It was the reply-all no one wanted, and it came on a Friday in October just after lunch, when the students at the University of Iowa College of Dentistry were in clinical rotations with patients or had checked out for the weekend. The inciting email was sent by the college dean, David Johnsen, addressing the September 22, 2020, executive order from then president Donald Trump that banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training for the military, federal agencies, government contractors, and recipients of federal grants, including universities and nonprofits.
Johnsen’s email didn’t condemn the president, nor did it mention the president by name. It did voice concern about the effects of the order, which had brought DEI initiatives across the country to a sudden halt. “Though we understand the importance of complying to avoid a potentially devastating impact on University of Iowa operations and funding, we stand unified against this order and its attack on people and free speech,” it read.
The College of Dentistry was one of the last departments on campus to send such a message. Everywhere, universities and government agencies and nonprofits were scrambling to comply with the order. Several had already spoken out against it. At least one lawsuit was in the works.
Johnsen’s email was vague in an institutional way, seeming to purposefully avoid partisan speech. The word “condemning” appeared in the subject line, but not in the body. There was only one problem with the email: It hadn’t blind-copied the recipients. And second-year dentistry student Michael Brase hit “reply all.”
Brase’s response didn’t make a lot of sense. He quoted Trump’s executive order at length and concluded that it did not “prohibit the teaching of history or trainings that encourage equity and diversity for all races/sexes. Rather, it frequently and repetitively uses the words ‘inherent’ and ‘fundamental’ to illustrate what is to be construed as a ‘divisive concept.’” He went on to cite the Oxford English Dictionary to define “inherent” and “fundamental.”
He then posed five questions. Question number two read: “By condemning Executive Order 13950, does the COD support using federal funds to promote trainings that teach that certain races/sexes are inherently or fundamentally oppressive, racist, sexist, etc. (as defined above)?”
Question number four read: “Since Executive Order 13950 prohibits race/sex stereotyping and/or race/sex scapegoating, is it to be understood that the COD considers these elements to be in line with ‘fundamental university values and practices?’”
The answers, of course, were “no.” But answers weren’t the point. Like a bargain-bin Ben Shapiro, Brase was employing the kind of “debate me” language used by conservative groups like Turning Point USA—the brainchild of perpetual young Republican and avid Trump supporter Charlie Kirk. His questions followed standard bad-faith arguments seemingly designed to put the college on the defensive. It’s a “gotcha” argument—there is no winning. (Brase declined multiple requests for comment.)
“Once someone pulls out the Oxford English Dictionary,” said one College of Dentistry student of color, “you know it’s a trap.”
Maybe on any other weekend, in any other year, Brase’s reply would have been ignored. But his email came two days after Donald Trump held a massive rally in Des Moines, where the governor smiled, mask-less, and tossed MAGA hats into the crowd. It came just weeks before a divisive election in the middle of a global pandemic, in a red state where leaders mocked those who took COVID-19 seriously, and state legislators denied that it was a problem. It came as the concept of “cancel culture” was growing from a brush fire into a five-alarm blaze. Figures like Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss were dousing the flames with gasoline; Donald Trump hadn’t yet been banned from Twitter, but he would be soon; and free speech and oppression—real or imagined—were becoming the new satanic panic, with colleges and universities as ground zero.
Then there was the fact that the University of Iowa had struggled with its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives for years, in large part because multiple DEI administrators left the school for other opportunities before their policies could be implemented. The last associate vice president for DEI at the University of Iowa lasted for a grand total of seven weeks. Shortly after he left the school, the vice president for student life and a former interim chief diversity officer departed as well. That was in 2019. Neither of the university administrators had discussed their exits publicly. Those I spoke to expressed the feeling that there was something beneath the surface--something ugly.
Brase’s emails were like popping a blister. The replies oozed out. The raw, tender skin of the college’s insides was revealed.
People argued with Brase, pointing out that it’s impossible to teach concepts like diversity and equity if you cannot address discrimination and inequity. One faculty member, Nancy Slach, supported him, writing, “I reject the ideology that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country. People are not racist due to the color of their skin or sexist based on their gender.” She later added, “I for one cannot support Black Lives Matter. I do not think this organization is what many think it is.”
