Leaders of the controversial Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom at the University of Iowa have two years to determine how they can comply with a state law requiring students to take two center courses.

But getting there will not be easy. They will have to maneuver through confusion over how to comply with the law and sometimes bitter biases about the center, which, so far, has focused on conservative principles at the expense of liberal ideas.

“There’s one thing that just seems to kind of stick with me,” The Gazette higher education reporter Vanessa Miller said during a Tuesday afternoon live Zoom meeting to discuss recent reporting she has done about a series of emails that reveal disorganization and the center’s interim director’s frustration with University of Iowa and state Board of Regents officials.

“It feels like everybody is coming into this from their respective sides with their own biases and their own assumptions about the other person’s biases,” Miller said. “So, instead of people coming together, trying to sort of solve a problem to make something work and function, people are coming into it with all this baggage and sort of, like, pent-up anger.”

For example, she said: “Some of the Advisory Council members make little side comments during their board meeting about how much the university hates them. I’m sure they’ve not really talked with anybody at the University of Iowa, you know what I’m saying? So, there’s just some assumptions and too little discussion, probably. Too little, like, real conversation of people coming together.”

The Iowa Legislature established the Center for Intellectual Freedom in 2025 after Republican lawmakers who control both chambers of the Legislature complained that University of Iowa professors are too liberal and that conservative voices are not given a fair chance to be heard on campus. The center's stated purpose is to teach a version of American values that conservative thinkers can control. Moreover, the University of Iowa does not run the center under state law. The Board of Regents does.

Students did not show much interest in the center during its first year. The center has until June 2028 to become fully organized with a full-time director. That is when state law says students must take a three-credit American history course and a three-credit American government course to graduate.

Miller has reported that the center's catalyst, interim director and University of Iowa economics professor Luciano de Castro, wrote several emails earlier this year in which he accused the University of Iowa administration of not supporting the center. Her subsequent reporting showed that former U.S. Rep. Greg Ganske was surprised to learn that what he thought would be a public lecture for the center, with press coverage, had been scheduled for a class of 11 students behind closed doors.

Also, the Advisory Council seeking a permanent director for the center is not using a consulting firm, Miller reported. She also reported that the regents unveiled on July 21, the date this podcast was recorded, plans for a new Center for Intellectual Freedom governance committee that is to include de Castro and regents President Robert Cramer, Steve Lacy and Christine Hensley.

That committee is to conduct annual performance reviews of the center’s director and send employment recommendations to the Board of Regents for approval, board documents made public showed. The governance committee will receive reports and recommendations from the center’s Advisory Council, the documents showed.

Below is a transcript of the interview with Miller, with some minor editing.

Lyle Muller

00:32

Our guest is Vanessa Miller. And I asked Vanessa to come and talk to us because I’ve just been impressed with the reporting that she has been doing this week on the Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom.

And to give you a little bit of background, I have poked at that center. I’ve not been a fan of it, and so my position is known,

We will not pester Vanessa for that unless she wants to offer it, but we want to keep her ability to do some fair reporting, and also trustworthy reporting, which it really is. And I think, Vanessa, before I get too deeply into this.

I think that what really gives you reporting authority is the depth that you’ve gone to really be fair and explore all of the options.

The Gazette, on Sunday, gave you three full pages, almost. So, you got the front page, two full pages inside, and when I got — I actually read it online early, and I couldn’t put my tablet down when I was reading the story. I sent you a note right away, and I thought, we have to get you on.

So, thank you for doing this.

Vanessa Miller

01:43

Yeah, no worries, thanks for having me.

Lyle Muller

01:45

How long you been working on the story? Or the series of stories.

Vanessa Miller

01:50

I’ve been covering the center since they started talking about it, so for a long time, and every time something emerges, something new emerges in it, I would put in a public records request. So, I’ve gotten some emails along the way, like, we got a bunch of documents around the big, inaugural event that they held in December.

But then in June, on June 8th, they held one of their advisory council meetings. And there were just a lot of stuff that was said during it that made it very clear that, like, a lot was happening behind the scenes. There were, like, you know, Richard Lowry (University of Texas-Austin associate professor of finance and center advisory council member) was sort of hinting at: a lot of stuff happened with that search process, but we don’t want to get into that here. And so, all of the little, hints that they were dropping in that meeting made me, sort of, that day, put in a public records request for all the emails that I could get. And then, so not this… not last week, but the weekend before, on Friday afternoon, they provided me, like, the dump of around 300 emails, 300 plus, and so, I started to read through them that night. And, I got to page 25 and I called Zach, and I was like, I’m sorry, they’re… I’m not even… I haven’t even started in on these emails, and I can tell you right now, there’s a bunch of stories here. I was like, I’m just gonna need some time, and so they gave me the following week to just not do other stories, to just focus on reading through the emails, organizing them into stories, figuring out what we had. So, really, only a week, and then we started getting the content out there.

Lyle Muller

03:36

And to interrupt you there, Zach is a reference to Zach Kacharski, who is the editor of the Gazette.

Vanessa Miller

03:44

Yeah.

Lyle Muller

03:45

We worked with him together, too, in the same Iowa City office, all those many, many years ago.

Vanessa Miller

03:51

Yes.

Lyle Muller

03:52

So, 300 documents, 300 emails?

Vanessa Miller

03:55

Yeah, around 300 emails, and honestly, every single one of them was interesting. A lot of times, you get emails that are… amount of emails that are that size, and many of them are, like, duplicates, or just, like, news articles that have been shared that hit the keywords you requested. And, you’ll get, like, 20 to 25 interesting emails out of 300. But I… every single email was interesting.

Lyle Muller

04:19

Did the emails reflect anything that you had seen in the regular public packet that the Board of Regents released?

Vanessa Miller

04:27

Well, so, in terms of the Board of Regents itself, it usually just puts out a one-liner in its agenda that says, update on the Center for Intellectual Freedom, and then Christine Hensley, who is the… she’s a regent and also the chair, obviously, of the Advisory Council will give a verbal update. And so, no, within the Board of Regents agenda, I had not seen anything like what I was seeing in the emails.

They’s been painting, like, a pretty, you know, rose-colored glasses type of view of what was going on at the center in terms of their goals, and how great the first event went, and all that stuff.

Thanks for reading Lyle Muller Doesn't Have a Fancy Column Title. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Lyle Muller

05:11

Luciano de Castro, the interim director of the Iowa Center for Intellectual Freedom, has grievances, and he is the main catalyst behind this center. But, one of the emails that you received said, and I’m quoting it, “in all the months since the Center’s establishment, not a single concrete action of support from university administrators has been identified.”

And then he, you write here that he was slamming the UI public assertion that “we want the center to succeed” and his quote, “that might be true if success means nothing.”

So, there was a real sense of frustration there. Was that sense of frustration evident throughout all of his emails?

Vanessa Miller

05:58

Oh my gosh, yes, every single one. I mean, he sent lots of emails to, Mark Braun, to Christine Hensley, those two primarily, and then to Richard Lowry.

Lyle Muller

06:09

Braun, the Executive Director of the…

Vanessa Miller

06:11

Yeah, executive director of the Board of Regents, just repeatedly expressing his frustration, and I mean, I was kind of taken aback by one of his emails where he asked Christine Hensley to ask Mark Braun to act professionally by including him in more of the communications. He was frustrated that Mark Braun was sort of asserting himself in different ways in the center. You know, the law does say the Board of Regents needs to provide approval over all these things. I think what this sort of, conflict between them all shows is that, although legislators passed a law, you know, creating this center, there’s no… there’s no roadmap for how a center functions within a University of Iowa campus that it doesn’t report to, and that doesn’t govern it. So they do have to get approvals from somewhere: I guess the Board of Regents, according to the law. But, the university doesn’t have a college in place where it can offer courses for this new center.

I mean, there’s just no structure, there’s no precedent, and so there… I mean, I think everyone was frustrated, honestly, because they didn’t know how to work. And so, they were: how to work it, or how to do it. Yeah, and they were all just trying to figure it out, but they were figuring it out in a frustrated manner, you know?

Lyle Muller

07:32

Well, that gets to one of the questions that I had immediately when I read that quote, is that, if the regions are to run the place under Iowa law, not the University of Iowa, and that the state law established the center what role is the University of Iowa even supposed to have in so-called supporting the center?

Vanessa Miller

07:54

Right. I mean, that’s a really good question, because it does house it, and it does seem like they are supposed to provide some sort of supplemental funding and signatures. I mean, he was going to the university to, when they were trying to sign contracts. Like, this agreement with Chris Ruffo (Manhattan Institute senior fellow and conservative activist) to come speak, I mean, that had to go through the university, you know what I’m saying? Or the Board of Regents people, or there were, like, there’s… there’s a whole story I didn’t write about first-class plane tickets for some of these people. And, a lot of that was going through the UI procurement office, so it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know who’s supposed to sign what. It seems like it’s… obviously, everyone’s confused.

Lyle Muller

08:35

And, by the way, neither de Castro nor University of Iowa officials were willing to talk with you for this, correct?

Vanessa Miller

Yeah, I mean, I did send emails to Professor de Castro, and he didn’t respond in general. The university, they would answer some questions, like when I was asking about how their policies work in terms of people that want to sit in on classes who aren’t registered, that kind of thing, you know, for some of the things. But, I asked them to respond directly to de Castro’s accusation that it (the university) was providing no support, and they didn’t respond to that.

Lyle Muller

09:14

Do you feel like you’ve had a pretty good relationship with Professor de Castro when you’ve interviewed him before for stories on this?

Vanessa Miller

09:21

Yeah, yeah, I felt like he was pretty responsive and helpful up until… because he had been excited, even to have us sit in on the classes, and I was prepared to do that. And then, a few days before the classes were supposed to start, he sent an email saying that we couldn’t come, and that we needed to register as, like, non-enrolled students, which I obviously could not do at that state in the semester. And, so that was frustrating. I haven’t really had any communication with him since then. So, for a long time, though, he was pretty responsive and helpful.

Lyle Muller

09:59

In your story, you say that de Castro wrote that hiring has been blocked, quoting here, “hiring has been blocked, expenditures have been subjected to approval requirements that apply to no comparable academic unit, communications have been deliberately routed around the interim director, bylaws have been altered without authorization, and open requests for policy guidance have gone unanswered for months.” What’s he talking about?

Vanessa Miller

10:32

Yeah, well, I mean, to start off, he was trying to hire faculty and begin that process almost immediately. Like, he hadn’t even been really appointed before he was trying to bring Richard Lowry to town to set up the bylaws in the center, and that’s when Mark Braun kind of interjected and was like, this is too soon, you haven’t been appointed, we haven’t appointed. So I feel like he was frustrated from the outset … And, they were telling him, don’t hire, please push pause on that because it’s much too early. And so, that’s the hiring thing. He got into a back and forth with the Board of Regents attorney over bylaws because he prepared some bylaws that I haven’t seen, and that weren’t provided to me, but she characterized them as, like, unworkable, not even worth her time to redline, because they were so not standard procedure. And, I know that within those, you can tell from the conversation, within those bylaws he had given himself, or the director of the center spending authority, explicitly. And so, she (the regents’s lawyer) prepared her bylaws. He was grumpy about those and so they went back and forth on that a little bit, and eventually just skirted the issue of who has spending authority. I know that he had wanted to have say over the account that the Center for Advancement created for donations to the center, and they said he couldn’t have any say in that, that that needed to go through the university.

