Continuum

During one summer in the mid-1960s, John Warnock toiled away at a tire store in Salt Lake City, recapping old tires with new tread. It was difficult work: Grind off the old tread, apply adhesive, carefully align new tread on tire, seal the new tread. Repeat all day long. It was loud and hot and uncomfortable. And the tire shop gig just wasn’t working out.

Warnock was just finishing up his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Utah, but his job prospects as a fully credentialed mathematician seemed uncertain. Sure, he could teach, but that wouldn’t provide much more cash than recapping old tires, and he wanted to provide for a family one day. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy. I’ve almost got a master’s degree in mathematics. I need to get a good job,’ ” Warnock now says.

He shot out a resume to IBM, and the company snatched up the young mathematician and sent him to a couple of different computer schools around the country for training. Once he devoted himself to computers, nothing would ever be the same.

Warnock BS’61 MS’64 PhD’69 has changed the way people interact with technology. He co-founded Adobe Systems, Inc., one of the most successful companies in America. His awards and honors have included the U’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1995, the American Electronic Association’s Annual Medal of Achievement Award (along with Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke) in 2006, the 2008 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and in 2010, the Marconi Prize, the highest honor for work in information science and communications.

The University of Utah’s John E. and Marva M. Warnock Engineering Building was completed in 2007 and provides some of the country’s most advanced engineering classrooms and facilities. (Photo by August Miller)

The son of a prominent attorney, Warnock grew up in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, Utah, along with his older brother and sister. He attended Olympus High School, where he had a singularly undistinguished and completely average high school career. Today, he would probably be labeled “unmotivated.” He expressed a passing interest in engineering, but a high school counselor told him that he had zero chance of being a successful engineer. He didn’t have a head for math.

Ninth-grade algebra was a disaster. He just didn’t understand mathematics, and he failed the class. But a math teacher at Olympus took an interest in him. “I had an amazing teacher in high school who, essentially, completely turned me around,” Warnock says. “He was really good at getting you to love mathematics, and that’s when I got into it.” When Warnock left high school, he was pulling straight A’s in math.

He attended the U after graduation—in part, because that’s what everyone else was doing. “Almost everybody at that time who grew up in Utah went to the University. My dad went to the University, and my mom went there for a while.” In college, Warnock was, in his words, a “mediocre” student. He says that he’s fairly certain professors viewed him as one of those students who was solidly in the middle of the pack. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy, and went on to graduate school at the U, finally managing to keep his grades up.

While working on his master’s degree, Warnock in 1964 solved the Jacobson radical, a rather complicated problem in abstract algebra that had remained unsolved since being posed in 1956. “I got swept up in the problem after I read about it in a book by [mathematician] Nathan Jacobson, and thought very hard about it for about one and a half years,” he says. “My thesis advisor worked through the write-up, and it was submitted and accepted for publication in the Transactions of the American Math Society.”

Soon after, in 1965, Warnock met Marva Mullins BS’66, who also was a student at the U. They dated for only five weeks and were married in September. “I knew right away that she was the one,” he says.

Armed with his master’s degree and a new sense of purpose, he got the job with IBM and then returned to the U, where he received a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1969. Warnock has said that he holds the dubious distinction of having written the shortest doctoral thesis in University of Utah history. That 1969 thesis outlined the “Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination.” In layman’s terms, the algorithm assists a computer in its attempts to render a complicated image by breaking the image down into smaller parts that the computer can handle.

During his doctoral studies, Warnock also began working with ARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, on part of a government-funded contract granted to Evans & Sutherland, a University-based start-up that was founded in 1968 by two leading professors in the U’s Computer Science Department, David Evans BA’49 PhD’53 and Ivan Sutherland. Most of the company’s staff members were current or former students. ARPA was designed to promote technological breakthroughs and big-picture thinking (initially to counteract work done by the Soviets) using small research teams. At Evans & Sutherland, Warnock first began to work on ideas for a computer language that would allow computers and printers to talk to each other. “The University was a very special place in the late 1960s,” Warnock recollects. “With the ARPA contract that Dave Evans had, he was able to attract Ivan Sutherland and Tom Stockham and some of the really great researchers from around the country, and the group at Utah was just incredibly creative and really invented a lot of computer graphics as we know it today.”

Warnock left Evans & Sutherland in the late 1970s and became a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), in California. The center was doing some of the more cutting-edge computer graphics research at the time, and Warnock worked on interactive computer graphics projects that would shape the way computers would evolve over the next three decades. “Essentially, Xerox really invented the personal computer the way we know it today, with the use of graphical user interface, and the use of type and laser printers,” Warnock says.

At Xerox, one of Warnock’s colleagues was Geschke, head of PARC’s Imaging Sciences Laboratory. The pair were like-minded idealists and innovators, intent on solving some of the thorniest problems in computer graphics. They had a particular interest in tackling a solution to computer-generated typefaces and images. At the time, it was virtually impossible for a computer to render a smooth, aesthetically pleasing typeface or picture, let alone send the image to a printer. The two scientists eventually developed InterPress, a printing protocol that allowed computers and printers to communicate.

But Xerox balked at Warnock and Geschke’s brainchild. The duo tried to convince Xerox executives that the system they had developed would be the wave of the future. Xerox wanted to make it a proprietary form, while Warnock and Geschke believed that InterPress would be better put to use in the marketplace, where it could become standard on its own. After two years of lobbying by the scientists, Xerox preferred to just sit on the idea. “They decided that they weren’t going to adopt what we had worked on, [and] they weren’t going to let the world know about it,” he says. “We thought that was crazy.”

