The State of Utah has a new President. Here’s who will be heading up Logan University starting this summer.
The Utah Board of Higher Education announced the new president Friday in Logan after two days of meetings and discussions.
(Utah State University) Finalist candidates for President of Utah State University, from left: Kenneth White, Elizabeth Cantwell, and Rodney Bennett.
Logan • More than six months after outgoing President Noelle Cockett announced her resignation, Utah State University will soon have a new leader.
Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell has been put in charge of the university beginning this summer, as Cockett’s retirement takes effect. Cantwell was announced as Utah’s new president late Friday during a meeting of the Utah Board of Higher Education. The board held a brief meeting and voted unanimously for Cantwell to lead the university.
The new president was in Logan to celebrate the new appearance and entered a ballroom at the Taggart Student Center to great applause.
“I’m enormously grateful to the board for their trust in me,” Cantwell said onstage shortly after his election. “I’m going to do everything in my power to get to a place that was basically made beautiful by President Cockett and move.” We all have a truly incredible future for Utah State University and the state of Utah. “
The Friday afternoon announcement came after an hours-long closed session earlier in the day. An agenda from the Board of Higher Education indicates that the Board was scheduled to meet and question the finalists from 7:30 am to about 4:30 pm, when the announcement was made.
Cantwell succeeds Cockett, who was appointed USU President in 2017. During her six-year tenure at Logan’s helm, the university saw several campus sexual misconduct lawsuits, including harassment within USU’s piano department and the treatment of a former soccer player who delivered a speech by a coach and a police chief about sexual assault and chronicled the failure to address sexual violence on campus.
The latter led to a Justice Department investigation that concluded that the state of Utah had systematically failed to address campus sexual assaults dating back to 2013.
Recent safety issues on the Utah state campus were among the many topics discussed during a forum with the three USU presidential finalists earlier in the week.
According to her biography, published by USU, Cantwell is currently the University of Arizona’s senior vice president of research and innovation. Her responsibilities include overseeing the university’s UA Tech Park, a large research park in Tuscon that contributes $1.7 billion to the local economy.
This is breaking news that will be updated.