What else did he list? I mean, just, like, each of those points, I could tell you what they’re referring to. I mean, he… oh, after the inaugural event, he wanted to prepare a book that he would sell, and that each of the panelists would write, like, a chapter, and he would compile it. And, he wanted to, then, sell that, and then use donations, maybe, or proceeds or whatever, to benefit the center, but then got really worried that the university was going to claim some sort of copyright of the book, and that they would get the proceeds. And, so they had a huge back-and-forth about that. And, he’s just really afraid that, yeah, that he’s pushed pause on that book entirely because he doesn’t want the university to take any of that money. The Board of Regents has promised that they wouldn’t, and that that doesn’t apply, but then he was asking Mark Braun to sign this statement saying he wouldn’t take any proceeds — or the university wouldn’t — and Braun hasn’t signed that. So, there’s a bunch of discord over those policies. Yeah, there’s a huge number of things.

Lyle Muller

13:04

Well, as you point out aptly in the story, the, this highlights holes in House File 437 that created the center. A lot of thought didn’t go into that. And, I know we have a state legislator in the call, and maybe we can get some comment from him a little bit later.

You know, you point out that de Castro wanted to be in every communication, or at least have access to every communication about the center. He is the interim director. That seems like a reasonable response under the current structure. What is the organizational relationship supposed to be with Regents Executive Director Mark Braun?

Vanessa Miller

13:52

Well, yeah, I mean, I think he is the head of the board office, and I think that the board office is supposed to have ultimate say over a lot of these aspects of the center. The center really is just de Castro and then, he has one administrative assistant who was sending some of the emails on his behalf. At one point … he had sent an email to the provost’s office requesting a meeting, that they… he wants the center elevated to, like, a college level, so that they can start offering their own courses. And he wanted to … be part of the Council of Deans and things. And, then the provost’s office would respond… would forward things to Braun … and then a response would be sent back to that administrative assistant at the center, and then… and the administrative assistant would then send that to de Castro, who was like, why don’t you just send this straight to me? So, it was some of that. It was just, like, lots of people responding to different emails, and some of which never ended up in de Castro’s inbox.

Lyle Muller

15:04

The whole thing about elevating the center to a college status was pretty interesting, and you pointed out the Catch-22 nature of the center’s existence. How confounding was that question for de Castro? Was that fairly evident? It seems it would be.

Vanessa Miller

15:23

Yeah, yeah, I mean, he said that the university… he said, basically: because I know someone in the university college — which offers a lot of the University of Iowa’s online certificates and degrees and stuff — he said, because we know somebody within that college, they were willing to host our courses for this semester. But, they said we can’t keep doing that going forward. And then, Kevin Kregel, who’s the provost, was like: if you want to offer more courses, you don’t have a home here at the University of Iowa because you report to the Board of Regents, so you need to get to the board and talk to them about it.

And so, yeah, I think that de Castro was kind of like, where am I… I’m, like, required to offer these courses, but I can’t hire faculty, and no one is allowing me to house my courses so that I can put them in, like, the system, or whatever. You know, I think it was just kind of like, what do I do here, you know?

Lyle Muller

16:14

And we do have a comment from Mary in our chat: “From listening to the November and June virtual meetings of the advisory board” — there is an advisory board for this center — “I got the impression of great disorganization that there were side conversations going on outside the meeting, and that Luciano was more interested in writing a book and getting the profit.”

So, I don’t know if you have any thoughts, or if that rings, true to you.

Vanessa Miller

16:45

For sure. I mean, there was one point during one of the June… during the June meeting of the Advisory Council where they were kind of getting into a disagreement, and Amy Claeys, who, again, is the Board of Regents attorney, had to interject and be like: okay, this is not the time for that conversation, like, you guys can get together off… off this chat and then have a conversation, and… or, like, another time. We’re kind of arguing about, the search process for a new director and who should have eyeballs on applications. And, she again had to say: you guys, let’s talk about this another time, or in a different way.

And, yeah, I do feel like, for some reason, de Castro was very, very passionate about this book … I mean, there was a huge number of the emails that I received that were focused on… on his… his getting commitment from the university and the Board of Regents that he… that he… I think even at one point, he did say, I, would get the revenue from this and not… and not them. And I don’t know, I think way back last year, when he first mentioned the book, or maybe just at the beginning of this year, he did say that they might use the income for the center. But, I haven’t heard him sort of say that since, so I don’t know where that money would even go, you know, if the university and the board doesn’t take it, if it would go straight to him or not.

But again, he’s not writing it, he’s just compiling it. All of the panelists are the ones who are writing these chapters, and it sounds like they already have done some of that work.

Lyle Muller

18:18

There was an effort to bring University of Texas economics professor William Lowry to campus, which he did, and to bring Lowry’s anti-DEI stances to the U of I, and other conservative causes in academia. Tell us about that. What did you see there as far as correspondence that was going on with that effort to bring him here?

Vanessa Miller

18:43

Yeah, that again happened … I think it was July 20th of 2025, and so that was before de Castro (was interim director). I mean, he was appointed 10 days later, so he probably knew he was going to be. But, he hadn’t even been officially appointed by the board as the interim director, and was trying to bring Lowry to town, and Lowry eventually would be named on the Advisory Council, and then chosen to be on the executive committee, and then chosen to be chair of the executive committee. But, way before any of that happened, again, de Castro wanted to bring him to town.

And, Mark Braun did intervene and say: this is way too premature, like, we just haven’t even named Advisory Council members. There was a cadence to the law, he said, and you need to do things in a specific order. And obviously, naming Advisory Council members comes before bringing one of them to town to set up the center and help craft bylaws. … de Castro was, like: well, I’ll pay his way with my own money. And then they were like: no, please don’t do that. And then, he did it anyway, you know? I mean, the emails didn’t show that he did it anyway, so I had to do some extra reporting to see if he (Lowry) actually came. But, he did come for a specific chunk of time. The Board of Regents office confirmed that, the spokesperson.

Lyle Muller

20:02

There was this December 5th and 6th event, the inaugural, that a lot of reporting was done by a lot of media. You did quite a bit of it, too, and you did a lot of behind-the-scenes reporting on that. But it just sounded like it was in total disarray.

This was, what, December 5th and 6th, and this is from you story that, ran online, in preparation of the Sunday printing of it in The Gazette, where Braun has all these issues. And, it’s on November 25th, which is not too far, and not too… you know, 10 days before the event. They still didn’t have a rental contract for event space at Old Capitol. The catering order was submitted, but too late; they usually need a two-week order, two weeks of notice. No transportation company, what was that, it was unclear that there was a contract yet for getting people there. The… this agreement with Rufo for $50K. The Center for Advancement account established for donations to the center. As of November 24th, Braun worried, had a zero balance.

Was there any kind of response to Braun’s concerns?

Vanessa Miller

21:30

Well, de Castro was concerned that… I think Braun sent that email… that message with all those, that list of concerns to Hensley, and then Hensley forwarded it to de Castro. So, again, de Castro was like, why don’t you just communicate this to me, instead of … to Hensley. So, he was kind of upset with the communications, and he’s like, we’re working on all this.

And honestly, like, in just covering the event straight, before I had requested all these documents, what stood out to me was just that it was a bunch of sessions, that were all very, like, conservative leaning, that sort of ideology. There wasn’t a real balance of views presented at any of these panels. And, that was something that a lot of people were sort of concerned about at the time. And then, we subsequently did some reporting that showed that … there was some debate about whether this was even an open thing, like, whether it was an open event or whether it could be closed. And, that a lot of… everyone that was invited was a Republican lawmaker or a Republican in some way. There wasn’t, like, a lot of balance in terms of the invites, so that was that.

But then, when I saw these emails showing that: you’re right, it was kind of chaos behind the scenes, and that Luciana called it hell to even organize, you know, and that he didn’t want to do it at all because he felt like the board was going to get in the way, it kind of made sense. I was like, okay, this kind of tracks because it was hard… it was hard to tell what was all going on, but that something was a little bit off, you know?

Lyle Muller

23:10

How on earth did you keep all of this straight?

Vanessa Miller

23:13

Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, had a lot of documents going, so I keep a list of, like, potential stories in one section, and a list of different emails. And, I highlight them different colors based on what story they match with, you know, as I’m going through the emails, and keeping record of, what page different things are on. When I called my editor to tell him my plan, I was like, honestly, I think our main story is just that there is this power struggle and confusion over reporting and who has authority at the center and over the center, and so I’m just gonna write that story, and I’m going to get it all out there, and then we can edit it and cut it if we need. And then, if there are pieces that don’t quite fit into that — like Greg Ganske (former U.S. representative from Iowa) thinking there was going to be a huge crowd at his class — that was just kind of a sidebar; we’ll pull some of those things out. And so, that’s kind of how we started with it and organized it.

Lyle Muller

24:22

Yeah, the Ganske thing is interesting, where, what, you found out that 11 people were signed up for a closed class?

Vanessa Miller

24:30

Eleven people in that class, yeah.

Lyle Muller

24:32

Yeah, and he was expecting a public lecture with press coverage, the whole thing. Yeah. And how does something like that get mixed up? Greg Ganske is going to be sympathetic to the center. He’s on the Advisory Board, right?

Vanessa Miller

24:47

Yeah, yeah.

Lyle Muller

24:48

And how did something like that get mixed up with your friends?

Vanessa Miller

24:52

I know. I wondered the same thing, and I just, I did not see, there was not the email that de Castro sent originally inviting him, or maybe he just asked him by phone or something. But, it did seem like he was not clear in the original invite, what he was being invited to do, obviously. …

Ganske, I think maybe he (de Castro) just said, will you come give a lecture, you know, for the Center for Intellectual Freedom? And he said yes but didn’t make clear that it was part of the spring semester course, and it was for the 11 students who had signed up. And so, I just thought it was kind of ironic because he (Ganske) wanted all this coverage in the media, which actually, according to UI policy, could have been allowed if de Caster just allowed us. I didn’t need to register as a non-enrolled student.

And then, de Castro had to sort of break this hard news that, in fact, no media had been invited, and it could not be open to the public, and it was just 11 kids. And l obviously, he (Ganske) was grumpy about that because his email was, like, call me now. So, I don’t know how that call went, obviously, but when they started communicating by email again, Ganske was again asking for signage, so we’ll see. I don’t know.

Lyle Muller

26:07

Yeah. Do you think there’ll be a public, event with him?

Vanessa Miller

26:12

I don’t know with him. He did come and give that lecture, and to my understanding, it was just the students and maybe a few other invited guests or whatever. Definitely not a big crowd, no media coverage or whatever, because the Legislature then did just recently pass this bill requiring students to take courses.

And so, they have to really ramp up the, like, they have to hire faculty, they have to get the infrastructure in place. They’re kind of tabling any plans for courses this coming year, but they could still have events, like, invite speakers to campus or whatever, so it might, something might happen there, this coming year.