Warnock and Geschke decided to make a go of it on their own, and they left to found Adobe Systems in 1982. One of their first technological breakthroughs was PostScript. Built on what they had learned with InterPress, PostScript paved the way for computers and printers to efficiently swap information, and it was developed for Apple’s LaserWriter printer in 1984.

Before Adobe’s PostScript, printing and publishing were solely the domain of companies that could afford expensive printing presses. To have anything printed in appreciable quantities required copious amounts of ink and large clattering machines that would take up the better part of a spare bedroom—even for the smallest machines. It was a process dating back to the earliest days of printing, largely unchanged. But Adobe’s new creation kicked off the desktop publishing revolution.

Adobe Systems co-founder and U alum John Warnock relaxes inside the whimsical interior of the Blue Boar Inn that he and his wife, Marva, own in Midway, Utah. (Photo by Tom Smart)

Adobe’s early days were rough. The Internet was just taking off, and Adobe’s own management team was at odds with each other over where the company fit in the computing spectrum. Then, in 1991, Warnock wrote a research paper about a program he dubbed “Camelot” (during Adobe’s formative years, programs were often given code names). The paper outlined an early version of what would later become the Portable Document Format, or PDF. For the first time, an electronic version of a document could be searched, reviewed, and sent to another user. The fonts in a PDF are preserved—what you see, the receiver will see. It allowed legal or business documents to be easily swapped between computers.

The PDF put Adobe on the map. Over the past two decades, the PDF format has replaced much of the flow of paper documents between users. Other revolutionary products followed at Adobe, including Illustrator and Photoshop, the latter of which has become an industry standard for graphic design work. Adobe is now a billion-dollar company and the world’s third-largest software developer for personal computers. Warnock stepped down as chief executive officer of Adobe in 2001 but still serves as co-chairman of the board, with Geschke.

These days, Warnock devotes much of his time to his other interests. He began collecting rare books in 1986, starting with the purchase of a 1570 edition of Euclid’s Elements from a bookstore in London. In 1995, he started a company called Octavo. The idea of the company was to sell CDs with high-resolution scans of the books. “We scanned some of the great books from the greatest libraries in the world, as well as a lot of the books I own,” he says. “The company was not successful for a number of reasons, but I had all the book files.” So he created the website rarebookroom.org to showcase the scanned images and make these rare books readily available to anyone with a computer and Internet access. The site now features more than 400 volumes.

Warnock’s other passion is Native American art. Over the years, he and Marva would often travel to the Four Corners region with their three children to visit Native American sites, and the trips sparked an interest in American Indian art and culture. “We started collecting casually, maybe 10 or 12 years ago,” he says. “We think the early history of the United States is interesting, and the art produced by Native Americans is incredible.”

U alumni John and Marva Warnock, shown here at their Blue Boar Inn in Midway, divide their time between California and Utah, where they also have a home in Deer Valley and ski every winter. (Photo by Tom Smart)

The Warnocks’ collection began with baskets and pots and has since grown to include hundreds of items, including moccasins, shirts, and beadwork, from more than two dozen Native American tribes. The collection has toured the country in many exhibits, including one at the University of Utah in 2010, and a number of the pieces may end up going to Paris for an exhibit in 2014.

The Warnocks also have devoted attention to their home state in other ways. In 2003, the couple announced a major donation to the University of Utah, providing the funds to kickstart construction on the John E. and Marva M. Warnock Engineering Building. The 100,000-square-foot structure was completed in 2007 and provides some of the most advanced engineering classrooms and facilities in the country.

The Warnocks, who have a home in Deer Valley, still hit the slopes for skiing every winter. And they own the celebrated Blue Boar Inn in Midway, which also keeps them busy in Utah.

It’s been nearly a half-century since John Warnock spent that summer recapping tires. Thirty years after founding Adobe, he shrugs off his success and offers up one of his characteristic understatements: “We sort of learned as we went. And it turned out all right.”

— Jason Matthew Smith is a freelance writer in Salt Lake City and a former editor of Continuum.

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Luise Poulton casually holds out the small, unassuming—even plain-looking—book. It lacks the exquisite line drawings, the delicate rice-paper pages, the elegant typeface, and even the literary credentials of many of the other books in the University of Utah’s rare book collection.

“It’s a tiny little book. It’s not very fat, it’s not very tall, and it’s very unprepossessing. The paper isn’t particularly great,” says Poulton BA’01, the rare books manager at the U’s J. Willard Marriott Library. “There’s nothing fancy about it.” But this book is likely the most valuable of the 80,000 pieces in the University’s rare book collection. It’s a treasure among treasures, all of which visitors are free to handle, touch, and read from cover to cover.

That includes this deceivingly valuable little Book of Commandments, or a surviving original of Galileo Galilei’s Dialogo, or the first novel Charles Dickens wrote (at age 25), or a tome of sacred Buddhist writings from China printed in 1440, 10 years before Gutenberg’s famous press.

“Here, you want to hold a million dollars?” Poulton says as she hands over the palm-sized Book of Commandments, written in 1830 and containing Mormon church founder Joseph Smith’s description of what he said were his revelations from God. The book, which sat in his brother Hyrum Smith’s library, was donated to the U by LDS Church leader John M. Whitaker in 1969. The U Rare Books Division also has one of only two known copies of the Book of Mormon inscribed by Joseph Smith; The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints owns the other. But the Mormon pieces are, by far, not the only storied stories.

