USU Summer Updates From Interim President Alan L. Smith

Editor's note: the message below was sent to all employees on Monday, June 23, 2025.

Dear Colleagues,

I hope you are having a good summer. Though it is relatively quieter at USU since commencement season, there is plenty of activity as we offer summer courses, pursue our writing and research, plan for the coming academic year, and revisit various hanging projects. I know many of you are balancing this with vacations and family time. The change in pace and focus is well earned—please make the most of the opportunity to be productive and recharge.

I write to offer some updates. First, we continue to progress on our strategic reallocation planning in response to HB 265. In early May, I shared our draft plan with you and later in the month we addressed some technical items of feedback from the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education. I then presented the plan to the Utah Board of Higher Education (UBHE) on June 6. UBHE offered contingent approval of our plan. They would like further information on how our reinvestments will amplify instructional activity, which I will present to the board later this summer. In the meantime, we will review our proposed disinvestments and reinvestments to ensure that we are optimizing our instructional capacity. As we further tighten up our plan, we will update our website where appropriate, including the plan documents themselves.

Though our plan will continue to evolve, the focus of our energy will now begin shifting from planning toward implementation. Where implementation work ties to the development of new academic programming, this will be handled within the academic colleges and involve our faculty experts. Where the work ties to operational or business functions, the appropriate administrative and expert teams will address those. In short, this work will be highly distributed in nature.

I will soon pull together a steering group that includes administrative, academic, and technical representation to ensure general oversight and collaboration as we proceed. Deans and department heads will be your points of communication within academic units as implementation work in specific areas moves forward. I ask for your patience as we proceed with a very complex process. Please also understand that certain elements—particularly reinvestments—cannot proceed until we ultimately receive legislative approval of our plan.

The college mergers that were announced as part of our strategic reallocation plan will officially be in place July 1. Many particulars of these mergers will be worked out over the coming academic year within the respective college communities. However, I am pleased to announce the names of the colleges here. I know this has been of great interest to you, and I thank you for your patience as my leadership team has navigated various interests of the state, our funders, and others tied to these mergers.

The merger of the colleges of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Science moving forward will be known as the College of Arts and Sciences. Embedded within the new college will be the Caine School of the Arts and we are working with the Caine family on a major gift to continue our legacy of excellence in the arts. Also, our new Center for Civic Excellence, housed in the Provost’s Office and supported by ongoing dollars from the Utah legislature, will interface with the College of Arts and Sciences in advancing our forthcoming general education revision. With our new college, we have considerable potential to develop creative, coordinated efforts that amplify student success and opportunity. I will look to all of you to be sure that we reach this potential.

Similarly, there is tremendous potential to bridge expertise and generate creative programming and research collaborations through the merger of the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences with the S.J. and Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources. The merged college will be known as the S.J. and Jessie E. Quinney College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Moreover, I am pleased to announce a $5 million gift from the Janet Q. Lawson Foundation to create the Janet Lawson Endowed Deanship for this college. The Quinney and Lawson families enthusiastically embrace our new direction, and we are deeply grateful for their partnership as we move forward.

Finally, I share that the set-aside for annual raises that was to focus on those in low salary bands has been used to good effect. Prior to this year’s raise cycle, 88.7% of our salaried employees made at least $43,000 or at least at midpoint for those salary grades where the midpoint is lower than this amount (i.e., grades A through D). Following the raise cycle, we now have 94.5% at these thresholds and additional employees have received raises to better align with their expertise and accomplishment. Given the modest resources available to us, we are pleased to have made this progress. Be assured that we will continue to seek ways to elevate compensation to meet worker needs and be competitive in the employment marketplace. As I have shared before, our people are the most valuable resource in fulfilling our important mission. I greatly appreciate the effort and commitment that each one of you bring to USU!

One day I will write you a short email. That day was not today, but I thank you for reading, for your outstanding contributions, and for your resilience during unusual times for higher education. Let us meet the challenge by staying focused on the long horizon and keeping our commitment to students and our Utah communities at the forefront.

Sincerely,

Alan L. Smith

Interim President