Lyle Muller

26:56

Here’s a question from one of our viewers. “In your opinion, how much of the so-called lack of support that de Castro complains about stems from active antipathy and foot-dragging from university officials? And how much is from the fact that the center is a weird Frankenstein-like add-on to the university? It’s not part of any of the colleges, for instance. And then, you know, and related to this is that no one even knows how to accommodate classes that aren’t part of the established bureaucracy.”

Vanessa Miller

27:28

Yeah, I think it’s kind of the latter. I think that it’s just that there is no infrastructure in place for a center at the University of Iowa that does not report to the University of Iowa, but to the Board of Regents. There’s nothing else like it that exists, and so the university is like, you need to get approval from the Board of Regents. But, the Board of Regents doesn’t have the ability to offer courses. It’s not a college, you know, it’s not a university. So, I do think just the fact that nobody really knows what to do with it. I think it’s true, the university doesn’t feel comfortable elevating it to a college status, you know, and including him and the Council of Deans, et cetera. Maybe that will happen, I don’t know, but I think it’s probably more of the latter, that no one quite knows what to do with it, versus actively dragging feet, you know?

Lyle Muller

28:22

We’re at the halfway point of the hour that I allocated for this, and for the people who are watching this, you can have a chance to ask questions as we go along. I see some in the chat, and a couple of them: one deals with the Common Sense Institute.

So, the Common Sense Institute, this conservative group in Iowa that issued a report. And, Republican lawmakers used that when they did this law this year requiring students to take a couple of courses at the center.

Are they still playing a role in the Center for Intellectual Freedom?

Vanessa Miller

29:03

Well, I think that they only were playing a role in that. The director, according to the law, was told that he needed to have a needs assessment, a market needs assessment done, and so he hired the Common Sense Institute to produce that needs assessment report. What I found really interesting — and I think it was kind of hard to connect all these dots in my reporting, so maybe it’s easier to just talk about it — but that report that I talk about de Castro producing, where he says the university has not supported the center at all, it’s like an 18-page report that came out on April 8th, the Common Sense Institute draft came out on April 7th to 9th, depending on when it was circulated, so basically at the exact same time.

And all of the Common Sense Institute’s recommendations really aligned with the problems that de Castro had been citing, that he was running into, like: “I can’t hire faculty.” And then the Common Sense Institute report was like, you need to go ahead and hire faculty, first, to create (the center), kind of supporting everything that de Castro had been saying he needed. Like, you need to have spending authority. And he’s like: I don’t have spending authority. So, it was just kind of an interesting connection between those two that I noticed.

And then, pretty quickly, there was some discussion about whether they (university officials) were trying to suppress that report, because I do think there was concern that, if lawmakers use this report to pass a law that says — because the report suggested that they require students to take courses from the center — then the university is really going to have to figure out how to do this. And, they don’t have a way to do it right now because it (the center) doesn’t have a college, you know what I’m saying? And how are they going to have this gen ed requirement out of a center that doesn’t have any college that it’s attached to. …

I don’t think the Common Sense Institute is still having any role, but that’s the role that it did play back in April.

Lyle Muller

31:13

Well, and then you have Kevin Kragle, who is the provost, taking the position that, since the center is not an academic unit of the University of Iowa, it can’t have these certain powers, such as, de Castro being able to go into deans’ meetings, things like that. He relies on… it’s an independent academic center.

And so, you know, and, you know, that’s what the law says.

Vanessa Miller

31:40

Yeah.

Lyle Muller

31:41

He isn’t wrong.

Vanessa Miller

31:42

He’s not wrong. I mean, that’s what it says, but it’s like, what is that? What does that mean? Who knows? I don’t know, you know?

Lyle Muller

31:50

Do you sense any indication that there’s going to be some efforts to straighten this out? Because one of our viewers points out that the Center for Intellectual Freedom is going to be on the agenda for the July 29th Board of Regents meetings, the next meeting.

Do you sense any kind of effort, or recognition that these issues exist and that they need to be addressed?

Vanessa Miller

32:15

Yeah, yeah, because what’s going to happen next week at the Regents meeting is that they — you know how the Board of Regents has all these different committees, like the Property and Facilities Committee and the Academic Affairs Committee — so they are creating a new standing committee just for this Center for Intellectual Freedom. And, the three people serving on that committee will be the three regents that are on the Advisory Council, so Hensley, and then Robert Kramer, who’s the president of the Board of Regents, and then, Steve Lacey, who’s also a regent. I think that they’re hoping that these people will be who de Castro, or whatever director they hire, will report directly to — so taking Mark Braun out of the situation entirely, although he’s retiring anyway — but whatever executive director of the board, whoever that is, not having them (the center director) report to him (the regents’ executive director), having them report to this council, this committee of regents.

But those regents, somebody’s going to have to really figure out, again, how you offer all these courses, because the Legislative Services Agency did the math on how many students this center is going to have to educate under the new law, requiring students take these courses to graduate. And they mapped it out to be, like, 12,000 students a year through, like, 96 (class) sections. So, it’s like, who’s going to teach all these courses out of what college? How are kids going to sign up for it? There’s a lot of questions to be answered.

Lyle Muller

33:46

State Representative Dave Jacoby, a Democrat from Coralville, is on this call, and he infamously did get an invitation to the December meeting after an awful lot of effort on his part. I’ve unmuted him. Dave, questions or comments that are relative to what we’re talking about here?

Rep. Dave Jacoby, D-Coralville

34:06

Well, I just appreciate the reporting, Vanessa and Lyle, for keeping this very important topic alive. It’s been a debacle from the start. I also sit on the (Iowa House) Higher Ed Committee, and when the interim director showed up to testify — Oh, by the way, don’t use quotation marks. That can be viewed as a threatening move, as I understood from Collin Sawyer (administrative services manager at the Center for Intellectual Freedom) at the university —

But it started off very badly because he was less than honest. It started from the premise that there was a huge demand, must a huge demand for these classes. It was also on the premise where he said it’s absolutely impossible to get tenure at the University of Iowa, which is interesting, because he, himself, got tenure at the University of Iowa.

And then, in the politics side, I think he was, with a bedfellow, with Representative Collins (Taylor Collins, R-Mediapolis) thought that any idea that they came up with would automatically not only become law, but enacted immediately. And, we’re seeing, just, that it’s just not possible to do it that way, and that the demand isn’t there.

As we heard, for those of us that listened in to the Advisory Board meeting, they’re already talking about asking the state for more money. And the startup costs are anywhere from $3 (million) to $5 million, where we’re sitting today. And, they were talking about asking for five to 20 million more over the next 20 years.

Vanessa Miller

35:55

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think they… they’re… I mean, they need money. They’re desperate for it, because, again, they have to hire all these faculty to teach all these courses. And, they’re hoping for donations, maybe revenue from this book. You’re right, they’re gonna’ ask for more money. And I… yeah, I don’t know, I guess we’ll see where it goes. Somebody’s gotta’ provide it. … There is a caveat within the law that says if they want to get additional resources from the university, or any of the universities, then the Board of Regents has to approve that. Sol,I guess there is this option for the board to approve spending UI money, to this hiring, now, for these gen ed courses. …

I mean, I guess it’s gonna have to be this new committee, this new Regents Committee that makes that decision.

Lyle Muller

36:48

Robert Leonard is a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative and a longtime journalist. He’s on the line. Robert?

Robert Leonard

36:56

Yeah, thanks, Lyle. Thanks, Vanessa, for your always outstanding reporting. It’s just fantastic.

A number of things come to mind, most that maybe you’ve all thought of, but if they want to build this out to a college level, that’s just absurd. It’s just absurd. I mean, what other departments would be in it? Am I misunderstanding what’s happening? Are they really saying they’re going to build out a college? What other departments would you have?

Vanessa Miller

37:28

I’m not quite sure. Again, I don’t know that they want to have a bunch of departments as much as they want to have the same degree of power as a college has. But, they also don’t want oversight that a college has. They don’t want to have to hire HR and IT and all these other things, and so we’re… he (de Castro) was even talking in these emails about signing, like, an MOU with a college for some of those services, like HR-type things … so it (the center) didn’t have to hire all those. … I think people are just trying to figure it out.

De Castro did, in the emails he did provide … a report on his recommendations, for how to proceed, and it included that. It had a whole proposal for how it would structure the center’s status within the university.

Robert Leonard

38:31

It wouldn’t be uncommon for a center be in regular meetings like departments are with deans. That wouldn’t be irregular. I understand that. I mean, I know that happens in some places.

Vanessa Miller

38:46

Sure, I mean, yeah, I think he did want a regular seat, though, at the Council of Deans table. Here it is. So … it was called the Proposal to Change the Organization Status of the Center for Intellectual Freedom, and this was dated April 13th. So, this was, like, within a week of that report he issued on … issues facing the center, and of the Common Sense Institute. So, then he had a whole argument, a legal basis, and proposed restructuring, where he would make it on par with, like, the University College or the university library, and then proposed getting administrative services and support through an MOU, like I said, with another college, and proposed a system for registering in the Maui (Made the the University of Iowa information technology services) integration and getting its own code and stuff.

But again, they never did this. Thus far, the university has not done what he proposed.

Robert Leonard

39:43

The other thing that is intriguing to me is the insistence on getting the royalties from a book. There’s very little market for such a book, I would guess. Anybody that’s published an academic book knows you’re not making any money on it. And so I’m wondering if it’s going to be something like, oh, like Ron DeSantis did. His book was a New York Times bestseller before it was even printed, and somebody had already just paid for it. And so, I’m wondering if this is a way to get some cash into the center, to him personally. There’s just… it just doesn’t make any sense otherwise, but thank you, Vanessa.

Vanessa Miller

40:25

Yeah, you’re welcome. I’m not sure on who would be interested in it or not. There’s a lot more debate over:if it sells, who gets the money right now.

Lyle Muller

40:36

Tory Brecht, also a member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, has a question. Tory?

Tory Brecht

40:41

… You know, it’s like they want that cake and eat it too, to be, like, at the level of one of the colleges, or as you say, the University College or the library, but it’s a wholly, politically invented center. And so, I guess what strikes me is the lack of realization that all of this can be undone when and if the political winds change, and so how many people are going to be willing.

You talk about faculty, I’m not going to become a faculty member at somewhere that, with this new governor coming in, potentially, or new legislators or whatever, can be disappeared as quickly as it appeared, right? And then the other question I had is, for the part in the legislation — I know it says it requires the students to take the course, but does it require them to have completed the courses to graduate? Because if it’s no, then nobody’s gonna’ take it anyway. …

Vanessa Miller

42:20

Yeah, so I do have the law pulled up, and it does require the courses to graduate. It requires them to take both, an American history and an American government course to graduate, and this is all undergrads across the whole region system. Ne, it specifies, and then it says in here, that the Cyclone Civic Center at Iowa State and the Center for Civic Education at UNI, they can, like, … shall, designate courses at their respective institutions that satisfy the requirement. But, it specifies that the UI Center for Intellectual Freedom shall be the sole academic unit at the State University of Iowa responsible for offering the courses that satisfy the requirement. So, only the university, only the center can offer these courses that will be required for students to graduate.

Tory Brecht

43:13

Not the history department. You have to have a history, American history class from this outside, non-College of Liberal Arts course, but not from the actual… I mean, that’s an unsustainable model.