The Marriott Library is home to one of the top rare book collections west of the Mississippi. The books are shelved in the library’s “inner sanctum,” a 7,000-square-foot, humidity-controlled, secured vault kept cold—between 58 and 62 degrees—and dark, with posted signs demanding, “Lights Out! Lights Out!” Stretching 120 feet long by 80 feet wide, the vault houses the world’s third-largest collection of Arabic papyrus, the largest collection of medieval facsimiles in the state, and the largest collection of fine press and artists’ books in the region. The books are brought to the vault after cataloguing in a “staging area,” but they don’t stay in the vault.

Poulton’s strong belief is that anyone who desires should have access to the collection—from a leaf of the Gutenberg Bible printed between 1450 and 1455 to Isaac Newton’s first-edition Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, an “extremely valuable book” that was printed in 1687 and is worth up to a half-million dollars. Poulton describes her job as balancing security and access. She shoulders the task of safeguarding the books, a responsibility that she acknowledges makes her nervous and keeps her up at night. But just as important, she says, is ensuring access to the books and making them as available as possible. “And I love that. I love the idea that you don’t have to come in with a letter from the president of Harvard to see these books. I love it that anyone—anyone—can walk into that room and say, ‘I’d like to see this book,’ and they get to see it.”

While other universities and institutions around the world may have larger, more impressive collections, Poulton marvels that the University of Utah, a public university, has the collection it does. “This is not Yale’s Beinecke Library, this is not Princeton’s library that has two full copies of the Gutenberg Bible. This is not Oxford. This is not Bibliothèque de Paris. This is a state institution,” she says, “and we have these things.”

U student Matthew Scholl, left, examines a page of a Gutenberg Bible, with Luise Poulton.

The way Poulton speaks about the renowned collection reflects her own background. As a young ballet dancer working in New York, she realized she had advanced as far as she could and needed a degree, so she came to the U as a student in the Ballet Department but ended up switching majors and graduating in history. Of Rare Books’ latest exhibition, Fighting Words: American Revolutionary War Pamphlets, which took months to curate, she says with a dancer’s aplomb: “We want the end-product to look effortless, like any good performance, right?” She rattles off an intricate history of each book but in the next breath betrays a performer’s anticipatory excitement: “The props that I have are just so incredible.”

Poulton has worked at the Marriott Library for the past 20 years, including the last 15 with Rare Books, and her enthusiasm for the job is palpable. She wants everyone to have the sensory experience of holding a centuries-old book—to not just touch it while leafing through pages but to inhale the mustiness of a book’s scent, to hear the thick rustle of pages made from rag paper, to see the fine craftsmanship of books that were early printers’ pride and joy, to handle ideas that were revolutionary.

“To hold a copy of Common Sense, printed in 1776, that was held by hands in 1776, and most likely read out loud to other people in 1776, that’s a connection. That’s a very physical and visceral connection,” Poulton says. And anyone can have that experience, by visiting the Rare Books room during its regular hours, Monday through Saturday. A staff member usually supervises the visits.

The power of holding these books is unmistakable. “There’s just nothing like it,” she says. But equally powerful are the stories behind each book, and the paths of the books through history. Among the most compelling is that of the U’s copy of Galileo’s Dialogo. Only 1,000 copies of the book were printed in 1632. The book’s discourse on astronomy and Galileo’s contention that Nicholas Copernicus was correct in postulating that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the Earth drew the ire of the Catholic Church.

The church considered the book so dangerous that Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Inquisition, placed under house arrest until his death, and prohibited from publishing any future books. The Dialogo was placed on the Inquisition’s list of forbidden books and remained there until 1835. Most of the copies were destroyed. It is believed only about 200 copies survived, and somehow, some way, one of those copies made its way to the U, hidden away and changing hands throughout the centuries.

Other highlights among the scientific books in the U’s collection include Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, the oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today. The first-edition copy, also among the U’s most valuable at $185,000 to $200,000, was printed in 1482 by famous German printer Erhard Ratdolt. “This was his book,” Poulton says, pointing out Ratdolt’s “self-congratulatory blurb” on the first page, in which he describes the quality of work his shop produces. Or there’s the first-edition Novum Organum, printed 138 years later, in which Francis Bacon disagrees with Aristotle to set “the stage for a new way of seeing, studying, and understanding the world around us.”

The pieces are among the “big guns” in the U’s science collection, Poulton says. But the science collection is just one part of “a world-renowned archives,” says book dealer Ken Sanders, owner of Ken Sanders Rare Books store in Salt Lake City. There are “hundreds of significant collections housed at the library, any one of which could provide a student a master’s thesis and a lifetime of research,” he says. One of the U’s rare pieces, an aquatint by Karl Bodmer featured in the 1839 book by German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, is now on display at the Smithsonian through January 27.

But Poulton finds the simple stories of some of the books in the U’s collection to be as compelling as those of the grander works. She recalls curating an exhibition of 18th-century multi-volume herbal books. In one of the volumes, a dried plant had been pressed on a page that matched the picture of that plant. “This was at least a 200-year-old book,” Poulton says, “and who knows when that particular specimen was added in that 200 years and by whom—and why just that one, and why didn’t they keep going, or maybe they did and the rest fell out. So there’s the find. There’s this very personal touch, and then there are all these questions. So I love knowing. I also love the mystery.”

