April 17, 2025

Thank you all for joining me during a very busy time of the semester. Think about the many campus events of just the last week or two: a presentation from Chasten Buttigieg as part of the Anne Newman Sutton Weeks Poetry Series and Presidential Sesquicentennial Speaker Series; a student-led panel on Gen Z leadership, a community hour Westminster birthday party and proclamation from Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, a special version of our Alumni Awards, tailgates and athletic events, Ride the Cyclone, Pride Week, and employee recognition events. These are only some of the April happenings; I apologize for not listing them all. Having numerous, competing events on campus is standard for Westminster. This year, though, seems different. Maybe, despite all the national talk of divisiveness on campuses, we’re collaborating more. Maybe, regardless of the attempts around us to suppress ideas, we’ve become even more creative.

Yes, we’re achieving so much under daunting conditions; I’ll talk more about those conditions later. First, let’s acknowledge what getting to this point takes. Faculty and staff leadership have exemplified thoughtfulness, creativity, and action, from facilitating the adoption of a new core curriculum to creating campus programming around wellness. We all understand the importance of attracting and retaining both undergraduate and graduate students, and I’m grateful for the more than 20 faculty who are working in partnership with our Admissions team to personally contact admitted students. Summer undergraduate and graduate enrollments are strong, and additional admissions events in the coming weeks will continue to build the entering class of the fall. Student Affairs and Athletics leadership and staff have been listening to student feedback and improving campus dining facilities and experiences, fostering student engagement, and working with Advancement and Marketing, Communications, and Events to both elevate campus experiences and draw new, wider attention to our good work. Expect improvements in our campus servery over the summer to be completed by the fall.

Several people and programs across Westminster have received incredible support from our events staff, which has generated both social and traditional media attention and helped drive record attendance at our events. We know the importance of student support and scholarships, which includes not only the great work of our Advancement team in securing funding but also their partnership with the business office and Financial Aid teams to improve our speed and efficiency in getting those scholarship funds to students. Our work is shared, and our successes are collective.

We deserve the positive attention we’ve been getting. Think about the success of last month’s Small Business Conference, which attracted not only 100 Westminster students, faculty and staff, but even more community attendees who participated in sessions in English and Spanish that focused on small and rural businesses, marketing, and artificial intelligence. Creating community was the explicit focus of a symposium last month, born from a partnership between our Westminster College of Arts and Sciences and the University of Utah School of Medicine. We are doing things unique to our region, and while they may be becoming scarce or impossible elsewhere, they are indispensable here.

The impact is tangible. In case you missed Audrey Clare’s presentation at the recent Staff Council meeting, look at the results from our most recent survey of graduating students. The results are similar for undergraduates and graduate students: 98% of students see value of their degree in helping them achieve professional goals; 92% of undergraduates participated in a professional experience, athletics, on-campus employment, community service, or a combination of these (and for graduate students, not shown here, 89% were satisfied with their program); 89% of undergraduates and graduate students report being employed, continuing their education, or participating in a service program after graduation; and 75% or more students reported that their Westminster experience contributed to their career confidence.

The impact on students is clear in their perceived value of a Westminster education, their engagement with it, and the outcomes in career progress and confidence. The value is also clear in financial terms; for instance, out of 14 colleges evaluated in Utah, a recent New York Times study ranked Westminster as first in economic mobility, which measures the likelihood that students who came from families in the bottom fifth of incomes moved to the top fifth after graduation. Carry these data points with you if you can. 

Career confidence, of course, is one of the student value propositions that we’ve been working to realize for all students. As you’re all likely familiar with at this point, these are our student value propositions:

  • All students will participate in outdoor learning activities so that they understand the importance of the natural world to human health and happiness.
  • All students will develop a personal wellness approach, so that they have the knowledge, skills, and commitment to thrive amidst stress, complexity, and ambiguity.
  • All students will apply their learning to leadership in a variety of social, community, and professional contexts, developing self-awareness, empathy, inclusion, and the ability to empower others and inspire change.
  • All students will engage in paid internships, scholarship, professional or clinical experience, or field studies so that they expand their application of knowledge, create career confidence, and boost earning potential.

We are making great strides for our students, but I’d also like us to recognize what we’re doing for each other because of your collaboration and creativity. Faculty and students, working with our facilities crew, are underscoring the importance of the natural world to our health and happiness by adding to the beauty, accessibility, and environmental health of our grounds and gardens. Look for new plantings and refreshed pathways in the fall. Our wellness approaches extend beyond Wellness Day to events like Chop and Chat. The great collaborations across campus exemplify the Westminster approach to leadership, which demands empathy, inclusion, and empowering others. And, consistent with our focus on building career confidence in students, our Human Resources team has called together a group of campus partners to work on an employee learning initiative, which complements plans in motion by Staff Council to present a staff retreat this spring that will contribute to our own professional development and career confidence.

A few minutes ago, I alluded to the daunting conditions under which we work. Westminster has certainly seen challenging times during its 150 years, but the challenges now go far beyond the campus. Our world is increasingly chaotic: whiplash from economic policies, deportations and canceled visas, federal programs and services cut, ideas banned, and histories erased. Most recently, we’ve seen the rapid dismantling of the Department of Education (DOE) under the latest executive order. Most people don’t know what the DOE does, but for us, the department plays a pivotal role in accreditation, which ensures consistency and quality of education, enforces civil rights, and both provides and administers federal funding to institutions and to students.