Vanessa Miller

43:29

I think that’s kind of what the deal was, that they don’t — again, they need to hire faculty, and then if you go to the other law that talks, that actually created the center, it designates that hiring authority to the director. And while de Castro is the interim director, they don’t actually have a director, and so I think that’s part of what they were like: we need to get a real guy or woman, whoever, in place to run this center so that they could start hiring faculty, because that’s what they’re supposed to do according to the law. …

And then, they tried to do this search, and then they’ve had all these problems even getting a search firm to help, you know, and all this debate the job description and everything. … I think they really just want to get somebody, a director in place, so that that person can handle all this.

Lyle Muller

44:19

Well, let’s talk about that job search because the search is happening without a search firm.Ordinarily, the universities use a firm like Heidrick & Struggles, which was one of the firms that was looked at, so that these firms can sort through resumes and find someone who might be a good fit.

What’s the issue? Is it money, or is it something else?

Vanessa Miller

44:46

It’s not all spelled out. I wish I had more, honestly, but it seemed like there was some debate with Heidrick & Struggles around the fee, that the board thought they wanted to do a fee that was, like, a percentage of the hire, the person who’s hired’s salary, first-year salary, plus a $100,000 retainer fee. And, then, they were like, no, no, we just… it’s just one and the same, and there was some debate about that. But then, they also had, apparently, a huge amount of red lines to the contract that weren’t provided to me, but they talked about them.

And they said things like, I know this is a lot, I know these changes are a lot, take your time. And so the board was, in the end, like, we can’t accept all these changes and all these things that you’re offering. … Then, thy did say, we’re not going to use you, we’re going to go in a different direction. And then they tried to get Parker (Executive Search), which is a pretty well-known search firm, to apply and to meet, and they had an interview and everything with them. That never panned out, and I don’t know why.

And then, the final one that they were trying to get that they were pretty close with, they seemed to have a pretty solid team. … They seemed interested and then they kind of ghosted the board for a while, and then came back and said, you know what, I’m too busy for this search, I can’t do it.

I’ve heard some things off the record that I maybe shouldn’t share, but I don’t know exactly what happened, you know, in terms of them not being able to get a search firm. But, in the end, they decided they needed a director so badly that they’re just going to run this search through the Advisory Council’s Executive Committee, which is nine people, the majority of whom are out-of-state professors.

Lyle Muller

46:34

There are only about 11 minutes left. If people do have a question, just feel free to raise your hands, but what I wanted to ask is the, are there more stories coming? Do you have more to report on?

Vanessa Miller

46:47

Yeah, yeah, there are… I mean, there are a couple of things that I have not … I think we’ve written 400-plus column inches, so I just felt like we needed to put some aside for a while. But, one of the things I’m going to just do a little story on is there was a lot of debate over first-class tickets for some of these people to come into town, what decisions were made around how to spend the money that the council, or that the center has, that $1 million.

Sol kind of looking at some of the budget pieces there is something that I’m going to look into. And then, I’m going to do a little bit more reporting on some of the book stuff, because … I did one story on that book drama before I got the emails, and there’s just so many more, kind of, documenting these demands that de Castro has made of Mark Braun and things. So, those are two pieces I’m going to do going forward.

Lyle Muller

47:51

I’d imagine you’re hearing a lot of rumors, because with something so controversial and people involved, there would be rumors around campus. How hard is it to discern rumors from fact?

Vanessa Miller

48:04

I mean, I sort of take everything in, you know, and hear it, but I would never report anything without having it substantiated through documents, or through, like… I mean, usually documents or on-the-record sources. Like, I’ll take… I… we don’t like to do a lot of anonymous sourcing of things, you know? So, I do take everything that I hear and put it into my bigger picture of how this is shaping out. But, sometimes you just have to wait for things to happen in public before you can report them, even if you sort of knew they were going to happen or are coming, you know? So that’s kind of where I am on that. But, if somebody provides a document for me that substantiates something or is willing to go on the record and share details and attach their name to it and stuff, then I will report that.

But again, yeah, you do hear a lot of stuff, and you just kind of remember it, and look for it, and see if you can substantiate it in any way. And, if you can, then we’ll get it out there. And, if not, then maybe it was just a rumor.

Lyle Muller

49:07

Vanessa, as you’re going through these bits and pieces and trying to separate everything and then put them into a collection of stories, have you given some time to think about what the big takeaway is from what’s going on with the Center for Intellectual Freedom?

Vanessa Miller

49:22

There’s one thing that just seems to kind of stick with me, and it feels like everybody is coming into this from their respective sides with their own biases and their own assumptions about the other person’s biases. So, instead of people coming together, trying to sort of solve a problem to make something work and function, people are coming into it with all this baggage and sort of, like, pent-up anger, you know what I’m saying?

There’s… there’s just… there’s all these, assuming-the-worst sort of thing, and it feels like if we really were trying, if they really were trying to … support intellectual freedom and a diversity of thought, you know, and debate on campus … like, even listening to some of the Advisory Council members make little side comments during their board meeting about how much the university hates them. I’m sure they’ve not really talked with anybody at the University of Iowa, you know what I’m saying? So, there’s just some assumptions and too little discussion, probably. Too little, like, real conversation of people coming together.

Lyle Muller

50:48

So there are a lot of open-ended questions, such as how legislation can get tweaked. How, what’s going to happen in the fall? Are people going to … are people enrolling? And how does all of that play out?

How will you juggle all of that with some of the other duties that you have?

Vanessa Miller

51:07

Yeah, we’ll be watching, obviously. In terms of this fall, because of the new mandate, it doesn’t actually take effect until July of 2028, so they have a couple years, so there won’t be any courses this next year, because they’re going to be trying to stand up the center by hiring a director, and then hiring faculty. So I think that will honestly be one of the most interesting things, is to see who they hire as this director, and then to see who the director hires in terms of its faculty to teach these courses, because that’s … going to come under a lot of scrutiny in terms of these people, and their background and their ideology and all of that, because then they have to… those people are in charge of creating the curriculum, that they’re going to be teaching 12,000 students a year, you know, and they’re going to be required to take to graduate, so it’s like: what are they even going to be teaching? And who’s going to be teaching it? I mean, all of that is going to happen within the next year before the courses are even offered, you know? So that’s going to be something I’m watching carefully.

Lyle Muller

52:09

Vanessa, I want to thank you here for being here and talking with us. As we bring this to a close, Robert Leonard has a question, and I’m trying to find him.

Yeah. There you are, Robert. You’re unmuted.

Robert Leonard

52:24

Yeah, a couple of points. One, as it’s set up with all those students, this is going to collapse under its own weight.

It has to. There’s not the infrastructure there. It’s going to collapse, and if it doesn’t, by some odd means, an organized student body could shut it down very quickly.

Vanessa Miller

52:44

Well, I think that that is a fear that they have. I mean, they’ve sort of vocalized that. Richard Lowry has said that during one of the advisory council meetings, like, this is a ton of stuff we gotta’ get going in terms for this center to succeed. And so, they just want to… they want to get moving as fast as possible, and I think that’s the urgency around getting a director hired.

But again, well, I guess we’ll just have to see. I mean, they’re going to need… they are going to need university support, and they are going to need this Board of Regents Committee to function well.

Robert Leonard

53:21

Thank you.

Vanessa Miller

53:22

Yeah.

Lyle Muller

53:23

Thank you, Vanessa. I think that’s where we’ll leave it.

Vanessa Miller

53:26

Alright.

Lyle Muller

53:27

Thank you for your reporting, and for being here and being willing to talk with us. It’s been a pleasure.

Vanessa Miller

53:37

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me, Lyle, I appreciate it.

Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent stories from its roster of Iowa’s finest writers in this week’s summary. And go here to learn about the new Iowa Emerging Journalist Corps.

Lyle Muller Doesn't Have a Fancy Column Title is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Proceeds from paid subscriptions support the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Emerging Journalist Corps.

Several of the Midwest’s Major League sports teams have community-building philanthropies and donate raffle items, like tickets and team memorabilia, to the Iowa Children’s Museum. The museum uses the items as giveaways in major fundraising events, like the winter Celebrate Play Gala and spring Iowa Children’s Open golf tournament.

This podcast brings to life the people interviewed for the written piece, “Major league sports hits homerun for Iowa Children’s Museum.” Enjoy hearing from them.

Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary.

ORDER HERE. You also may purchase the book at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Books and Ice Cube Press.

This podcast also appeared at the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Emerging Journalist Corps website. Go here to learn more about this effort to showcase reporting by young Iowans.

Avery Dykstra, a University of Northern Iowa student in her first year of college but with sophomore standing, felt a strong motivation for writing an Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Emerging Journalist Corps story about energy drinks.

“In my generation, I see a lot of my friends go from coffee to energy drinks a lot lately,” she said in a podcast accompanying her story, which you can read at this link. “On campus, especially, it’s a lot of culture. If one friend wants to grab a drink, with another its, ‘me, too.’”

Dykstra from Urbandale, wrote in her story:

Catered to the younger generation with bright colors and celebrity promotions, energy drink sales are surging. Even with unpleasant side effects — ranging from sleeplessness, anxiety spikes, heart problems and dehydration — demand continues to grow.

She goes into detail in this short interview.

Avery Dykstra is a University of Northern Iowa sophomore from Urbandale, Iowa. Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and leads the Emerging Journalist Corps. Check out the corps here and some of then Iowa Writers’ Collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary.

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative Emerging Journalist Corps showcases the work of student journalists selected to participate in the reporting project. The program gives aspiring reporters something increasingly difficult to find in today’s media environment: hands-on mentorship, real-world reporting experience and a public platform for their work.

The following is a transcript of this podcast, if you want to read along. Minor edits — such as removing repeated words, ums and the like — were made but the words printed are verbatim.

Muller: First of all, thank you for doing this. I want to get an idea of how the idea for the suspension came about and the reasons behind it, and then what you hope to accomplish, or what the Heartlanders hope to accomplish during that year.

Goetz: Yeah. So as far as how it came about, our owner told me in early January that he was going to ask our ECHL Board of Governors, which is a group of all the presidents and owners for every team across the league, to potentially let us consider this voluntary suspension of operations for next season. And kind of where I believe it came from is when, when he bought the team in July of 2023, I wouldn’t say that it was in a terrible spot. But certainly, when you buy a team three months before the season is going to start there’s not a whole lot of time to say, ‘let’s figure out what we have here, and then let’s build it the right way, which, when you see teams come into the league like New Mexico down in Albuquerque, is going to have a team that starts next fall. They’ve been operating for a year already.

READ THE STORY HERE

So for a place that has an 18-month runway versus a three-month runway, and part of that runway is clearing out the issues that got left behind from the previous owner, which was lots of unpaid bills, people in the community that didn’t want to work with us because, even though it was a different ownership group, it’s still the same team name. So in their mind, you stiffed us on money. We’re not going to work with you. So there was a lot of, like, repairing and rebuilding. To do that probably took the better part of that first season. And then, at the end of the first season, we did some reorganization. And we saw lots of progress last season in terms of revenue growth, fan growth, corporate partnership growth, our social media following, the marketing that we were doing, and so we saw some good growth.