Like the discovery she stumbled upon in a lesser-known book given as a gift to a woman. Poulton doesn’t even remember the book’s title, but in it, she found an inscription by inventor Nikola Tesla. “I just flipped out,” she says. “I called one of my sisters and said, ‘You won’t believe this.’ ” Poulton’s students have had similar experiences. Just this fall, Poulton was giving a lecture on artist books, which are unique, newer books in the collection, mostly made in the 20th century. “One of those students was looking at a book smaller than a cell phone and burst into tears. I mean, lost it,” Poulton says. The text was about charity and quoted the medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides.

“I’ve had reactions like that often. It gets to be personal. … The smell, the touch, the sound really does have meaning to it. It’s the difference between getting an ‘I love you’ in an email and getting a hug in person,” Poulton says.

Emily Michelson, a history professor at St. Andrews University in Scotland who taught at the U from 2006 to 2009, says those stories and the experiences they elicit are extremely valuable. In Utah, she brought her students every semester to visit the Rare Books room. “It was enormously important for the students,” Michelson says. “Often the books were the oldest man-made objects they had ever seen, much less held.”

Poulton says she is always striving to expand the “depth and breadth” of the collection. “I have a wish list that’s five million lines long and a Microsoft-worth of money.” Besides expanding the collection, Poulton also is working to digitize many of its works so that readers can look at them online. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, given her desire for people to physically hold the books and equal wish for the greatest accessibility. She can’t help but think the early printers from centuries ago would feel the same way.

“I can see them saying on the one hand, ‘Wow, what a great idea,’ because part of the reason for Gutenberg developing printing with movable type was out of an obvious need for more copies of less expensive books. On the other hand, they did make a big deal about making what they produced beautiful.” Poulton—who doesn’t own a Kindle, has “no plans to get a Kindle,” and won’t use an iPad because it has no keyboard—can relate: “Texting is a great example. That’s not spelling,” she says.

Yet that modern-day dilemma is another example of what makes the rare books so intriguing. By handling and touching the books, it is easy to grasp that they are the reflection of real lives and real people who grappled with many of the same everyday circumstances that exist today. Their stories are rich, and the stories behind them even richer.

“The rewarding part is sheer selfishness,” Poulton says. “This is what I do. This is what I am surrounded by. To give students a context as to why they should care about some musty old books and see their reaction, that’s the most gratifying thing.”

—Kim M. Horiuchi is a longtime journalist and freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

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Expecting a new baby girl in early December, Katina Anthony and her husband, Chris, were both excited and worried. Already the parents of a 2-year-old boy, the couple has no health insurance, and they don’t know just how they’ll pay the hospital bill. “A delivery is like nine or 10 thousand dollars,” says Katina, who works part time as a night janitor for the University of Utah, a job that doesn’t qualify her for insurance benefits.

Her husband had been working for a small company that supports the construction industry, in a job that also lacked insurance coverage. Like many people, the couple found themselves living in an unfortunate financial gap: They couldn’t quite afford to buy private insurance, but still made too much to qualify for Medicaid. Katina says state workers advised her earlier this year that the only way the family could qualify for assistance was for her husband to quit his job. “Before that, they told me I could divorce my husband and live alone, and then I would qualify,” she says. “I was shocked. There’s got to be a better way.”

Katina Anthony and her husband, Chris, walk with their son Daniel in Salt Lake City. The new law would help the Anthonys, who lack health insurance.

By 2014, the young couple likely won’t have to worry so much. That’s when the major reforms in the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are slated to take effect, expanding access to health care to about 32 million Americans and potentially transforming nearly every aspect of the way health care is paid for and provided. “Overall, I’m happy about the Affordable Care Act,” says Katina, whose family would have access to coverage under the law.

Focusing on Core Values

Passed in early 2010, the Affordable Care Act is considered the most sweeping reform of the health care system since the implementation in 1965 of Medicare, a publicly funded insurance program for seniors over age 65, and Medicaid, the assistance program for low-income Americans. The new federal law’s provisions are intended to expand access to insurance, increase protections for consumers, improve health care quality, streamline care delivery, curb costs, and shift the focus in health care to prevention and wellness.

For providers like University of Utah Health Care and the U’s School of Medicine, understanding and preparing for the law’s reforms isn’t easy. The complex law has many ramifications and will likely have unintended consequences for consumers, providers, insurance plans, and governments. As a paradigm shift, the law is “huge,” says Vivian Lee, the U’s senior vice president for health sciences, dean of the School of Medicine, and the chief executive officer of University of Utah Health Care.

“What we are trying to do is focus on some of the core values and core principles of how we need to deliver care,” Lee says. “We’re working on the things that prepare us for the new world but also enable us to survive in the old world.”

And how exactly does an institution change? “That’s the million dollar question,” says Lee. “It’s a migration.”

A number of factors are driving the way the U’s health care system—and other providers nationwide —will address the law’s countless changes. Those include volatile national and state-level political and philosophical debates and the more practical realities of funding and personnel. Proponents say the law will provide critical relief to the more than 50 million uninsured Americans by providing access to health care at affordable prices. The supporters say tax credits and subsidies will help both businesses and individuals manage costs and that health care will be less expensive for all.

Opponents of the $900 billion law, however, see it as a government takeover of health care that infringes on states’ rights. They contend the law hurts businesses and unfairly meddles in the private financial decisions of citizens. Opponents also argue the law will cost more than projected, raising the federal deficit even while curtailing as much as $500 million in Medicaid spending and imposing new taxes.

