Hall to hit the road, visit counties
Kermit L. Hall has moved into his new office at Utah State University, but he hopes to acquaint himself with a much larger work space before settling into the role of president of Utah’s land grant university.
This spring, Hall will spend more than a month touring the state with faculty and students to reemphasize USU’s role as the extension university in Utah and learn from people in the state how they might be better served, he said.
“I want to drive home the fact that we are an institution whose responsibility extends throughout the state,” Hall said. “We are an institution that has the opportunity to benefit each citizen of the state.”
Two tours are planned. The first, a month-long bus tour, will take Hall to every county in the state under the campaign “Raising the Benchmark at Utah State University.” Hall will stop in a different county every day to meet with community members, legislators, alumni organizations, USU supporters and media. He said he hopes by meeting these people he’ll be better able to help them and in return receive their support for the university.
He will also introduce himself to extension faculty, who have only met him via satellite broadcast. This is one of the most important reasons for the tour, said Weldon Sleight, director of Extension Services for USU. As a land grant institution, the university’s first mission is to take education to the people through extension services in each county and listen to and find solutions for their problems through research, he said.
Extension staff members all over the state represent the university without having any direct contact with the university itself.
“You have to remember, in Logan we’re only 20 miles from the Idaho border,” Sleight said, “which means the whole state is basically away from here.”
As Hall makes his way through Utah, he will be joined in each county for the day by two USU students and faculty members originally from the area, who will help acquaint him with the area and speak at high schools and other places in the community about the university’s mission and plans for the future.
“The student voice will be part of anything we do as an administration,” Hall said.
Students interested in representing their counties can contact Eric Olsen in the High School/College Relations office.
The Benchmark tour will be conducted once every several years. A shorter second tour, “Roads Scholars,” will be conducted annually.
Hall has organized an advisory board to identify key places and people to see in Utah and will yearly take new faculty and staff members on a four-day bus trip to visit them.
“It really shows Utah that we care,” Sleight said. “This university serves the entire state, so our faculty needs to be familiar with the entire state.”
Hall’s experiences at Ohio State University and North Carolina State University helped him form a vision of what a land grant university needs to be to a community, he said.
By touring the state he wants to learn what a land grant university needs to be for Utah communities, he said.