And then halfway through this season, that growth had kind of stalled out. It certainly hadn’t regressed but it hadn’t continued to grow in the exponential fashion that we had anticipated. So what our owner wanted to do is, it’s expensive to own a team … what he wants to do right now is sort of put pause on things, and then let’s reorganize in terms of local and minority investment. He’s the sole owner of the team, which is a rarity. He’s not the only one in our league, but it’s very rare that there’s not a group of people that do that. And in a lot of other markets, when you have local businesses that are also investors, they’ve got a different interest in making sure that they’re marketing us as well, that they’re using tickets as a way to drive business for them.

And so our owner is looking to find additional investment that sort of takes some of the lift off of just the front office staff and coaches to market, to sell tickets, to get people excited about it.

Muller: You just made the playoffs last year.

Goetz: We did. Yeah.

Muller: Did that help?

Goetz: What’s really interesting is that in our league, and this is based off of data that we had — the University of Iowa, Tippie College of Business has a data analytics program and so we had a capstone course do a project for us — that in our league, winning and losing really doesn’t impact attendance. It’s there. There are people that will argue that — these are the numbers that were based on four years here, as well as attendance numbers and records across the ECHL.

And so to kind of put that into a little more perspective, I go to two Cedar Rapids Kernels games a year. I have no idea who they’re playing. I have no idea if they’re better than the team they’re playing. I have no idea if they even won the last time I was there. I’m there to have a good time. And that’s what minor league sports is by and large. So, there are certainly a group of fans that winning and losing matters to them but that’s more about happiness than it is somebody who’s not a fan making a decision to come to a game or not. So certainly, there’s a lot of good feelings and joviality around that. But, we saw a little bit of an increase in season ticket holders but I attribute that to some changes we had made in the season ticket holder packages. Previously we just had one season ticket. And what we did was, we created a lower tier and an upper tier with differing benefits. And we saw most of our growth, which was about 40 season ticket holders, was from a group of people that hadn’t bought season tickets, that bought in at this new no-frills kind of: just give me the ticket kind of package. And so to get back to your answer, the playoffs are helpful in some regard, but it certainly isn’t something that’s a huge jumping off point, if it’s not something that’s already ingrained in the community.

Muller: So, it sounds like what you’re talking about here is a loyalty to just the program for whatever reason. Is that, right?

Goetz: Well, we certainly have people that are incredible. We’ve got an amazing season ticket holder base, amazing in terms of, like, the support that they give and the showing up. It’s hard for me to do something five times a year and we have people that are doing this 36 times a year. And when we made the playoffs, they came to all three home games. So they’re doing 39 times a year.

They’re making a choice to come and support what we’re doing in the players and the coaches, which is really great. It’s building additional, instead of loyalty, I would maybe say affinity for some of the people who maybe are not hockey enthusiasts. But is this something that you can do a couple times a year because you enjoy it? It’s a family night out instead of going to a movie or going bowling or down to a high school sporting event. Is this something that we can capture more affinity from people? And we made some progress in that certainly. I could bore you with numbers all day long, if you wanted to, but the number of people who come to a game and then come back for a second or third game has almost doubled in the last two years. And that’s a really good sign. But there’s not enough new people getting to a game to fall in love with it, and that’s really where I think we’ve not been able to hit the mark. The people who are here love it and they’re enjoying it probably more and more. The people who have experienced it, are enjoying it and coming back more often, but not quite to the level of — you know, there’s a team in our league has a 5,000 season ticket holder base. (Savannah Ghost Pirates) We have a 5,000-seat arena. That would be lovely if we had that scenario. But it’s it’s not where we are right now. And in our attempts to grow towards that, we just haven’t made the progress that was necessary. So, our owner wants to take a pause, regroup and get some get some additional investment, be that financial, be it relationships. There needs to be some more investment from people locally to make sure that we’ve got the resources and the partnerships to move forward in a way that’s going to be more successful for us moving forward.

Muller: Other teams have done this and come back.

Goetz: That’s my understanding, yeah.

Muller: One thing I’ve been wondering about is just how hard it is to compete with the University of Iowa. For example, you came off a three-day weekend visit, and at that time the Iowa Hawkeyes were in the NCAA basketball tournament. Iowa State was, too, for people want to watch on television. But Iowa was in the men’s tournament, there was an expectation the women might have been there as well.

Goetz: Yeah.

Muller: How easy is it to compete with that?

Goetz: I would say not just the University of Iowa. I’m good friends with André Perry, who’s the executive director over at Hancher, and we were having a conversation a couple weeks ago that: one of the things that’s amazing about living in this community is that there’s, like, 19 different things that you could do every day. And that’s fantastic as a person who lives here but as somebody who’s trying to get people to forget about the other 18, that’s an additional challenge that, maybe, other markets don’t see the same way that we see. And I’m certainly not saying there the other markets that have ECHL franchises don’t have competition either but the University of Iowa is certainly one that’s really, really well ingrained, not just locally, but in the state.

And so, whether that’s men’s basketball, women’s basketball, wrestling, football — which, the first third of our season happens during football season — high school football on Friday nights in the fall, the NFL on Sundays. there’s just so many different other opportunities, And so, one, trying to cut through the noise to make sure that people know that we’re available, because our our PR and marketing machine is as hard as our staff works at it. We don’t have the resources or the reach right now that a University of Iowa has so we don’t get the news coverage that they do. So, I would hate to say that it’s insurmountable but it is a reality of where we are right now, and we’ve got to find ways to make our make ourselves more visible and more attractive for people to say yes to once they see us.

Muller: What happens with the affiliation with Minnesota Wild during the suspension?

Goetz: The Minnesota Wild, we alerted them shortly before the announcement came out and, so, I don’t know what their plans are. Certainly they’re going to need an affiliate in the ECHL. So my assumption, which is not based in fact but my assumption, is that they’re going to look for a team to be an affiliate. And my hope is that they do that on a one-year basis because affiliation agreements across the league range from: some of them are one year, some of them are two years, some of them are three years. Just completely up to what the NHL franchise wants to do. And so there, I think, seven or eight teams in our league that their affiliation agreements come up for renewal this year anyway so there might be a reshuffling to start with. But my hope is that the Minnesota Wild will just do a one-year agreement with somebody and then, if we’re able to come back in ‘27-’28, that we would resign again as a three-year agreement.

Muller: That affiliation seems to be a natural for this area, with the Iowa Wild in Des Moines, and not so much of a drive to St Paul to go to a hockey game. And I noticed that, you know, that’s been a good affiliation for, say, the to Cedar Rapids Kernels with the (Minnesota) Twins, that kind of cross connection. Talk a little bit, would you please, about just the connecting with the community? Because there’s this idea of a team like this that can actually help connect to the community. When you think of the Reds, you think of Cincinnati, and the Cardinals clearly big in St Louis, arguments in Chicago about their communities.

What about Coralville and Iowa City?

Goetz: Yeah, it’s something that we want people to have: that same kind of connection to knowing, of course, that the University of Iowa is always going to be that primary connection for people when they think of the Iowa City, Coralville, the North Liberty Tiffin area. But it has been an area of emphasis for us that, when I came in, I had seen six hockey games in my entire life. So this wasn’t like, ‘I love hockey, can’t wait to do this.’ This was, ‘I think there’s a lot of potential to do great for the community that I’ve lived in for 17 years.’ It’s 19 years now, but 17 at the time that I wanted to make this a community asset.

I wanted it to be valued and just a beloved institution here. So some of the things that we did to try and make that happen is: you go visit schools and you read to children; where, if there was a parade, we were in it. We partner with, oh gosh, it’s well over 100 different nonprofit agencies in and around our community to be able to provide them with fundraising opportunities, whether that’s through tickets through our nonprofit game program, which is sponsored by Scheels. And so, that nonprofit game, they get an in-game commercial, or they get a talk-live on the mic about what their cause is. And then, they get to sell the chuck bucks (foam rubber pucks thrown onto the ice for prizes) and then they make money off of what they sell there. So we’ve really tried to be active in a lot of different community ways.

And additionally, getting in with the University of Iowa, which is maybe the thing that I’m most proud of. I had mentioned earlier, we did a project with the Tippie College of Business data analytics program. But we’ve done, we’ve had three to five classes do projects for us every semester for the past three years. And so there’s, students getting actionable, real world experience in the projects that they’re doing.

Muller: What kind of projects?

Goetz: So we’ve done marketing projects. We’ve had analytics projects. There’s a University of Iowa event management certificate program that: they help us with events that we do. The sport rec management program has had a variety of experiential classes that they’ve put together. One of them is helping us with our Best Field Trip Ever Game, which, they bring a class of students out to help make sure that we’re delivering, I’ll call it, customer service. We’re probably more corralling to, when you’ve got 23-hundred (2,300) fifth graders there’s only so many teachers. So, helping people get to and from where they’re going, acting as de facto chaperones helping make that experience great for people. S,o we’ve touched in a couple different areas across campus. And the thing that’s even more important to me than the classes are that, at present, we have 18 full-time staff members and we have 28 University of Iowa student interns that are getting actual experience and doing something that they want to do, whether that’s in marketing analytics, ticket sales, corporate partnerships, hockey operations, video equipment, social media. If there’s an opportunity that we can provide to help people take a step in their career. We’ve been, I think, exemplary in that for the past couple years.

Muller: The event planning program, I’ve been involved with that in a few projects with nonprofits that I’ve been involved with…

Goetz: They do great work.

Muller: They do, and they’re a great resource. And there always seem to be some really sharp, sharp kids in there who come up with some idea that I hadn’t thought of.

Goetz: Yeah, so much talent in the University of Iowa. It’s not just that those internships and class projects aren’t just doing busy work for us, than they’ve they’re providing value for us and for the students.

Muller: Are you worried about losing relationships during the year?

Goetz: Well, I mean, I think that’s a natural concern. What my hope is, is that the people that loved us and had relationships with us saw the value in those things and that, if we’re able to come back, they’ll want to come right back into the fold on that because it does drive value for them. … We use the term corporate partnerships instead of corporate sponsorships becaus,e in my mind, sponsorship is you pay me money, I perform a task, and then we’re done. And a partnership is, are we meeting the goals that you have? Like, yes, you can give me money for a Dash report, you can give me money to run a video. But at the end of the day, are we actually helping you achieve something in your business or your organization? And I think we’ve done a really nice job. Certainly not perfect, but I think we’ve done a really nice job over the past couple seasons at changing that narrative and there are partners that, what we do for them changes throughout the course of the season based on the changing needs that they have for the new opportunities that maybe we dream up as the season goes along. So my hope is that the people that we have relationships with see the value and that are are waiting with open arms for us to be able to come back.

Muller: Do you know what comes next after the season ends? What’s this next year going to look like for the Heartlanders?

Goetz: Most of the work is going to be done by our owner. As I mentioned … a lot of this is going to be about building the investment, which is financial. But there’s also relationship capital that needs to be in this as well. So, that’s what the majority of the work is. And, unfortunately, there won’t be very many staff that are retained here. And, you know, as far as exactly what the workload looks like for the people that will stay, that kind of remains to be seen. But my hope is that the majority of our staff, instead of waiting for a year, finds something that continues their career somewhere and, if the situation arises, that they can come back.