Although passed by Congress, no Republicans voted for the law, and since 2010, more than 30 unsuccessful attempts have been made to repeal it. Twenty-six states, including Utah, and the National Federation of Independent Business also sued the government to stop the Affordable Care Act’s implementation, arguing that many of its mandates are too expensive for already strained state budgets. That particular legal battle was lost this past June, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law’s implementation, on a 5-4 vote.

That the debate over the Affordable Care Act is mired in politics is no surprise to Robert Huefner BS’58, a U professor emeritus of political science and former director of the U’s Governor Scott M. Matheson Center for Health Care Studies. Politics and government are in part about making choices between values, Huefner says.

Quinn McKenna, chief operating officer of University Health Care, says that “a redesign of the system makes sense.”

“Government programs tend to be those where you’re having to balance things that you can’t just balance with a cost equation. You get those kinds of concerns in health all the time,” says Huefner, who helped two Utah governors through major changes to public health programs during the 1960s. “A second reason is cost. Health care is now the second biggest cost of state government in the country, behind education, so that means it’s political just in terms of the tradeoff between financing a public service and maintaining acceptable taxes.”

Huefner predicts that even if the Affordable Care Act is ultimately repealed, the U.S. health care system won’t go back to where it was two years ago because the system—from individual doctors to government programs and institutions such as University of Utah Health Care— has already started to change. “Too much has happened, and they are already moving on it,” he says.

Medicaid Expansion

As the law now stands, some of the key—and controversial—provisions include Medicaid expansion to cover individuals with incomes below 133 percent of federal poverty guidelines, and a requirement that individuals, with some exceptions, have health insurance through public or private providers, or face a penalty. Businesses will be required to offer insurance or face a penalty. States must create health-insurance exchanges to allow consumers to easily shop for and compare health-insurance plans and costs. And insurance companies will no longer be able to exclude individuals from coverage because of preexisting conditions, or charge variable premium rates.

How the Affordable Care Act will play out in Utah depends in part on decisions made by Governor Gary Herbert and the Republican-dominated Legislature that controls the state budget. Census figures from 2010 show 411,926 Utah residents without health care. State health-department data project about 111,400 of those people would qualify for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Of those, about 53,000 would be newly eligible. The remainder are people who already qualify but have never enrolled in Medicaid, says Tom Hudachko BA’98, spokesman for the Utah Department of Health. That group of people is also likely to come onto the Medicaid rolls under the new law’s expanded provisions.

Helping the Uninsured

But Medicaid spending, which represents more than 21 percent of Utah’s budget, is already vexing lawmakers. State analysts project expanding the rolls could cost the state as much as $1.7 billion dollars between 2014 and 2022, despite continued federal reimbursements. The Affordable Care Act allows states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion plan, and it’s not yet clear what Utah will do.

At the University, Lee says the state ends up paying for uninsured people’s health care costs anyway, regardless of whether the federal law prevails. Some costs are “baked in” to insurance premiums paid by others, and the rest is covered through so-called charity care, meaning that the University’s health care system picks up the tab, she says. Last year alone, University of Utah Health Care spent more than $80 million of its $1.2 billion budget providing care to uninsured or underinsured patients, says Quinn McKenna, chief operating officer of University Health Care.

Lee notes that it’s far more costly for institutions, and individuals, if patients defer care until they reach a crisis point. “You’d rather have them on Medicaid, managed and seen in clinics, so they don’t come to the ER three weeks later,” she says.

If the new federal law continues on track, just how many of the uninsured would come into the U system as patients in 2014 with either private insurance or as part of expanded Medicaid isn’t clear. Both expanded Medicaid and private insurance rolls have the potential to bring some dollars back to the University, and that could cut the volume of charity care so that those funds could be redirected for medical education, direct care, and other uses.

Another uncertainty is what the rest of Utah’s health care market will do under the new federal law, Lee says. “If the rest of the market is receptive to these patients, then the distribution will be the same. If there are barriers put up for some of these patients, then more of them will come to us, because we take everybody.”

Vivian Lee, the University of Utah’s senior vice president of health sciences and dean of the Medical School, says the school’s class size must grow, to address the state’s physician shortage.

Either way, it seems certain that the demand for health care will grow. That has Lee, as dean of the School of Medicine, focused on making sure that Utah is training enough new doctors to meet the need. The U has the only medical school in the northern Intermountain region and is typically the main supplier of physicians for Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and northern Nevada. Nationwide, a shortage is predicted of at least 91,500 physicians by the year 2020. Utah’s own physician shortage is even more severe, Lee says. A 2008 Association of American Medical Colleges study found Utah currently has fewer than one primary-care physician per every 1,000 people. Only three other states have fewer physicians per capita, and it’s hard to close the gap quickly, because it takes nearly a decade to train a physician. “With the Affordable Care Act and the fact we are the fastest-growing state in terms of population, that means that it’s just going to get worse,” she says.

Training More Doctors

To address the shortage, U administrators want to use a two-step process to restore the number of students accepted into the medical school annually from 82 to 102, and then expand the enrollment to 122. In 2008, the school had to reduce its class size from 102 students to 82 due to cuts in federal funding that were not replaced by the Legislature. Increasing the annual class size, however, will require money, and that funding is a top priority for the U with the Legislature in 2013, says Jason Perry, the U’s vice president for government relations.

Lee says that the U Medical School gets about $26.5 million annually in funding from the state. Increasing the number of medical students to 122 will require a projected $12.2 million in annual funding. The U is asking state lawmakers to cover $10 million of those costs. A similar appropriation request was made, but not funded, in 2012.

