President Elizabeth Cantwell answers the question “who are we as a university?”

Her aim this year is to listen. 

“You never come in as a president to an institution like this and say, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ The community tells you what’s needed.”  

Elizabeth “Betsy” R. Cantwell sat down in her office as Utah State’s 17th president on Aug. 1. Although typically a slow process, Cantwell’s onboarding happened quickly, taking only four weeks beginning to end.  

“I really wanted to start before the academic year started, so I could at least know how to get to work and where to park so I didn’t look like a complete idiot,” she said. “It was really fast, and I just had to take a deep breath and wade in.” 

Cantwell recognizes she is new, so in order to best serve the university, she will be implementing listening sessions for students and faculty to participate in.  

Listening sessions will ask three key questions: Where do you think we should be going in the future? What are you worried about that might stop our forward motion? What do you think President Cantwell should know that no one has the courage to tell her?  

“There’s some really serious stuff going on, but there’s also serious stuff going on in the lives of students. You’re in a change period that history has rarely seen, and you guys are going to be the ones that are the next generation of leaders. So it did look to me like being a president was the highest level of service in higher education,” she said.  

Cantwell has a long and varied history and has worn many hats. She has worked for NASA. She has worked in national defense. She is now continuing her journey within higher education.  

 “When my fourth kid was doing college interviews, it really began to look to me like the mission of higher education was more important — probably the most important mission in the U.S.,” she said. “So I moved into higher education, and I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve worked at two very different but incredible universities, and I’m more and more convinced about this.”  

Moving to Logan from Tucson, Arizona, Cantwell has worked at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University.  

While originally from Boston, she has spent significant time all over the country. She attended high school in the heart of New York City, and received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Chicago. She then moved to California, “because that is what everyone wanted to do in those days,” to work and rethink her life before receiving a second bachelor’s degree in engineering.  

Cantwell wants to hear students’ voices and opinions as she familiarizes herself with her role as the leader of the university. She wants students to take matters into their own hands.  

“It’s not just administration or faculty that are in charge of making you safe,” she said. “You have some say and control, as students, as well in looking out for each other in a very functional way — not just your friends or people you like, but people walking down the street. It’s really imbuing this culture of responsibility for the people on either side of you, whoever they are.” 

Cantwell spoke on the mental health of students and her role in providing resources to those who are struggling. Her goal is to help students recognize their own resilience and come to terms with the fact that life is anxiety-inducing, but there are still moments of joy and satisfaction.  

Her advice is to find something simple every day to ground yourself to.  

“I am really serious about this,” she said. “We live in an incredibly complicated world. It is not getting less complicated, it is getting more complicated. It is really a challenge for our brains to manage to train ourselves to find little pieces of joy everyday. Intentionally lean into it. Just 30 seconds or 10 seconds makes all the neurological differences in the world. It can be so highly varied, but it’s about training your brain to have those moments as well. That’s a huge piece of surviving and thriving in the world where we live, where it’s pretty hard to take a deep breath and relax all that often.”  

Cantwell said the majority of her job is to set the stage and answer the question, “Who are we?” on behalf of the university as a whole.  

“I would really like to see this campus be able to become a place that is more comfortable and has a sense of belonging, associated with all of us feeling like we have authority to take care of one another,” she said.   

Cantwell went on to explain that a look into infrastructure, how curriculum is delivered and how faculty understands whether students are well-equipped to get jobs upon graduation is necessary to the job.  

“I think that as we have seen in the last ten years, in particular in higher education, bad things can happen on college campuses,” she said. “It’s my job to be as worried about that as I am focusing on the upside. I think we are in a pretty good place. I know there have been things to happen on this campus. I look at what we’ve put in place in the last couple years. That doesn’t mean we’ve done everything that we need to do, but I’m particularly interested in how we create a culture so when you come here, you become part of a larger team.” 

Cantwell looks to the future and all that can be accomplished not only as a university, but also as a community.  

“I don’t want to see a lot of mourning the past, because we don’t have time for that. We have to make the future good. We can’t let it do things to us, we have to make it happen,” she said.  

And with that, she struck a power pose for a photo, shook my hand and walked back to her office to complete her first day as USU’s 17th president.