August 22, 2024

The beginning of fall is always a wonderful time. Students are moving in, there’s tons of excitement, and parents are either relieved, teary-eyed, or both. We’ve got new faces on faculty and staff as well: If this is your first fall term, raise your hand. Welcome to the new academic year. 

I talked to many families over the past week, and one of the most frequent questions I was asked was how many students there are at Westminster. When I answered, some were concerned that we would grow too much because we’re now a university. They said that they came because they liked our size. If you include the graduate students and our returning undergraduates, it looks like we’ll end up within 5% of the number of students we had last year. Our new undergraduate student enrollment is going be a bit less than last year, and as usual we’ll share more details about our student body after the fall census.

We’re fairly confident that the drop is the result of the botched national FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) roll out last year, which has kept many young adults from going to college. The parents I spoke with confirmed that the experience of dealing with FAFSA was truly a nightmare - and those are the families that managed to navigate it.  Thank you to our financial aid team who did an excellent job preparing and delivering financial aid offers amidst a crisis that some have called more significant than the pandemic for higher education.

Our financial aid team worked in collaboration with staff in Information Services, which was one of many great collaborations this past year. Our Marketing and Communications team, working with our Enrollment, received national recognition for website excellence in graduate student recruiting, our Events team working across campus elevated the professionalism of our events, new staff in Finance and Administration are helping to facilitate ongoing work between Human Resources and Payroll, and our improvements in Shaw dining services reflect our partnership between Sodexo and Student Affairs.

This past week was also filled with retreats in preparation for the new academic year. The faculty retreat highlighted their depth of commitment and support of students, ranging from their approaches to AI (Artificial Intelligence) and current events in classrooms to appropriate and effective ways to help ensure student success. Faculty spent time talking about their new approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their peer review process, which reflects a forward-looking and thoughtful approach to valuing and supporting all of our students. Like all the great collaborations we have among our staff, faculty work also happens in collaboration with each other and in partnership with staff across campus. Retreats like the one that included both Provost Debbie Tahmassebi and Vice President Jessica Brazell-Brayboy's staff are particularly important in designing the best possible experiences for students and to talk about activities, progress, and remaining steps toward making our student value propositions a reality.

This year, more of our returning students are living on campus, with 50 more students living here than last year and all 5 residence halls open – the first time since fall of 2019. This means we have opportunities for an even more vibrant campus experience. The more time students spend engaged with campus life, the more opportunities they have to take advantage of experiences that are unique to Westminster.

In case you need a refresher, student value propositions arise from the work done on our strategic positioning efforts, called Westminster 150. The “150” refers to our sesquicentennial, or the 150 years since our founding, which we’ll start celebrating next year. More about that in a few minutes.

Westminster 150 led to the development of WestX, which is the name we’ve given the distinctive academic journey that we provide to undergraduates. Thank you to everyone who continues to advise and support our students, helping them choose pathways and succeed in Learning Communities, encouraging them to design their program as appropriate, and showing them how their knowledge translates to action. WestX provides structure and direction; our student value propositions identify our unique commitments and opportunities for students to learn in and from the environment, develop a personal approach to wellness, learn empathetic, collaborative, and inclusive leadership, and strengthen career confidence.

I’ve been talking about our student value propositions as experiences that all Westminster students will have, which I see as something we aspire to rather than a checklist of activities required for graduation. They are differentiators that we see as valuable and which students often seek. And if students don’t seek them, we should encourage, support, and create the expectation that they will be part of the Westminster student experience. There may be no penalty for students staying in their rooms all year and only leaving them to get food or go to class, but we have a range of opportunities, from working in the garden to conducting fieldwork, that students should be encouraged to explore.

For experiences to constitute learning, they must lead to new understanding, knowledge, or abilities. One of our greatest strengths lies in the many ways we encourage, guide, intentionally build and practice reflection in our students' lives.  We don’t need to count how many hikes a student takes, or how many recipes they try from the new Griffin Gourmet Healthy Cooking Workshop, whether they’ve held an ASW (Associated Students of Westminster) position, or if they’ve studied away.  We do need to encourage students to stretch themselves, take advantage of the opportunities we provide, and learn from their experiences. One conversation with students who have taken a May Study Travel Experience should be enough to convince you of their impact, whether from studying island formation, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture in Hawaii or walking forested trails and exploring art museums while Trekking the Camino in Spain.