As replies rolled in over the weekend, Brase wrote a lengthy email that included anonymous quotes from students and faculty who he claimed had reached out to him but were afraid to speak publicly. Among them:
Finally, an adjunct faculty member wrote in a separate email, “As a volunteer adjunct, I solely rely on this distribution list for those important announcements. Currently, I am an unwilling participant in a debate and I have no way of opting out of this email chain. Could IT please help me out and remove me from this distribution list and possibly place me on a list that will be more pertinent to the information I need?” Brase, once again, replied all and requested a different forum in which to hold a debate. The tortured thread came to an end.
For a student to hit “reply all” on an email made Jasmine Butler, a fourth-year student, gasp. “He’s gonna get into so much trouble,” she remembers thinking, because Brase’s actions were so unprofessional.
Initially, he was in trouble. Not for voicing his opinion, but for using the college listserv to do so. Brase received a letter from the dean’s office referencing “unprofessional behavior involving the follow-up emails you sent out on a public platform after you were offered other means to continue the conversation.” He was scheduled to meet with the Collegiate Academic and Professional Performance (CAPP) committee for what the letter described as “a Professional Misconduct Review Hearing” on Monday, November 23, 2020, at 8:45 a.m.
It wouldn’t have been the first time a student was reprimanded for misusing email. The college’s goal is to train dentists, which includes keeping their digital communications professional. Students I spoke to recalled classmates using the College of Dentistry listserv to sell things—and once to send a rude email to a professor—and being punished for doing so. At least two people familiar with the College of Dentistry confirmed that more than one student had been admonished for improper email use.
But Brase saw something more sinister at work. He wrote in a Facebook post on November 9 that he was being threatened with expulsion for being a conservative. The post immediately gained traction, liked and shared rapidly in certain seedy internet foxholes. Brase reached out to lawmakers, at least two of whom jumped to his defense, posting about his account on their own social media pages. The student newspaper, The Daily Iowan, reported on the story, and local news outlets picked it up. So did the website Campus Reform, which is dedicated to waging online campaigns against perceived liberal bias. The story was never questioned, context never added. Even Democrats in the state didn’t raise questions. And why should they? In Iowa, Republicans are good at the breathless disinformation campaigns. Hell, they’re so good they were featured in The New Yorker.
And Iowa legislators took up the cause. One of the first was Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, son of the leader of Iowa’s Republican Party, who gained national attention in 2016 when he proposed a “Suck It Up Buttercup” law. The measure would have financially punished colleges and universities for providing “extra” grief counseling after Donald Trump’s election. “People have the right to be hysterical,” he told the Des Moines Register. “On their own time.” Kaufmann said Brase reached out to him, and he was sympathetic because, as he put it to me, “Michael unfairly was called into a meeting and he was threatened with expulsion.”
Kaufmann and Judiciary chair Steve Holt used their power to hold not one but three House of Representatives Government Oversight Committee hearings on Brase’s supposed censorship. There are rumors of a fourth. There was a pandemic raging through the state—in the fall of 2020, Iowa had one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. But it was a series of reply-all emails that demanded the attention of the legislature.
The hearings became a launchpad for lawmakers to introduce bills that would end tenure, force faculty to identify their political affiliations, and make Trump’s executive order state law. In the process, Brase became a conservative cancel culture hero. Free speech was under attack, he said on podcasts and in national publications. Liberal campus culture had gone too far, he claimed.
When dean Johnsen was called to testify at the first hearing, he tried to clarify: Brase had never been threatened with expulsion. He wasn’t being singled out for his political views. Other students had been called to CAPP meetings for things ranging from academic infractions to personality issues. The CAPP committee helps the college adhere to accreditation standards. And as Johnsen tried to point out to the oversight committee, the dental board operates in a similar way. If the college didn’t prepare students to deal with a complaint process for the world they’d inhabit as practitioners, they would be failing. Ultimately, Brase’s CAPP hearing was canceled, and Johnsen apologized.