Raising tuition to help cover expanded enrollment costs just isn’t an option, Lee says. “Our students come out with an average of $158,000 in debt,” she says. “You don’t want to increase tuition more, because then they will have more debt, which forces them away from primary care [careers] and pushes them toward the higher-paying specialties.” Primary care doctors are expected to be in high demand after 2014, because the Affordable Care Act seeks to place more emphasis on wellness care and prevention.

The federal law will also begin to change the way doctors and hospitals get paid, and that has administrators like McKenna concerned about the bottom-line costs of doing business. In addition, the law’s reforms require that more of the health care dollar be spent directly on patient care, and the government will give more scrutiny to care delivery to make sure benchmarks are met.

Chris and Katina Anthony shop for baby items, with their son Daniel.

University Health Care facilities and staff annually handle an average of 1 million outpatient visits and 27,000 inpatient admissions and surgeries, McKenna says. That care gets paid for fairly evenly through private insurance and publicly funded programs. Data from the past three budget years show that on average, Medicare payments make up about 32 percent of the budget, and Medicaid payments total about 13 percent. Commercial insurance and managed care programs represent another 46 percent of the budget, with 5 percent coming from other government programs and 4 percent from patients who self-pay.

Those percentages are bound to change after the new law’s implementation, but no one can yet project what the numbers will look like. “From a philosophical standpoint, no matter what health care reform looks like, we know we are going to get paid less for what we do,” McKenna says. “Our strategy is to ask ourselves, ‘How do we live on less?’ It’s not a bad strategy, and that’s why a redesign of the system makes sense.”

Redesign is what McKenna’s job is all about. For nearly five years, he has promoted initiatives to keep the U ahead of the health care reform curve through staff-driven redesigns of care delivery and the processes needed to support the health care mission. Both on paper and in practice, the initiative seems a match with many of the criteria outlined in the federal law’s reforms. It’s also helping the U health care system meet its own goals of bettering the patient experience, improving care quality and outcomes, and bolstering overall financial strength.

The work is already netting tangible results. One review of patient outcomes for individuals needing ventilator support found that U patients stayed on the breathing machines longer than those in many other hospitals. A performance excellence team—a group of system-management engineers working in concert with doctors and nurses—reviewed the treatment protocols, looking for ways to improve. Under the changes they proposed, the number of patients staying on ventilators longer than 48 hours has dropped by 27 percent. The amount of time patients remain hospitalized has also been cut by 2.7 days, and the number of ventilator-associated pneumonia cases has been reduced by 67 percent.

Overall, that has saved the U health care system $3 million, McKenna says. “That’s what we’re trying to do across the board. We’re looking across the system and asking, ‘Where do we have those kinds of opportunities to redesign the way we do things?’ ”

Poised for Reforms

So far, care redesign has been approached on a project by project basis, McKenna says. The next step will be to up the tempo of change and spread the initiative across the wider health care system—a move that will help the U better prepare for the federal law’s broad reforms.

No matter what changes the law brings, the main goal of the University’s health care system is to provide the highest quality of care, McKenna says. “Our goal, my personal goal, is, whatever we are doing, we’re going to make it better.”

Lee and McKenna believe the institution is poised to weather the reforms well. The proactive work already begun has helped to reduce or flatten costs in recent years. Utah’s smaller and generally healthier populations also play in its favor. “I’d say we’re in a pretty good starting position,” Lee says. “And I hope were a good model for the country.”

To help that happen, Lee has established a health care reform committee to study the law’s reforms and analyze what protocols are already in place to ensure the U system makes the best possible choices for the future on the uncertain road ahead.

“I can picture seven scenarios where we’re doing the right things, and we’re going to be just fine,” McKenna says. “I can also picture two or three scenarios where all bets are off, and we’re going to have to be wildly creative and [think] out of the box, more so than what we are doing now. I think that’s where the nervousness comes. Is it going to be the seven or the three?”

Regardless of which scenario unfolds, uninsured patients like Katina Anthony are hoping the law prevails and provides them with much-needed help. Her husband lost his job this past fall, and the couple hoped they’d qualify for Medicaid in time for the baby’s birth, so the bills can get paid and so Katina and the newborn would have a few months of care. “It’s ridiculous,” Katina says. “We don’t want to the be the ones who are living off the government, and Chris is out looking for a job right now, but this will help.”

—Jennifer Dobner is a former longtime Associated Press reporter and editor who now is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City.

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Here comes Sam Wilson, carrying a wild pig.

He plops the pig, which is mustard-colored and plastic, on a platform in the center of his classroom. It is the beginning of the 2012 Fall Semester, and the beginning of Wilson’s 35th year teaching at the University of Utah, and he is here to show his students how to draw.

Today the topic is triangulation, the technique of drawing, for example, a pig’s head by sketching a series of smaller and smaller triangles instead of the object’s natural curves. It’s a technique that will help the students draw what they actually see rather than what they assume they see, and the result is often messy. That’s okay, Wilson tells the students. “Be sloppy. Leave footprints. Show me you were alive when you drew it.”

Before they begin at their easels, he demonstrates at his own. “I’m going to do a couple of brief drawings,” he tells them, then pauses before he delivers his next line: “I’m going to draw underwear.” He pauses again, waiting to see if they’ve gotten his joke. This is quintessential Wilson; if there’s a pun to be made, he’ll make it, rounding it off with a smile that looks something like a grimace.

