SALT LAKE CITY — “Transformation” was the topic of discussion when University of Utah President Ruth V. Watkins and her senior staff met with the editorial boards of the Deseret News and KSL Thursday to discuss big changes to the state’s flagship public university, including hiring a new chief safety officer.
Watkins and the university are riding a wave of recent good news after a particularly trying past year. The university was thrust into the spotlight on national campus safety discussions after senior Lauren McCluskey was killed last October by a man she had dated.
But in the last few days, the university has announced a $150 million donation from the Huntsman family for a mental health institute that will broaden research into and treatment of mental illness on campus and across the state.
The university has been granted invitation-only membership to the Association of American Universities, which includes 63 of America’s and two of Canada’s best-known research institutions.
And the University also just announced creation of a special scholarship for Pell Grant-eligible low-income students that will help them finish obtaining their degrees, a process that often gets derailed because of cost and other challenges.
Coming soon
The university is close to hiring its new chief safety officer, who will meet with the cabinet monthly, Watkins said. That person will oversee the campus police chief, among other duties. A new campus chief of police is also being hired.
Watkins said the university has been transforming campus safety by changing culture, along with the processes for handling or preventing problems. They’ve boosted training of staff, are working to make certain students and staff know where to get help and how to be safe and are approaching safety as one would tackle it in a mid-size city, which the campus really is, she added.
Among the traits the new campus safety officer will have are experience and a strong record of success, good communication skills and law enforcement experience or knowledge, Watkins said.
Big campus challenge
As with campus safety, some of the biggest transformational changes at the University of Utah will result from new hires. As part of the mental health donation, which will be made available over 15 years, the university is recruiting a new head of its Department of Psychiatry. The head of the psychiatry department will lead the university’s neuropsychiatric hospital, which will be renamed the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, as CEO and help shape mental health research, screening and treatment not just for the school’s 32,000 students, but for individuals in rural and other parts of Utah.
Mental health is an issue not just on Utah college campuses, but nationwide, the university administrators said. But the National Institutes of Health doesn’t have a mental health institute to match its cancer and other institutes.
The creation of a mental health institute at the university with funding from the Huntsman family and other potential donors could put the university in the position to help shape such a nationally designated institute, according to Watkins and Michael L. Good, senior vice president of health sciences, CEO of University of Utah Health and dean of the medical school.
The donation is “broad,” giving the university great latitude in determining how best to use the money. The first push is finding and recruiting the right person, Good said. The gift will “interest the nation’s best talent.”
University of Utah officials also envision a partnership with other providers and are already forging a collaboration with Intermountain Healthcare, he said, adding those conversations have been taking place for a while. University officials are looking at other partnerships, including in suicide prevention and to broaden access to mental health services, which is a major challenge throughout Utah. Money will also be directed to research to understand and find treatments for mental illness.
“There will be a lot of partnerships,” Good predicted.
They plan to have the institute director in place early in the process so that he or she can help shape what follows.
Delightful news
The Association of American Universities is self-described as including only research institutions “at the forefront of scientific inquiry and educational excellence.” And Watkins said that being invited to join the group, along with Dartmouth College and the University of California Santa Cruz, is the academic equivalent of joining the Pac-12. Members are highly accomplished universities that drive much of the most important research of this age, placing the school “at the table where big decisions are made,” she said.
Watkins called the invitation “delightful” and said she expects that talented students who might have left Utah to attend prestigious universities will see that they don’t need to go anywhere else. Membership in the group will broaden the university’s influence and increase the value of any degree earned there.
A couple of other academic transformations are taking place at the university, as well. Daniel A. Reed, senior vice president of academic affairs, said the university has made great progress in boosting the college-completion rate of its student body. The new scholarships will help that, too, addressing an issue of students completing a year or two of school then dropping out because they can’t afford to finish. Students who qualify academically to attend the U. and who also qualify for Pell Grants will be able to complete the last two years of their education with the help of the new “For Utah” scholarship, he said.
Online offerings are also being beefed up because the scheduling flexibility and being able to attend school without having to physically be on campus helps some students stay in school, Reed said.