We need to be confident in the value we provide students both in and out of the classroom and how our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion contributes to the student experience's value. At Westminster, one place of distinctiveness can come in students of all ability levels and demographic groups experiencing and learning from opportunities afforded by Utah’s natural landscape. We know, for instance, the positive and lasting effect of our outdoor programs on first generation students, whether during orientation, a day trip, the semester-long Westminster Expedition, which left yesterday, or the Outdoor, Education, and Leadership (OEL) Field Semester, which launches another cohort this weekend. Our goal is to make an outdoor experience affordable for all students, as well as becoming known for making the outdoors accessible for historically excluded and marginalized populations.

Our focus on wellness isn’t new; we already embed content and activities into curriculum across Westminster. The new L.S. Skaggs Integrated Wellness Center creates even more possibilities for programming across the spectrum of wellness, and the facility makes support for student physical and mental health more accessible and appropriate for the professional level of care that they receive. It’s an important complement to the physical and educational activities that are part of the Eccles Health, Wellness, and Athletic Center (HWAC). Please look at the new facility when you can and plan to attend the grand opening on September 14.

Finally, the way we value leadership at Westminster is somewhat unique, as it demands engaging ethically and empathetically with different people and perspectives while cultivating skills of inclusion. Our students learn to apply and practice leadership in a variety of professional and social contexts, developing self-awareness, compassion, and the ability to empower others and inspire change.

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk about leadership with Eric Kelderman, a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He wanted to interview me about the president’s web page on our site and why we chose to include both a traditional CV and a longer, more personal story written by Autumn Thatcher from the Westminster Review. Eric said that he found some presidents being described in grandiose phrases like “visionary leader,” but that he found most president’s websites “banal,” or formulaic and boring. On the other hand, I revealed personal details that made me vulnerable and open to attack. Didn’t that concern me?

I told him that all the lines on a vita can’t tell you how someone is going to lead. The community a president serves deserves to know what motivates them, how they’ve come to have certain values, and what experiences have shaped their approach to leadership. I know that may not be traditional. For instance, I’m supposed to take credit for things like the amount of money I’ve raised, but I don’t act alone, and nothing impressive is possible without the great work of those alongside me. I could spend time bragging about our successes, but the work, especially in talking about things like equity and inclusion, is never done, so a leader needs to both celebrate progress while having the humility to recognize the distance yet to travel.

He asked me if that approach to leadership was taught somewhere. For instance, I must have attended a Harvard leadership program; did they teach it there? I said no, I haven’t been to Harvard. But I know that’s what we try to do at Westminster.

We are leadership guides for our students. Our skills will undoubtedly be tested this year, and supporting them, and hearing them, in all their passions and angst, may be challenging. Westminster students, staff, and faculty should increasingly be sought after as compassionate leaders who also know how to follow, and who are problem solvers who can build bridges. I’m confident that we’re up to the task, and I’m proud to be here with you tackling it.

Finally, this fall we’ll be preparing for a year of sesquicentennial celebration. We have the chance to tell our story, our evolution as we’ve responded to our communities’ needs and the challenges of our times, and to affirm our values and distinctive character. In speaking with a small group of faculty and staff last spring, Westminster was described as “pushing a little harder,” “asking hard questions,” and “having a lot of nerve.” They defined the Westminster experience as “giving permission to be curious,” “learning through relationships,” and “different by design.”

These are more than phrases; they are us. I look forward to your collaboration and engagement in celebrating all that we have been and what we are poised to become. We’ll be sharing a sesquicentennial calendar soon, and remember that conversations with Cabinet during community time, lunches with me, and information in the Griffin Gazette are all great ways to stay updated. In the meantime, enjoy the anticipation and excitement of a new academic year.