But something else was happening too. The weekend of Johnsen’s email, AJ Foley, another second-year student, was home in Des Moines for a funeral. Foley, who is Black, said he read the emails and thought, oh no. On Sunday, another student of color called Foley in tears. It was all too much—especially the professor saying she didn’t support Black Lives Matter. “That’s like someone looking at you and saying, ‘you don’t matter,’” said Foley. At the school, students rely on professors to grade them in practical settings and to observe them with patients. If a patient became inappropriate or racist or violent, Foley wondered, would every professor have every student’s back? “I worry about going to the gym, about walking down the street,” he said. “Now I worry about walking through the halls of the school.”
Students told me they knew some people didn’t like the diversity initiatives, but that the sentiment had been hidden behind smiles and assurances of unity. The atmosphere was professional; people simply didn’t talk about it. After Brase’s emails, they said, things changed. Megha Puranam, a third-year student, said it felt like the aftermath of the 2016 election, when everything she tried not to see about her country reared its ugly head.
Puranam said she was in her clinical group the Monday after the emails were sent when an adjunct faculty member came to speak to them. It was an informal chat while they waited for patients. Puranam wasn’t in the room when the faculty member entered, but said that when she walked in, everyone stopped talking. Puranam grew up in eastern Iowa and is a resident of the state; her family immigrated from India.
As the conversation resumed, Puranam said it was clear the group was discussing the emails. She said she sat silently while they talked. At one point the faculty member referenced Afghanistan, and she corrected his pronunciation.
“Is that where you are from?” she recalls the faculty member asking. She said it wasn’t. “Where are you from then?” he wanted to know.
“Iowa,” she replied, and left the room.
Puranam said she went to the counseling office and sat in a room to compose herself. When she returned to her clinical group, she said the students were discussing a cultural competency test they would have to take. She said the faculty member pointedly ignored her. After he left, she recalled that one of the students “basically asked, if you receive a gift but don’t want it, is it really a gift?” She said it was clear that the “gift” he was referring to was diversity. In a later discussion, the student claimed he was talking about a literal gift, she said. But Puranam was frustrated. “I cannot hide who I am,” she said. “I cannot hide behind a medical mask and whiteness. My skin is not a gift I can just reject.” She changed clinical groups.
Puranam is part of a student group called the Action UIowa Task Force that advocates for DEI initiatives on campus. The group is not affiliated with the College of Dentistry and existed before Brase sent his emails. Racial discrimination and inequality is a well-documented barrier in medicine; in a 2017 NPR survey, 32% of Black Americans said they had experienced racism in health care, and 22% said they had avoided seeking care because of discrimination. And while 13.4% of the population identifies as Black, only 3.1% of dentists are Black. Black adults are twice as likely as white adults to have unmet dental needs. The graduating class of 2021 has 80 total students; just 15 are nonwhite, and only one is Black. In the past four years, the number of nonwhite students at the College of Dentistry has hovered between 14 and 30%, according to literature from the admissions office. There is, in other words, a quantifiable equity and inclusion problem in the field of dentistry, and it exists at the school. Puranam and her classmates have been working to address it.
During the summer of 2020, the Action UIowa Task Force had urged the college to do more to address the inequity in their field, and they’d felt listened to, Puranam said. But the moment Brase spoke up, everything they did became about him.
In January, three months after the email fracas, the Action UIowa Task Force held a walkout and protest at the College of Dentistry. Students who participated contacted their professors and used allotted personal days to cover for their absence. They were careful not to abandon patients. Thirty-four had appointments rescheduled—the majority for general cleanings and checkups—but no one was turned away for emergency procedures. A University of Iowa official sent me a memo outlining the steps the college had taken to make sure every patient received care and said the students participating in the walkout had behaved in a professional manner.