You know, it would be great to have a lot of them come back. But also, I think, we’re just like on the hockey side of things. This is a developmental league. Nobody’s career goal is to play double-A hockey. They all want something higher. And that’s the same way for most of the staff that we have, is that they want to grow and expand in their career and develop. And, certainly, I’m doing what I can right now to connect them with whatever those next steps could look like. So, my hope is that most of them find other jobs in the next couple weeks and can continue in their careers and, maybe, a higher growth area than what would just be hanging around here, potentially.

Muller: Do you stay with the company? Or do you know?

Goetz: So, I have a contract that that is going to come up in June and, at this point in time, I’m not sure what my future looks like after that. A lot of this is dependent upon the progress that gets made by our owner and what he needs — boots on the ground — because he’s over in West Des Moines. He also owns the Des Moines Buccaneers. And so, from that perspective, if there’s a role here to continue, I would love to keep building this. But I’ve got to be prepared, that there may not be a role for me with the Heartlanders moving forward as well.

Muller: And the Buccaneers is a junior team.

Goetz: Yep. So they’re USHL, which is the same league that the (Cedar Rapids junior league) RoughRiders are in. And that’s the same league for the Dubuque Fighting Saints and the Waterloo Blackhawks.

Muller: Speaking of that, I went to a lot of the Cedar Rapids Rough Riders games, and the first game that I came to for the Iowa Heartlanders — the level of skill is incredibly noticeable with the way they pass and the way they just work that ice. Those are really good hockey players, and they’re playing double A hockey.

Goetz: Yeah, yeah, I’m three years in, I still marvel at: there’s a lot of things that they do that I don’t know that at any point in time in my life I would have been able to do once. And they do it regularly,and they do it on skates. And it’s just so impressive. And you know, when you show up junior hockey, those are 16- to 20-year-old young men that are trying to get college scholarships. And our guys have played college or the highest level of amateur Canadian hockey. And so these are professional athletes. And there is a big difference between a high school-age kid and what. If you think about basketball, the best high school basketball player can be great. But in the NBA environment, that’s not the same

Muller: Are the Heartlander players on a one-year contract?

Goetz: Yeah.

Muller: Do they have some sort of off ramp?

Goetz: Yep. So every player in the ECHL, you just have one year contracts. There’s no long-term contract available. So I know a lot of our — I shouldn’t say a lot — there’s probably eight to 12 of our players that really want to stay here. They’d hope this would be, as long as they’re in the ECHL, this is the place they wanted to be. And there are some other players that, maybe this was for them, or they’re just looking to play somewhere else. But, hopefully, everybody gets a chance to play next year somewhere. There’ll be the same number of spots in the league. As I mentioned, the New Mexico Goatheads are coming in. And so, with us taking a pause, it’s the same number of roster spots. So, from a player perspective, it’s the same competitive position that it would have been coming into this season.

Muller: When you talk about somebody who likes being here, that gets back to that sense of community, it seems. What is it about that relationship? Do you know why they were able to connect here?

Goetz: Yeah, well, everybody’s got their own reasons but the last season went after the playoffs. When our head coach took a job with the Des Moines Buccaneers I had called all of the players and said, “hey, I don’t know what who the next coach is going to be. We’re starting the process, but I’m happy to talk to you about anything that I know that’s happening, and I’d love for you to stay here if you want to stay here.” And almost to a person, what they said was this: you don’t know that it exists until you show up here. And it’s a beautiful community. It’s a caring community. There’s a lot of amenities and things to do. Our players who have wives or girlfriends or kids, they’ve moved here, too, and they love it.

And I just, I just think it’s, I don’t want to say quaint because that makes it sound, you know, like a main street kind of town, but there’s so many great things to do. There’s great restaurants. People are friendly and welcoming. It feels good to be here. It’s easy to get around. And more so than anything, it’s the — certainly I’m not casting aspersions on other teams in our league — but hearing players say when I’m here people care about me as a person, I’m not just a tradable asset that the second I upset somebody, I’m on the chopping block. And so, I think, that’s not necessarily something that we focus on, but being people who live here, that’s just part of our nature, is that we should be taking care of other people and making them feel valued and welcome. And that’s something that’s been very evident since I moved here in 2007. That’s just what this community does. It really embraces everybody and wants to try and give them a great place to exist and thrive. And that’s something I think our players have have really caught on to quite quickly.

Muller: What is the final message that you would like people to know about the Iowa Heartlanders, what the future could be and how it couldn’t connect with the Coralville-Iowa City area?

Goetz: Yeah. Oh, man, you’re trying to sum it all up and a closing statement is hard.

I think the thing that I’ve been sharing with people is, like, it’s really easy right now to say, you know, they’re not coming back, this is the end. And that might be the case. It might not be. But I would ask people to have hope and optimism about it. And that, when the day comes that there’s an announcement that we’re going to start playing hockey again in ‘27-’28, for anybody who feels a sense of sadness or remorse or loss or anger or any non-positive emotion, if you’re feeling that right now, when it comes time for us to be able to play again I hope that you remember that.

And that turns into, for some people, an equivalent commitment. For other people, more of a commitment to support the Iowa Heartlanders in the future. …Just finding additional investment isn’t going to change the fact that we still need people to come and support it and talk about it. News outlets to cover it for it to be valuable. The community has to be valuable to the community, and the community has to show up and say that it has value. And they’ve got to talk about it like it has value. And I hope, my hope, is that people continue to talk about it after the season is done here and not just forget about it until there might be a press release in the next month to nine months.

Muller: Will merch still be available?

Goetz: We’re not purchasing any new merchandise right now but we do have merchandise in our team store, which is conveniently 40% off right now. … We have seen quite a bit of uptick in people buying stuff in the last, it’s been three weeks, three-and-a-half weeks, since the announcement. There are people that do want the merchandise and we still have some available. So, certainly come out and get that, whether it’s as a memento or something, to to wear as a show of support over the next seaso, while we’re trying to put things together to come back.

Muller: Matt, thanks for taking time out for me. I really appreciate it.

Lyle Muller is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Check out some of the collaborative’s most recent reporting in this week’s summary.

Join us April 23 and 24 in Storm Lake

The Iowa Writers’ Collaborative appreciates its paid subscribers — and so do I — so we’re inviting you to our spring get-together. We’ll exchange ideas about what makes good writing for a wide audience on this platform. There also will be music and, we expect, some laughs and good times Thursday evening in Storm Lake and Friday night at Byron’s “listening room” in Pomeroy.

For details, fill out the RSVP form:

The truth took a big hit in the year we just passed into the rearview mirror, so much so that PolitiFact, which had awarded — if you want to call it that — a Lie of the Year award since 2009, named 2025 The Year of Lies. Many of the falsehoods in 2025 reached the fact-checking news organization’s threshold for being significant: they were repeated often and demonstrably false and consequential.

Being consequential was key to these big lies because they negatively affected the lives of several people.

PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Katie Sanders took time to talk about that in this video podcast. We spoke on Dec. 30.

Lyle: As you point out in a number of articles at Politifact, the last decade has been a bit of a firehose for falsities, and I want to talk to you at the end about 2026, especially with AI and the ability to produce falsehoods in a very short period of time with perhaps the imagination of a person being the only gate.

Katie: Sure.

Lyle: Let’s start with the Year of the Lies. How did that all come about?

Katie: Well, we went about choosing our Lie of the Year the way we usually do. I round up a list of what I think stood out in terms of the most egregious falsehoods of the year, the most ridiculous, but also the ones that like weren’t just one-offs. They had real significance.

So we had a pretty long list — longer than usual — but we’ve had long lists in the past. I mean, we all were there for the 2024 campaign and COVID, and you know, we’ve had a tumultuous decade, as I said in the column. So that part wasn’t unusual. But, when we were talking about how to isolate one, both with our staff just to have the discussion, and then with our leadership at Poynter and Politifact who decide by the year, we just felt it was, I think the word is insufficient, to declare one as more significant and more impactful than all the others because there were just so many strong candidates in the running. And so, it felt like a good time to step back from our annual exercise and try to make a different point about why lies are harmful and why we do this. And, that’s because lies can harm real people. So, we just thought it was time to shake it up because of the moment we’re in is not a moment, it’s an era, and we have to try to get people to care about it.

Lyle: Well, few things can really make you feel good about a year than a story that starts with: “The concept of truth feels particularly bleak in 2025. Government leaders deploy up-is-down narratives at an exhausting clip. Online worlds drip with artificial intelligence-generated slop that incites rage. Chatbots answer questions with fabricated information, and the government folds it into a report card on America’s health.”

And, it seems like that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as problems that have existed with keeping a focus on what really is a fact.

Katie: Those are all examples from 2025. And, like you said, those are just the items that I linked to in the sentences that are just the tip of the iceberg. … It was day after day. Just the steady drumbeat of what you’re seeing with your own eyes is not real, and what we were caught doing we didn’t do. I guess they did go back and change the MAHA report (Make Our Children Healthy Again) that was informed by some AI hallucinations.

Thank you for mentioning the top of the column, because … that was almost the easiest part to write, because it was, just as an observer, looking out for facts every day, that’s that’s how it felt. It felt like an assault on every front.

“LIE OF THE YEAR” STARTED WITH SARAH PALIN

Lyle: This is the 17th year that you would have been looking at lie of the year. Can you take us through a little bit of a history about lie of the year?

Katie: Sure. It predates me in my time at Politifact. It started in 2009. We were, the country was in the throes of a vigorous healthcare debate. … The first Lie of the Year went to Sarah Palin’s claim that the Affordable Care Act had death panels, and that was just, I think, very memorable choice. Again, I wasn’t there until a few years later … The Tampa Bay Times at the time had this idea to step back and kind of have a marketing moment. And so, somebody thought of the term Lie of the Year, and they decided to make it an annual tradition to single out a falsehood that really had a lot to teach us about the year that that we had in political rhetoric.

Lyle: … Who’s responsible for all of these lies, because it would be easy to say the last 10 years Donald Trump. But, that’s too easy of an answer, isn’t it?

Katie: It is, yes. I don’t want to diminish Trump’s role in shaping the, you know, the nature of our discourse. He … has a penchant for flouting the facts, not letting facts get in the way of a talking point, or many talking points that he likes. No politician has earned the Lie of the Year accolade more than Donald Trump. He’s either won the award outright or shared in it several times since the political scene.

Lyle: Yeah, he certainly is good at understanding that a lie is useful.

Katie: He’s very good at it. But like I said, the roots of Lie of the Year go back to 2009 so the lying predated Donald Trump. It will come after him as well but he just has a very different relationship to it. But, I think that the point that we also make in the column this year — and in the approach — is that our dire information ecosystem isn’t entirely directed or dependent on Donald Trump as president. You mentioned that we were going to talk about generative AI and how you can, you can invent a viral, convincing falsehood with sophisticated AI — generated imagery and visuals and video like that. You don’t have to be an expert in cutting video or illustration or anything like that.