The students stand around him in a semicircle. “We’re after drawing as a verb, not a noun,” he tells them. That means working at it, again and again, and it means being willing to make mistakes. “Remember,” he says, “in the College of Fine Arts, everyone sees your blunders,” by which he means, basically, get used to it. Drawing, as a verb, means caring about the act of drawing—or painting or making a sculpture—as much as you care about the finished product.

It might even mean caring more about doing art than selling it.

Which brings us, now, to Wilson’s home studio, a few miles south of the U. He is standing amid so much clutter and inspiration and finished products and nearly finished products that it’s hard to find an uncovered surface. “I have the world’s largest collection of my work,” he deadpans. There are paintings and drawings stacked deep on shelves and on the floor; many of the works are crammed into corners of the room.

There are also plaster busts, of Mozart and Beethoven and St. Francis of Assisi; there is a mannequin wearing a bra and Foreign Legion hat; there are skeletons and photos of popes; there is a rooster, a banjo, a moose head. There is a cabinet of rubber heads, including one with a fake nose, eyeglasses, mustache, and a beret. This is the one he calls Groucho Marxist.

In Wilson’s paintings, Groucho Marxist is a stand-in for the artist himself, and indeed the name and the mask add up to the perfect Sam Wilson. Don’t take any of this too seriously, they seem to be saying.

Like the studio itself, the paintings are crammed full of an odd juxtaposition of images. Wilson pulls out one painting with a title that’s 15 words long in Latin, plus 30 more in English, which he translates as “All things change as the years go by.” The painting is populated by a couple dozen figures, including a host of Renaissance-era Florentines, a comic-strip Blondie, the Groucho Marxist, and the initials LSMFT (from the 1950s ad slogan “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”).

U art professor Sam Wilson stands amid some of his artwork at his studio in his home in Salt Lake City. He often juxtaposes various images, leaving viewers to derive their own interpretations.

Wilson likes surprises, so perhaps it’s no wonder that when he begins each painting, he has no plan and no message in mind. They usually begin with something realistic—a finely rendered drawing of a turtle, perhaps—and then Wilson’s subconscious takes over. Many of his paintings include monks and everyday folks, which he freely admits he has copied from Renaissance works of art. The paintings might also include copied illustrations from 1950s magazine articles, with titles such as “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” and perhaps a clown or a set of false teeth. The paintings are rendered in intricate detail, through a process of layering charcoal, pastels, and acrylics.

“He has his reasons for putting the objects together,” says his colleague, University of Utah art professor Kim Martinez BFA’98, “but he’s asking the viewers to come up with their own associations.”

Wilson sometimes calls his work “over-educated folk art,” and at other times “a neurotic conversation” or “these harmless dramas.”

He hates to be pigeonholed (he is, after all, a man who loves Italian Renaissance painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and also walks around a lot of the time chewing on toothpicks), but perhaps his art can best be described as pop art—not of the Andy Warhol variety but more Jasper Johns; art full of visual jokes about art itself. “They’re all legitimate historical things,” Wilson says about the art references in his paintings, “but I’ve redirected the truth of art history. It’s like I have a play with a lot of characters and I’ve mixed up the scripts; I have Hamlet quoting Puck.”

The titles of his works, often full of puns, add to the whimsy: He might refer to an “altar” ego, or “A Tension to Detail,” or the “Bisontennial.” Sometimes the titles are in Latin, or some approximation of Latin. Sometimes the titles go on for a hundred words or more.

His tendency to begin a painting without a roadmap of where it’s going to end up is “a product of a lack of discipline,” he says. But this is more self-deprecation than truth. His brother-in-law once figured out, for example, that one of Wilson’s paintings—a relatively small four-by-five-foot piece—took 450 hours to finish.

Wilson is a disciplined artist, comfortable with routines, and he has little patience or applause for what he calls T-ball art (anyone can do it), the kind of conceptual art in which the idea is sometimes more important than the execution. He is wary of celebrity culture, and museum and gallery curators who have too much power. “Contemporary art is too big a tent,” he says. “There has always been a balance between concept and content, and to me, it’s shifted excessively to the conceptual, at the expense of people making things. It’s getting to the point you’re denigrated if you make something.” And then, just to make sure you know that he realizes how he sounds, he adds, “Like every generation, Wilson’s gotten old.”

“I think my beef with contemporary art,” he says, “is their collar isn’t blue enough.”

Wilson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in Southern California, the son of two parents who never finished high school. His own high school career, he says, mostly centered on being cool. He gives a demonstration of what “walking cool” looked like in 1961: He strolls across his studio, slouching a bit and looking like someone who doesn’t care about anything very much.

His real name is Roger Dale Wilson; but one day when he was 5 his father looked at him and announced, “You look like somebody named Sam,” and that’s the way it has been ever since, except on his driver’s license and Social Security card and the Art Department list of faculty, where “Sam” is still in parentheses.

After high school, he enrolled in a community college and got a D in art history. He was married briefly in the 1960s and had one son. By the mid-1960s, Wilson was against the Vietnam War— and then he was drafted. He was sent to Vietnam as a sign painter, and when he came back home, his protestor friends thought he was too much a soldier, and his soldier friends thought he’d had too cushy a job in-country.

He enrolled in college again, and this time he tried harder. Here’s how he likes to tell it now, though: “You became an art major so you didn’t have to grow up too soon.” He eventually got bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from California State University at Long Beach.

