Public engagement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
The University of Iowa’s core mission extends beyond the classrooms, laboratories, studios, and libraries where we educate students, conduct our research, and create new artistic work. Equally important is our engagement with communities throughout Iowa, across the nation, and around the world.
Our faculty, students, and staff work to solve problems, imagine new approaches to challenges, and improve quality of life, often through service-learning courses in which students earn academic credit.
It’s a virtuous circle: When UI expertise is harnessed to help a community or region improve the lives of its residents, the experience adds unique educational value to students’ academic journeys, and advances the research and creative production of our faculty. In turn, that new knowledge empowers us to help more communities, solve more problems, and improve more lives.
The UI is not just the University of Iowa, we're the University for Iowa—and throughout the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we are proud to serve.
Message of Solidarity & Support, Freedom & Mutual Care from the University of Iowa Department of GWSS
The Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa emphatically affirms our concern for and ongoing support of LGBTQIA+ students, colleagues, and community members. We especially assert our unwavering solidarity with trans, nonbinary, and/or gender nonconforming students, who have recently become the targets of discrimination as well as hostile and misleading representation.
As a faculty, we are familiar with the substantial body of research on sex and gender across a host of fields, including biomedicine, history, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Experts across all fields understand that sex and gender are not and never have been sheerly binary. Many have traced the long history of gender diverse or gender nonconforming individuals and communities in the Americas and across the world. We know that gender-affirming healthcare has been judiciously vetted by the nation’s top medical associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, along with international bodies such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. We fully support ensuring access of transgender, nonbinary and/or gender nonconforming students to bathrooms and changing rooms corresponding to their gender in or to preserve their bodily sovereignty, gender self-determination, and physical and psychological well-being.
As a faculty, we want to address our students directly: we see you, we care about you, and we are here to offer a soft place to land and a generative place to think in this too-often hostile environment. To do so is part of our educational and research mission.
We want to emphasize our year-round advocacy and affirmation of the value and human rights of every single one of us.
In solidarity and with love