So, we’re going to run into a new front in fake news, to kind of use an old term. And the column makes the point that, you know, we may not have arrived at our … moment of catastrophe with AI, where something so fake has gone so viral and caused this destruction. I feel like that’s been something we’ve heard researchers and journalists warn about for many years now with the rise of deep fake technology, but it did feel in 2025 that we are closer than ever. And, there are several little moments that I talk about in the column. But, there are many, many more examples behind it that show how people on both sides of the political aisle share responsibility for identifying fake stuff online. And, we’re very bad at it collectively. We’re still very bad at it. We have not developed the media literacy skills that help us discern and stop and pause before taking something online at face value. There are a lot of innocuous examples that we kind of cover day to day at PolitiFact.

I argue they’re seemingly innocuous: … older Americans at a facility dressed up in funny Halloween costumes that got so many of my friends because it looked so hyper-realistic. It might have gotten me at first too, because I’m, you know, scrolling Instagram like everyone else, time to time. But I look back at that moment and think that that could have been something else that generated a positive response of people saying, “Oh, this is so funny. Share it.” What if it generated different response but it was entirely fabricated. That’s where I get really uncomfortable and kind of fearful about what’s next in 2026 if we don’t become a bit more sophisticated.

Lyle: I want to talk about some of the examples that you have in your column. But first, it’s really important to understand the three criteria that PolitiFact looks at for the Lie of the Year, or the Year of the Lies. And, one of them is consequences. Can you take us through the criteria and how you weighed the things that were spoken that weren’t true?

LIES’ CONSEQUENCES CARRY WEIGHT

Katie: Well, consequences is probably the most important element of this year’s Year of the Lies. I felt like that was the word in the writing and editing of the piece and the associated pieces about humans that were affected by false talking points. That really captured our interest the most this year, was illustrating the consequences. … Usually we will look at the top kind of options for Lie of the Year, we will, our very small committee of about three people, will kind of argue what we think it should be. And, we kind of decide: Yeah, okay, this makes the most sense because it speaks to the criteria of being significant. It’s not going to surprise everyone. Like, everyone knows this one, it was prominent and it had significant consequences. And, we’ve weighed consequences in the past with our selection of COVID-19 falsehoods and denials and downplay or Jan. 6 downplay and denials. But this year, it just didn’t feel like it was enough to kind of retrace the anatomy of the talking point and talk to experts about what this says about our misinformation ecosystem.

I’ve written that story or edited that story many times now, and it just felt like we should really focus on one of the key elements of this selection, which is consequences. So we ended up doing a more ambitious package of multiple stories by multiple reporters, which was hard at the moment, but, you know, felt really good once we started rolling it out day after day and giving our readers something new to chew on each day.

Lyle: And those criteria: repeated often, demonstrably false and perhaps above all, consequential. And so, one of the consequential items that you had was a farmer in North Dakota, which would be of interest in Iowa as well — a farmer who had grain in, ready to be sold to an international buyer, and the Trump tariffs and foreign policy come into play. Do you remember that one at all, that farmer?

Katie: Sure. I remember Randy Richards. I didn’t interview him. My colleague, senior correspondent, Amy Sherman, did. …We weren’t examining the impact of tariffs as policy. That wasn’t the point but it was the framing of the tariff policy.

So, Donald Trump sold this, the idea of tariffs, as being a tax on foreign countries that would make Americans, especially farmers, richer. So we went out to find a farmer, to find their experience, and we found multiple farmers across multiple states who had said in the media in various ways that this was not how it was working out. And so, Randy Richards was willing to talk to us. He was willing to be on video with us, which was one of our important criteria for select for voices to highlight. We wanted to do videos in the package. So Randy was comfortable with that.

But we don’t cover the soybean industry day in, day out, at PolitiFact so we had a lot to learn about how these talking points hit Randy Richards during the campaign when Trump was arguing to retake the White House. And, then we got his reaction as he heard Trump from the inauguration on say: this is how the tariffs are going to work, and it’s going to be great for farmers, and they should go out and buy lots of equipment, and, you know, prepare to make even more, make even more soybeans, or whatever the product is.

I think the memorable quote from Randy Richards was, “that’s about as far from the truth as you can get,” when he heard Trump’s rhetoric kind of played back to him, because that had just not been his experience.

He and many of his peers were forced to confront the year with a lot of uncertainty. I think that was the dominant feeling for them: economic uncertainty. An then, just trying to follow the political tea leaves as China retaliated from Trump’s tariffs. That really hurt them. And, it was something that economists and trade groups had warned about for a very long time. But the Trump administration, not just Trump but his ag secretary and other economic officials said: it’s going to be great, money will come pouring in. And what the experience shows is that that did not happen for farmers, and it’s not happened off the the wallets of foreign entities. It was from Americans.

Lyle: So, for Randy Richards, that affected his lively income. But you also have in the story the reference of Dr. Mona Amin … a pediatrician in Florida who gets out. And, now we’re talking about health as well as a livelihood. Can you expand a little bit about that?

Katie: Sure, I think we have a pretty rich tradition of covering health claims, both health claims that go viral online and also health claims that are coming from our elected leaders or the people seeking office.

Lyle: A health claim was a Lie of the Year two years ago.

Katie: So, that’s what I’m backing into. We had a lot of health policy winners from the Affordable Care Act debates back in the day, and then in 2020 we named COVID-19 claims en masse the Lie of the Year.

And then in 2023, we named the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presidential campaign as the winner of the Lie of the Year for the misstatements and conspiracy theories that he was promoting as part of his campaign. It was with that kind of like background knowledge that we approached 2025 and the new administration over health and human services that had a dizzying amount of health policy changes. And, those have real trickle down effects and cause real friction in the doctor’s office between patient and doctor, patient and provider.

We’re based here in Florida, where there’s there’s even more kind of chaos, with our state leaders embracing this movement from the federal government and taking it even further in terms of changing up the vaccine schedule. And so, we we thought about parents, and we thought about providers who were dealing with the consequences of this harmful speech and are putting themselves in moments of tension with patients who are hearing one thing from the President of the United States about something like Tylenol and it’s appropriate use for people who are pregnant, and then hearing another thing from their doctor. We wanted to learn what is that like? And, we worked really hard to find a doctor who is comfortable talking about this on the record, because a lot of people are are not willing to do that to jeopardize their their employment.

We found Dr. Amin because she is based in South Florida but she’s also very comfortable, she’s more outspoken. She has her own social media account that is very successful, where she talks to parents directly about things that she was hearing from the federal government. And, she opened up about just how exhausting it is to be attending a school event for your child and then get all these texts from your colleagues in the field, and just looking down your phone and being like, what now? Like, what do I have to deal with now? Because it just complicates that relationship and adds a lot of stress at a moment at a very stressful time for new parents.

IMMIGRATION RHETORIC FULL OF LIES

Lyle: Then you talk about immigration in Iowa, I’ve been covering immigration, and there are meat packing plants here, a farm economy with farm workers. In Nebraska, nearby, a town is suffering with problems at the Tyson plant and raids. Do you have any idea? Can you recall over the year how many lies that PolitiFact investigated that were related to immigration?

Katie: I couldn’t tell you the lies, and that’s because we only name Lie of the Year once a year. I will say we covered 150 plus immigration stories or explainers, I should say fact checks or like explainers, that didn’t have a rating, and that’s a that’s a very steady commitment to a topic that is generating non-stop news. And so I think an immigration story felt very appropriate in 2025, say the least, and I think it’s something we had our eye on coming out of the 2024 campaign.

Trump had promised to launch the largest deportation effort in history while, at the same time, prioritizing violent criminals who did all manner of things that he described in every campaign stop. Along the way, or towards the end, as he was taking office, journalists started to ask Trump and other officials, like, how are you going to do that? What about people who are just in the country unlawfully? Where does that leave them? And you started to see the dissonance. And so, it wasn’t something that officials led with as they talked about their successful raids here or there, or crackdowns in cities across the country. They always trumpet the violent criminals, and they did find and have deported some violent criminals along the way.

But, I think doing this at the end of the year really gave us and many other outlets who have reported on the worst of the worst narrative, the data from the Department of Homeland Security, itself, to show that, far and away, most people being detained have no criminal convictions on their record, which is so far and away from the headlines of their, the news releases of their operations in the U.S. this year, and certainly miles away from how it was described on the campaign.

So, our third story about immigration and the worst of the worst narrative was, for me, a really important one for us to do. It was just something that also felt like there’s a new story, a new example every day, if not multiple times a day, in your own newsfeed, of that talking point ringing hollow.

Lyle: And we have seen this in Iowa, where the consequences of that have been huge, with people being taken out of their communities, sent to Guatemala, or wherever it is that they get sent, after they’ve been taken away. Some of them, they’ve been here, as you pointed out in your stories asyoung, kids when they went to school and whatnot. Do you see that immigration will be top-shelf topic for PolitiFact again in the coming year?

Katie: Absolutely, yeah. I think it will be. You know, it’s a tricky issue and I’m not going to dissect it entirely. I think that’s a really interesting topic. But, it was a defining issue in 2024 in the election, along with the economy, and that’s what helped Trump take office, was his promise to have a crackdown on immigration, right? And, I think it does put Democrats in an awkward position when you say, like, “Oh, do you want these violent criminals to remain in society?” You know, I don’t think that they have developed very efficient talking point to counter that. But, I think the manner in which the deportation operation has been implemented this past year surely will be a midterm issue.

So, what I’m trying to say is that immigration was our 2024 Lie of the Year, which was about the Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs, which was not true out of Springfield, Ohio. It played a role in our Year of the Lie series this year. And I wouldn’t be surprised for it to be in the contention, somehow, for a year-end conversation about truth and politics in 2026. It’s just a massive issue.

Lyle: Before we get into 2026 and wrap it up, would you take us through the procedures that PolitiFact goes through to check statement? I think that would be important for people to know.

HOW POLITIFACT CHECKS STATEMENTS

Katie: Sure. … We monitor political discourse every day. We’re on social media. We follow everything coming out of the White House, like, we assign one person each day to take turns monitoring what Trump is saying publicly. We follow leaders of Congress. In election years, we divide up key campaigns and we get their news releases. We follow their debates, campaigns, and ads and that kind of thing. So, there’s a world of places to get our ideas.

The first step is choosing your idea. So we try to focus on statements that are, you know, not easy gotchas. They can’t be predictions. They have to be statements that are important, that are kind of worth dedicating a day or several days to investigating. Or, they at least have to not be obviously true as well. They have to make the average person go, “Huh? I wonder if that’s really true?” and maybe the answer is not apparent after a quick Google search.

So, once we decide on our we call it a ruling statement on a claim that we’re investigating, we go to the campaign or the candidate or the leader, the politician, and we ask them or their staff, what is the evidence for the statement? We talk to the White House a lot and sometimes they will reply with a statement. Sometimes the statement is not necessarily directly relevant to our question, but we will try to accommodate some version of the statement in our fact check. Sometimes, we do link to specific studies or news articles, then we go reference that and, sometimes, they just don’t reply.

But that doesn’t stop us and, usually, we’re not waiting to hear back from whoever we’re fact checking. We are well on to doing our own research and that’s really important. We scan for academic journal articles, we consult experts at think tanks, whether it’s tariffs or immigration or health or any other topic. We’re trying to find people who know that subject area really well. They’ve either commented about it in the news media, they’ve written articles about it, or they may have a dissenting view from from experts who are quoted a lot.

