Road Warriors

U leaders traded their campus offices for a tour bus this summer, leading two multi-day road trips across Utah as part of the U’s 175th anniversary celebration. The journeys took them from Logan to St. George, with stops at partner institutions, businesses, and military facilities to strengthen collaborations and showcase the U’s statewide influence.

“I want us to be a university with impact. We have a vision and a plan for the future, and it’s not much different from what we said 175 years ago,” U President Taylor Randall HBA’90 said during a dinner with alumni in St. George. “It’s a moment of reinvention and re-anchoring ourselves on some of the basic principles of the past.”

The tours highlighted Utah’s interconnected higher education ecosystem, with stops at Weber State University, Utah State University, Utah Tech, Southern Utah University, and even BYU’s Creamery.

“I believe there are ways for us to succeed, as well as have every other institution in the state succeed,” Randall said during a breakfast meeting with Weber State President Brad Mortensen PhD’09.

Geoffrey Landward, commissioner of higher education, joined portions of the tour and praised the collaborative spirit. “We have a real opportunity to make some strategic changes to how we design and operate as a system of institutions that are unified in their vision of providing the best higher education for students,” he said.

The trips also included visits to Hill Air Force Base, the Great Salt Lake research site, and various Utah businesses, demonstrating the university’s commitment to partnerships across sectors and regions.