University of Iowa

The University of Iowa was founded in late February of 1847, as one of the very first legislative acts of the new state of Iowa after it was admitted to the union at the end of December of the previous year.

Iowa City had been the old territorial capital city, and remained the capital for the first ten years of the new state’s existence. In 1857, the state capital was moved to Des Moines, but the Old Capitol Building remains one of the most prominent landmarks on the university’s main downtown campus.

In line with its original charter, the University of Iowa has no campuses elsewhere in the state (thus, it has no connection to the other two major Iowa public universities, Iowa State University, in Ames, and Northern Iowa University, in Cedar Falls).

The University of Iowa has always been a forward-looking and socially progressive institution. For example, its College of Law—established in 1865 as the first law school west of the Mississippi—was the first public institution to confer a law degree on a woman, Mary B. Hickey Wilkinson, in 1873. (This was only three years after the first woman obtained a law degree from a private school, the University of Chicago.)

Alexander G. Clark, Jr., who obtained his law degree from Iowa in 1879, is believed to be the first African American in the United States to receive that distinction (though others had passed the bar exam and practiced law earlier).

In 1870, Iowa also established the first medical school in the country that was open to both men and women.

In academics, the “Iowa School” of philosophical realism is especially noteworthy. It was founded by the Austrian-born philosopher, Gustav Bergmann, and continued by his German-born pupil, Reinhardt Grossmann (who later taught at Indiana University) and the American-born, Laird Addis.

The University of Iowa is also renowned for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, whose faculty and students have contributed a whole galaxy of distinguished names to American letters, including, among many others,:

• Poets, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, James Tate, Louise Gluck, Robert Bly & Rita Dove
• Short-story writers, John Cheever & Raymond Carver
• Novelists, Nelson Algren, James Salter, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Robert Coover, Jane Smiley, Francine Prose, John Irving, T. Coraghessan Boyle, & Richard Yates
• Novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson

Other notable Iowa-connected individuals include:

• Physicist and astronomer, James Van Allen
• Philosopher, Herbert Feigl
• Psychologist, Kurt Lewin
• Novelists, Flannery O’Connor & Wallace Stegner
• Outstanding playwright, Tennessee Williams
• Actors, Jean Seberg, Gene Wilder, Tom Arnold & Mary Beth Hurt
• Television journalist, Tom Brokaw
• Founder of Rotary International, Paul P. Harris
• Pollster, George Gallup
• Former World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim
• US Senator for Iowa and former Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Charles E. “Chuck” Grassley