We try to not just quote a lot of people saying the same thing. We try to make sure we’re covering a talking point from all angles. If we can find consensus from experts who tend to disagree, we know we’ve done something right.

So, we go through this kind of exhaustive reporting process, and then we fold our findings into a into a fact check. The fact check ends with a quick explanation of our conclusion on the Truth-O-Meter. It explains what rating we chose and, succinctly, why we chose it. There’s six different ratings. Each one has a definition. You can find it on our website, politifact.com: true, mostly true, half true, mostly false, false, or Pants on Fire, which means the statements not only wrong, but it’s ridiculous.

And those ratings, by the way, are not just the decision of one reporter and whatever they decided to rate it that day. It’s a result of a conversation between three editors. The reporter can recommend a rating based on their reporting. They’re very close to the story, obviously, but the editors decide. They vet the story for any potential errors, errors in logic errors, you know, certainly grammatical errors. But we’re looking for what will the critics say about this, and where might they have a point. We’re trying to bulletproof the story, as a lot of people call it, and then we decide as editors, what rating. So, it only takes two out of the three editors to nail the rating down.

Lyle: But the process can be quite grueling at times, can it not?

Katie: It is grueling, yes. I’ve been part of PolitiFact since 2012, officially. So, I’ve sat in many star chambers, as we call them, as a reporter who’s having their story grilled for many years, and more recently, as an editor doing the grilling. And you know, I think, honestly, it’s, never fun to be the reporter in that position. But you also know, like, your story is being analyzed very closely at this stage. It should make you feel much better about going to publication.

… Lyle: I do want to wrap up with this: 2026, now as we look forward to this new year playing out, have you and the staff at PolitiFact talked about what to possibly expect for the coming year? …

Katie: We’ve talked about how we will approach some key midterm races. We’ve had preliminary conversations about that. We’ve talked about continuing to prioritize health and covering health in a different format that might reach people who are more skeptical of traditional fact checking, but may be more receptive to proactive information sharing to counter online, to counter all the concerning videos they see on their social media feeds. And, we’ve talked about continuing to cover AI at a steady level that kind of keeps up with explaining new developments and challenges with the technology. We ended the year with a really powerful story about chat bots and teens, kind of vulnerable teens, who use chat bots to navigate personal mental health crises to pretty tragic results where they have taken their own lives. So we will continue to cover the impact of AI very seriously. I would say that those are our main priorities, with another big one being covering the daily developments out of Washington.

Lyle: Lie or not. Is Chat box GPT (ChatGPT) and other AI programming taking our information and storing it? Do you know?

Katie: Lie or not? I don’t think that’s a lie. I don’t know, it’s complicated, but I would be, I would, just as a PSA, be very mindful about whatever you put into a chat bot. You never know where it could pop up again, especially if you’re not using a paid version. And then, even if you are, it’s not yours to have privately for all of time. Be very careful out there.

Lyle: Katie, thank you for taking the time out for me. I really appreciate it, and I think this will be very useful for the people who are reading what I’m writing now and viewing it. I appreciate taking the time out for me.

Katie: Great. Well, thank you so much for asking It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

ANSWERING THE PERSONAL INFORMATION QUESTION

I asked ChatGPT if it saves personal information. Here is the response:

Lyle: Do you store information we input into ChatGPT?

ChatGPT: Short answer: sometimes—but not in the way most people imagine.

Here’s the clean breakdown 👇

During a conversation

* Yes, I can remember things within the same chat so the conversation makes sense.

* That context disappears when the conversation ends.

Across conversations (memory)

* I don’t automatically store personal information you type.

* I only save things if you explicitly ask me to, like:

* “Remember that my kid’s name is Ruby”

* “From now on, keep replies short”

* When something is saved, it shows up as a small “memory” tied to your account and helps personalize future chats.

* You can ask me what I remember or tell me to delete anything at any time.

Training the model

* Your chats may be reviewed or used to improve ChatGPT, but:

* They’re handled under privacy controls

* They aren’t used to personally identify you

* You can opt out of chat history being used for training in Settings → Data Controls.

Important reassurance

* I don’t have awareness of you outside what’s in a conversation or what you’ve explicitly asked me to remember.

* I can’t browse your past chats unless they’re in your visible chat history.

* I don’t secretly build a profile of you.

If you want, I can:

* Tell you exactly what I currently remember about you (spoiler: it’s basically nothing right now)

* Walk you through the privacy and data settings step-by-step

Totally fair question, by the way—more people should ask it.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence source and not a person. I, however, I am living and breathing person and a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Meet our amazing writers, all real people and among the best in the Midwest, here.

ORDER HERE. You also may purchase the book at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Books and Ice Cube Press.

A short snippet from an interview with the Rev. Guillermo Treviño Jr., who died Oct. 31, 2025, at the age of 39 while being a champion for social justice.

Escucha Mi Voz

Iowa City Catholic Workers

I am proud to be a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Meet our writers here,

Back in the day when newspapers I worked at published a daily police log we often we got calls from people who ended up there. Their pathway to the log included shoplifting, drunken driving, simple assault, things like that.

The call went something like: Please don’t put my name in the paper. If you do, I will be fired. Or, my wife will find out. Or, in the case of college students, I won’t get into law school or medical school or get my first job after I graduate.

Our usual response made sense: Won’t you get fired, in trouble with your wife or with your grad school application because you shoplifted, drove drunk or beat someone?

Another call, especially at college newspapers, would be something along the lines of: Please don’t put my name or picture in your story about the political protest I was at because it will cause trouble for me. Sorry, we would say. You were in a public event, likely in a public place, causing a public disruption in order to change public policy.

That answer might be changing, and that is cause for concern.

College newspapers are being forced to rethink identifying people in stories because of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and revocation of F-1 visas for selected college students. The immediate reaction some of you have to that probably is that these students should not have to worry if they behave themselves and don’t disrupt things in the country that willingly took them in so they can take their knowledge back home.

If only it were that simple.

I wrote about this last spring, but reports of students taken into custody for what they wrote or said in a public forum has students, faculty and staff at colleges and universities on edge, genuinely worrying that the Trump administration vindictively will come after them simply for things Trump and his followers do not like. That would include writing a letter to a student newspaper protesting U.S. policies. It famously happened earlier this year with the deportation case of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University graduate student from Turkey who wrote an opinion piece for The Tufts Daily student paper about divesting university funds from companies with ties to Israel.

Closer to home you have University of Iowa grad students on F-1 visas who sued to overturn their spring 2025 government-ordered deportation. The case still must go to a resolution but the international students have been winning court rulings.

Colleges and universities are working to protect their international students from government harassment. One result across the country has been requests from international students to remove their names from stories previously published online. Moreover, the requests extend to removing photos and even entire stories featuring international students who fear they are at risk as the federal government scans the internet for someone to target.

Öztürk’s effort to regain her F-1 status is in federal court. She is free from custody after serving 45 days in a Louisiana processing facility. A judge has determined that the Trump administration had no legal right to send masked feds after her and take her from a public street and into custody because of the letter she wrote.

“Throughout, I was disoriented, hungry and nauseous,” Öztürk wrote in a piece for Vanity Fair and her student paper about being in custody. “In Georgia, after suffering a severe asthma attack without my primary inhaler and having a hard cry, I was feeling completely hopeless. In Louisiana, I found myself in a cramped, cagelike bus, waiting for hours. I watched as countless people arrived from a nearby plane, all shackled — hands, feet and waists.”

So, yeah, international students are worried and young journalists on a lot of campuses are scrambling to figure out how to cover them.

Grinnell College Scarlet & Black co-editors Taylor Nunley (left at table) and Sarah Evans preside over the student paper’s first layout session Sept. 4, 2025. (Photo by Lyle Muller)

The student journalists worry that the common practice of identifying people in stories — for accuracy but also ethical reasons dealing with authenticity — might cause undo harm to those people. The Tufts Daily editors have though about it and have a policy that says requests that names be removed from online stories get reviewed by an Ethics and Inclusion Committee and the Managing Board, with the newspaper holding the right to grant or refuse the request.

College student editors questioning whether or not they should identify people who make public calls to change public policy is serious business. We need accuracy and knowledge of those who have an effect on our notion of what is normal. Withholding public information could alter factual descriptions of a newsworthy, historical event.

Grinnell College student Tammy Zywicki was a staff photographer for The Scarlet & Black. Her unsolved murder made national news in 1992 when she failed to show up for the beginning of the fall semester. Her body was found in Missouri. This is a photo of the page layout for a Sept. 8 story in the newspaper about her death and photos for the paper. (Photo by Lyle Muller)

On the other side of the news desk, students who stop expressing opinions in their college paper or do not participate in a political event for fear of being identified on a news website and arrested by feds have a chilling effect, too, especially if they are not committing a crime. Losing their voices can raise questions years down the road that range from “what were they thinking?” to “why didn’t they do anything to stop that?”

Students I work with as the Grinnell College Scarlet & Black professional adviser are trying to come up with a policy as quickly as possible to deal with requests by students who fear being identified. That includes stories previously published and online for some time. It also goes for S&B staff who are part of a college known for its diversity and international student population. Real names give stories credibility. But for some that now comes with a risk.

“In normal circumstances, we wouldn't necessarily be going back and, like, redact all sorts of things,” S&B co-editor in chief Sarah Evans said. “But these are not necessarily normal circumstances.”

Evans said the policy will be explained to its audience once it is completed. “I think it's been a little bit difficult to do that in real time,” she said. “We're trying to make a policy that makes sure that our journalism isn't doing any harm to the people we're covering, or just to the general Grinnell community as a whole. And that takes into account a lot of the changes that we've been seeing in the past.”

The college reported in the latest S&B edition that only 24% of international students offered a spot accepted and enrolles for the fall semester. The rate was 42% for 2024 and 41% for 2023. College admissions officials said they suspect anti-immigration rhetoric and administration actions against international students left some wary of coming to the United States. Also, The S&B’s Akash Roy reported, incoming students were having problems getting appointments for visas as late as going into August.

For those who think all of this is coddling and nonsense, you need to see a larger picture. You don’t want lawbreakers you can ship out of the county to be here? Makes sense. But due process should be used to send them back according to the law, not a trumped up (pun intended) charge based on a political belief that may include criticism of the United States.

If the infraction is writing a letter, protesting a perceived injustice, demonstrating in favor of a political view, check the First Amendment and how the U.S. Bill of Rights applies to anybody, not just U.S. citizens.

Lyle Muller is a proud member of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Go here to learn more about the collaborative and its journalists and support all local journalists who write for your community. He is a retired Iowa journalist who still works as an independent contractor and professional adviser for Grinnell College’s The Scarlet & Black newspaper. His views are his own and do not reflect those of any official at Grinnell College or the institution.

Leslie Lopez, of Mount Pleasant, speaks Tuesday, July 29, before a U.S. Federal Building call to free her brother Noel Lopez, from the Washington County Jail. Noel, 24, awaits an Aug. 6 arraignment on two misdemeanor drug charges but the Lopez family’s fears are in high mode because Noel, who has been in the United States since the age of 2 1/2, is not documented.

Read the full story here.