By Nicole Yeager, Iowa City
We’ve seen this before.
Fast yet slow, the dismantling of the Women’s, Resource, and Action Center (WRAC) appears imminent.
In 2024, staff at the Rape, Victim, and Advocacy Center (RVAP) began to sound the alarms as university officials assured the public that they were simply “assessing” and making “strategic decisions,” i.e., not seeking to close the sole program responding to sexual assault in eastern Iowa. These assessments did not indicate closure, they said. With the support of RVAP’s new leadership, the UI’s Vice President for Student Life, Sarah Hansen, announced RVAP’s shift to a new model over email before eventually demanding RVAP close within two months. The rapid shift left both people in rural Iowa without the infrastructure to dispatch staff to people in the wake of their traumatic assaults (some staff in rural Iowa shared that they were never notified), and university students with less support to navigate the personal, time-sensitive decisions necessary to protect their physical and emotional well-being.
The Domestic Violence Intervention Program (DVIP) assumed the majority of RVAP’s work; though, notably, each of these entities initially sprung from WRAC. Following RVAP’s closure, WRAC once again provided one of the few spaces university students, staff, and faculty could turn to following sexual violence for community, support, and healing. Anyone connected to trans people on the University of Iowa campus know that it can be a place where people can visit and feel true, genuine support, which is particularly crucial as legalized discrimination takes root in our state.
On June 10, Hansen, based in the Division of Student Life, dispersed an email with their planned changes for WRAC, ahead of the Board of Regents’ summer session (June 15, 16). Hansen claims that the retirements of the assistant dean (focused on “well-being and basic needs”) and WRAC’s long-standing director precipitated the “review leading to organizational changes.” WRAC will thus be segmented across the Dean of Students Leadership/Engagement Area and Student Wellness. At this time, student organizations will retain access to the WRAC House, located at 230 N Clinton St.
In the email, Hansen said, “These realignments are consistent with leadership and Board of Regents directives to identify opportunities for efficiency and revenue in light of significant changes to higher education. I recognize that organizational change is sometimes difficult.”
The Regents and university administrators may toss red herrings to quell press and satiate concerned partners. Administrators may even assure professors and one another that parceling WRAC out across the university will protect WRAC from scrutiny in such uncertain times. If so, those decision-makers, or university stewards, will be ignoring WRAC’s storied history, the one which created space for RVAP and DVIP to exist in the first place.
As Director Linda Kroon, who is poised to retire after 34 years with the organization, said, “WRAC provides workshops to train participants in safe and effective ways to address inappropriate, offensive, harassing, and dangerous conduct to create a safe and welcoming community for us all.”
WRAC (currently) opens its doors to all, with particular emphasis on women’s issues and opportunities. It hosts a program — one found at just 23 universities and colleges nationwide — to help women find their voice in the public sector. It also participated in hosting submissions for consideration for the storied Jean Y. Jew Women’s Award, which shuttered its applications last year when the Regents forced the Council for the Status of Women to close and seized its endowment, redistributing it who-knows-where. I watched with professors, staff, and students as Marie Krebs introduced her professor, Dr. Yolanda Spear, who accepted the award as its final recipient.
As we stood in the very same room where the university regents meet within the Levitt Center for University Advancement, she discussed her experience as the first Black woman to receive the award. She said something like: as I step through this door, it is notable to me that I close it behind me.
Title IX, a law passed in 1972, moved the needle to prevent and address sex-based discrimination in higher education and employment settings. The law likely contributed to the founding of RVAP in 1973. WRAC, though, emerged one year before Title IX, in 1971. Title IX created an avenue for sex-based discrimination investigations, though it has not fully realized the dream.
The Jean Y. Jew Award stemmed from Dr. Jew’s experience as a Chinese-American professor within the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa. After years of gatekeeping, harassment, outright bullying, and discrimination regarding her race and gender, Dr. Jew found a lawyer (outside state lines) to fight. She won, referencing Title VII. Title VII prevents discrimination in the public sector, including universities such as the University of Iowa. Such cases are increasingly difficult to resolve; take for example Senator Bernie Sanders’ recent report, which found that under Trump’s administration, the Office of Civil Rights, despite receiving record-level cases, “reached 0 resolution agreements involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline [in 2025].”
Title IX was a step towards preventing sex-based discrimination, but it remains woefully inadequate in its protected scope of reproductive justice, in part because its framework is medicalized. Pregnant persons (a medical condition) are protected under the Act, but it fails to address the parent discrimination that caregivers endure as their children inch towards adulthood. Places like WRAC are crucial to carve out a little more possibility for women, who (as the incomplete data suggests) “leak” from the academic pipeline at a faster rate than others.
Following the closure of the Department for Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, Afro House and other living learning communities, the Council for the Status of Women, and too many more, it seems likely WRAC may soon face a similar fate.
Perhaps we are early in assuming that WRAC will be parceled out and dismantled piece by piece; people said that RVAP staff were preempting their eventual closure in 2024 when their reconfiguration was announced. However, in light of all we have seen forced to close as legislators consider mandating coursework through their Center for Intellectual Freedom, it seems probable that without resistance, WRAC is headed towards closure. It may take persistent, statewide advocacy to keep one of the remaining eastern Iowan stalwarts for reproductive justice, equal access, and healing open for public higher education.