Westminster’s federal funding as an institution is concentrated mostly in our Tax Clinic and McNair Scholars program, both of which provide vital services to students and communities. Perhaps more importantly, all federal aid to students, whether in the form of Pell grants, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants for undergraduates with exceptional financial need, work-study, and subsidized loans are all managed through the Department of Education. Our students, and our country, cannot afford to lose this support. Given the importance of student aid to constituencies on both sides of the aisle, advocacy for these programs should resonate with legislators, and their potential loss isn’t a cause for panic at this point.

Perhaps more relevant to Westminster is the fate of Harvard University – not because, as I’ve heard it rumored, a past president said Westminster should be known as “the Harvard of the West.” The current confrontation between Harvard and the federal government has the potential to affect all of higher education, despite the fact that Harvard is private and possibly financially independent. Here are the threats made this week: a $2.2B freeze on grants, loss of tax exempt status, federal control over campus leadership, review of all existing and prospective faculty for plagiarism, audit of all faculty hiring and related data, audit of all admissions data, and audit of the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership “for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” In reviewing the ideological composition of its faculty and students, “the university would be obliged to admit more students or hire more faculty explicitly on the basis of applicants’ ideological views.” As the New York Times has pointed out, “it is literally impossible to comply with this order — to eliminate all ideological litmus tests while imposing more ideological litmus tests.” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in an open letter on Monday: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” But that’s exactly where we seem to be headed.

Harvard will fight its battles in court and marshal its vast resources in its own defense. While that plays out, have our own work to do. At every opportunity, we need to connect what we do at Westminster to the “practical matters of everyday life” in terms that are simple and accessible. We need to explicitly embrace politically diverse viewpoints as we confidently assert our value (Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities). Think of all the ways that Westminster matters to Salt Lake City. I know that when I had surgery earlier this year, I was relieved that my nurses were among the hundreds of Westminster nursing graduates in the region. I know the quality of care I will receive. Westminster alumni currently manage our institutional investment portfolio, and I’m confident in their financial expertise and ethics. Our award-winning teachers are bringing compassionate, effective, and appropriate pedagogy to our schools, and Westminster produces innovators and entrepreneurs vital to sustaining and advancing the very workforces that have captured the contemporary public imagination. Tell this to anyone who will listen.

We know our education and the core values that guide us are essential as we meet today’s challenges. Here’s how I’ve articulated them for years now: shared humanity; authentic and inclusive affirmation of individual identities; knowledge born of openness, questioning, discernment, and personal passion; and personal and professional growth. These values are intertwined, and they are under attack - easy to ridicule and distort, and complicated to explain and defend. But if we give up on them, we give up on higher education, we give up on democracy, and we give up on the future. I’m not ready to do that.

I don’t think our students are ready to give up on the future, either. Many of them are approaching commencement with excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism for their own futures. They are talented and brilliant ambassadors for the values we espouse. And this is perhaps the most important reason why celebrating our sesquicentennial is so important. We have survived, and we continue to prepare our students to thrive. As you talk with your family, friends, neighbors, community members, and representatives, share our successes with them. Bring them to the Student Showcase on May 2, so that they can experience for themselves the contributions of higher education that we can’t afford to lose.

And next fall, bring them to Westminster Weekend. We have completed 3 of 4 events in the presidential speaker series, which will culminate during Westminster Weekend in September with Jane McGonigal, author of Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things that Seem Impossible Today. Note that all of these events are co-sponsored, again illustrating the power of partnerships. To be clear, we have brought a presidential overlay, theme, and support to these events, but most of the vision and execution has come from Dr. Tamara Stevenson, Dr. Alicia Cunningham-Bryant, Dr. Ranjan Adiga, Sheila Yorkin, Elyse Correa, and Megan Taylor. They have been some of the best-attended events of the last several years.

Now is the time to draw strength from our past as we look to the future. I’d like to share a few comments from last week’s proclamation event: Around this time in April of 1875, when the Coyners gathered 27 prospective students in the basement of the First Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City , they had an audacious mission: establish a premier, progressive collegiate institute in a region largely inhabited by the Ute and Navajo peoples, emigrants working in mining and railroads, US soldiers and travelers headed for the California Gold Rush, and, of course, settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As those early students and educators conspired in that Presbyterian Church basement, what were they thinking?

Westminster, known then as the Salt Lake Collegiate Institute, set out to be something different. They would follow the lead of Oberlin College, another Presbyterian institution, which was the first college in the country to offer education to both women and men. They believed in the power of education to elevate humanity. Although they hoped that education would lead students to follow a nondenominational Christian god, they wouldn’t demand it. They did demand independence of church and state, equal opportunity, and inclusion. Yes, that was radical for their time. It might be considered radical in our time as well.

Since 1875, we have understood the promise and power of education that is personalized, progressive, and inclusive. We have become indispensable not only to our students, but to the communities, workplaces, and civic organizations that they come to serve and lead in the Intermountain West and beyond. We remain decidedly different, small by design, and perhaps still audacious: proudly independent, enduring in value, and bringing people together to respond compassionately and effectively to the challenges and opportunities of our times.

Thank you for your collaboration, creativity, and commitment to supporting the education of our students, and for showing them strength, stability, and leadership. I’m honored to be with you on this journey.

Regards,
Beth Dobkin
President