Every news story about the protest framed it as a response to Brase’s emails. But it wasn’t. Puranam and her fellow task force members grew frustrated. They wanted to inspire a dialogue about racism, sexism, and homophobia in their industry and how to change it. “I didn’t like Michael’s emails,” said Jasmine Butler, a third-year student and a task force member, “but he has a right to send them. No one was protesting him; we wanted a conversation about how important diversity initiatives are. We also have a right to do that.” She later added, “He should be able to send whatever he wants. But not without consequences if it’s unprofessional or inappropriate.” Students had been reprimanded before. Why had Brase gotten away with it? The answer seemed obvious.
Brase controlled the narrative. Meanwhile, the Action UIowa Task Force students couldn’t even get in touch with local news outlets. “We were sending email after email and no one was responding,” said Anjali Puranam, Megha’s sister and a University of Iowa student who’s also a task force member. Local news station KCRG interviewed task force members at the protest. The event was not about Brase, but the newscast still framed it as a both-sides issue. “It’s not both sides,” Butler said. “No one has ever said Brase can’t talk. What we are saying is people are being treated differently.”
Butler’s experience with the university bureaucracy has been much different than Brase’s. In 2019, Butler was sexually harassed by another student in the College of Dentistry; she said he took a lewd picture of her without her consent. Butler said she hadn’t even noticed—someone else did and reported it. According to Butler, an investigation revealed that 21 other women in the college had also been harassed by the same student. Because Butler and other alleged victims still had to attend class with the student while his conduct was under review, they asked to be separated from him. “We didn’t want to have to see him late at night in the lab or be in small groups,” Butler said.
Butler said university officials assured her she would be separated from her alleged harasser. But she said she still ran into him in the lab late at night and was assigned to a small group with him. According to Butler, the office of student affairs had said they’d make sure that didn’t happen, but it did anyway—a clerical oversight. (The university declined to comment on the matter.) “Here we are actually in danger, and the university is doing nothing,” Butler said. “Meanwhile a student complains because someone wants to talk to him about how he sends professional emails, and we change the state laws.”
Members of the Action UIowa Task Force asked to attend the Oversight Committee hearing, but lawmakers refused. In the first hearing, Rep. Kaufmann lashed out about the task force’s protest. “Because they weren’t successful in silencing you, because they weren’t successful in punishing you for expressing your opinion, they’re going to use their First Amendment rights to trample on yours?” he asked Brase, rhetorically. “Excuse my French, but that’s total shit.” In the second hearing, he declared without any apparent sense of irony that the protest—a protected form of free speech—amounted to an “intimidation” of conservative students.
I asked Kaufmann why he hadn’t invited any members of the task force to the hearing. “It wasn’t about them,” he said. Then why had he shared misinformation about the students protesting? He hung up.
Rep. Charles Isenhart, a Democrat, is also a member of the Oversight Committee. When I asked him about the hearings, he emailed, “House Republicans have turned Government Oversight into a grievance committee. They latch on to the perceived injustices felt by people who share their political views and use the committee as an appeals court where the majority party serves as prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and executioner, limiting who can testify. In the meantime, the sentences were determined in advance of the trial, such as abolishing tenure at the public universities or forbidding the discussion of ‘divisive issues.’” What may once have simply been a story about how annoying reply all can be in a professional setting has been usurped and turned into a parable—a platform for screaming “free speech” until all other sound is drowned out.
Brase is still at the school. He got what he wanted, and so did Republican lawmakers; this legislative session they passed a law similar to Trump’s executive order, and while their bill banning tenure didn’t make it through, the message was sent and received. “This has definitely had a silencing effect on students and faculty,” said David Drake, a professor at the College of Dentistry. “Many are afraid to speak out because of fear of backlash from lawmakers”—lawmakers who control the funds for the university budget. Most of my emails and calls to administrators and faculty went unanswered. A couple of people involved with the university told me on background that they were afraid of potential backlash.
The students of color I spoke with, meanwhile, seem exhausted. One student said she serves on a diversity committee and has just “checked out.” Only one of the students I spoke to wants to stay in the state; everyone else wants to leave. Several told me they’ve stopped participating in admissions events. “I can’t tell Black people to come to this school,” Foley said.
“This has damaged our reputation as a school,” Drake said. “People aren’t going to want to come here anymore.”
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