By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
Bookending a weeklong frenzy of campus tours, Utah State University President Brad Mortensen stopped at Utah State University Eastern in Price to hold an open house discussion for students, faculty members and community stakeholders. During this meeting, Mortensen addressed concerns about staff morale, public perception of the university and mandates from the state legislature.
“For those of you who don’t know, some of you may be sick of hearing this, but you know, my background is, I was at Weber State for 21 years. I served as the president there for the last almost seven years before I transitioned into this role,” opened the president. “I do have a bit of an appreciation and history for how important this institution in Price is to the community and the legacy you have going back, even to the Carbon college days, just providing a tremendous service for the students.”
Moving on from introductions, Mortensen opened up the floor for questions. The first one fired his way saw him being asked what he is going to do differently than past presidents to improve the university and staff morale?
“Utah State is a great institution that has this tremendous statewide potential, but it’s been through a bit of a rough patch,” responded Mortensen. “I kind of suspected that when I applied that, that would be the challenge, but I’m excited to take it on. We’re going to try to change some things up. But I want to do it in a way that makes sense. I think the goals overall for USU are really pretty straightforward, but when I talk tomorrow afternoon, the first thing I’m going to say is we want to expand the reach and the potential of our statewide mission, because I think as we’ve had to hunker down and deal with some of the controversy that has, we’ve lost sight of the power of the unique strength that Utah State has to be a statewide university.”
The next question asked of Mortensen was how he would work with the Utah state legislature – which has taken a particular focus on USU as part of the ‘Strategic Reinvestment Plan’ mandated by HB265 – and how he would work to protect the university’s programs.
“I do believe that the criticism, the attacks, the other things that the legislature has made about higher education are because they see it as a really important asset for the future of our state,” shared Mortensen. “As folks are running for election, it’s important to give them our feedback when they’re trying to hear what we want as constituents and to be able to weigh in that way and then be engaged in the process to help improve that.”
He added,” We still have some rough things. We’re gonna have to work through the legislative audit for Utah State coming out on Jan. 30 … We’ll have to demonstrate an appropriate response. And we don’t quite know what appropriate means yet, to the audit findings in order to get back the 70%, the $8 million of $12 million from the Strategic Reinvestment Plan that the legislature is still holding.”
The topic of trust continued into the next question, which saw Mortensen answering how he aims to rebuild trust in the public following controversies across the USU system, both locally in Price and statewide.
“That’s one of the things I think that we’re finding in the audit, to a point of taking an approach when it comes to compliance or good procedures or best practices and other things that you know, we’ll catch it when bad things happen,” responded Mortensen. “That’s going to be really important just to build up the public trust too, because in some of these things that happen not just within higher ed, but across other institutions of higher education. Students asking, sometimes, especially at the Statewide campuses, you know, what is our Public Safety for our problems with our police presence and other things, because we don’t see them as much as we feel we should. So, all of those things are going to be important, and resources are constrained, but I think there are some systemwide things that we can share and try to address that issue.”
Price City Mayor Terry Willis also got involved, asking Mortensen whether the university’s statewide campuses would work to become more responsive to the economic needs of the communities they serve.
“One way we’re going to try to respond to that is to, as we’ve done, kind of academic program analysis, it’s admittedly happened at the USU level. We have a consultant we work with, and they’re already under contract, and since Monday, we have asked them if we can break this down by the different communities and what’s happening at the different campuses already, so that we zero in on some of those targets and needs,” answered Mortensen.
Mortensen also fielded questions on the potential for full tuition reimbursement for full-time faculty and partial reimbursement for part-time faculty, as well as being asked to look into an expansion of USUE’s post-secondary disability support services.. All concerns raised during the meeting were added to a list of statewide asks that Mortensen plans to present to fellow university decision-makers to help guide the university forward.
Closing the open house, Mortensen shared his goals as president,” The first one is going to be, you know, how do we just strengthen and further, you know, build upon statewide? I think if we lean into that, other things can follow as well … That’s what I’m committed to and really looking forward to engaging with all of you and doing that over the next, hopefully, many years.