit to the University and its mission and have enriched the history of the state.

We in the UI community need to speak up and oppose the travesty of closing the Iowa City branch of the State Historical Society, which is being pushed in the name of “financial considerations” and “duplication of function,” while the state government has an estimated budget surplus of $1.61 billion as of October 2025. 

The cost of maintaining this facility and its collections is small, but the effects of not doing so will be huge and devastating.

Shelton Stromquist

         Professor Emeritus of History

         The University of Iowa