The art degrees led to teaching art at his alma mater. There were also some side jobs painting the carousel animals at Knott’s Berry Farm, and cleaning the brushes of the matte painter for the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In 1978, he was hired by the University of Utah as a visiting artist, and then stayed on and became a faculty member. Along the way, he met and married his wife, Kristie Krumbach BFA’80.

Today, as a professor of art, he teaches beginning and advanced drawing, figure drawing and figure painting, and intermediate and advanced painting. “I’m probably the least structured teacher” in the Art Department, he says. Except in the beginning drawing classes, he says, he tends to not have a series of set assignments. “I think it’s my role to encourage the students to find their particular voice.”

University of Utah art professor Sam Wilson sits in a corner of his home studio, which is filled with some of the eclectic objects that inspire him in his work.

Over the past decade, he has also mentored five emerging artists through Art Access, a Salt Lake gallery that encourages and provides a venue for disabled and disadvantaged Utah artists. Art Access, which is part of VSA Utah, which in turn is an affiliate of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, occasionally couples these new artists with established artists.

“Sam is one of the kindest people I know,” says Ruth Lubbers, who retired in 2011 after 17 years as director of Art Access. “He puts on a really good act, like he doesn’t care. But he cares.”

The first artist Wilson mentored was Vojko Rizvanovic, a Bosnian war refugee whose injuries left him nearly blind. They first started working together in 2003, and the mentoring continues informally to this day. Rizvanovic BFA’05 is currently working on his master’s degree in fine arts at the U.

“He never says ‘Look at me, I’m the best,’ ” Rizvanovic says about his mentor. “But I’ve never seen anyone who draws that well, especially with colored pencils.” More than most observers, Rizvanovic has gotten an up-close view of Wilson’s work; because he is legally blind, he views both his own art and everyone else’s by using a magnifying glass. Many of the paintings in Rizvanovic’s MFA art show were made with art supplies Wilson donated.

Rizvanovic likes not only the mastery in Wilson’s work, but the spirit. “His art says, ‘Laugh, eat well, make friends, because tomorrow we will die. … Use your mind, make some jokes.’ ”

Wilson’s most public art pieces can be found at Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, where his 14 paintings of The Stations of the Cross line the cathedral walls. Wilson grew up Lutheran, which he defines as “an underachieving Catholic.” But he had spent 16 months in the 1980s helping to renovate the interior of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and when the diocese put out a call seeking someone to do the Stations, he applied. The paintings, which he completed in 1993, are in Wilson’s brightly colored, fractured style, but his usual irony has been replaced by a more mystical, darker reverence. Wilson chose to make each Jesus look different from the one before: Some look Hispanic, some Middle Eastern; all clearly show their pain. In 2010, Wilson was awarded the Cathedral’s Madeleine Festival Award for his artwork.

This painting is one of 14 Stations of the Cross that Sam Wilson did for the Cathedral of the Madeleine.

His cathedral paintings sparked his interest in the long history of church art in Italy. He and Kristie now travel there every year. Like the 15th-century Florentines he admires— Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi—he isn’t what he calls “a headliner,” the way a Michelangelo or a Masaccio was. By and large, he has made no effort to sell or promote his art, although he has shown his work in galleries in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. Former first lady Betty Ford bought one of his paintings at a gallery owned by a friend of his in Vail, Colorado. The piece was from his tromp l’oeil days, a watercolor featuring a paper sack, masking tape, and a seascape in the background. The title: Pull-tab Seascape in a 10-ounce Container.

“Part of selling art is building a reputation,” he says. “But I don’t want the responsibility of a reputation,” because that entails going to too many gallery receptions, he says. And, too, “the expenditure of time promoting myself isn’t worth it.”

He is happy to be holed up in his studio, or teaching his students to draw, or traveling to Italy with his wife, soaking in yet another fresco.

“I would rather do art,” he says, “than ‘be an artist.’ ”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based playwright and journalist, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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University of Utah President David W. Pershing stands in the shadow of a wind turbine, gazing up at the massive blades of the machine 300 feet above the sage and scrub brush of southern Utah’s high desert. On this fine June morning in the Escalante desert near Milford, Pershing, his two young stepdaughters—Tressa, 10, and Quincy, 13—and a coterie of administrators from the U are enjoying their tour of First Wind Milford’s power-generating facility. It’s a far cry from the marbled facade of the Park Building at the U campus, but Pershing and his fellow travelers are on a mission to familiarize themselves with the Beehive State’s distant corners, and to spread a message: The University of Utah isn’t just an urban school geared toward those who live between Ogden and Provo. It’s a school for students from Snowville to Rockville, and it’s precisely this message that Pershing has been pounding home at every opportunity during his statewide trip.

The Milford stop is one leg of an extensive odyssey across Utah dubbed “The Great Red Road Trip: Bringing the U to You.” Other jaunts took the new president to eastern and northern Utah in July, and Tooele County in August, all in an odd-looking, squat bus emblazoned with a large boot on the side.

About that boot. One thing you’ll notice about Pershing, particularly if you pass him on campus, is his choice of footwear: There’s no mistaking the distinct clop-clop of cowboy boots on concrete. Back home in his closet at the Rosenblatt House are a couple pair of sneakers, and buried back there somewhere are some hiking boots, but the cowboy boots—they’re front and center. Hence, the boot logo on the tour bus.

Pershing is by no means a cowboy, at least not in the classic sense—he was raised in the cornfields of Indiana. But he took to wearing boots in the mid-1970s while attending the University of Arizona, where he earned his doctorate in chemical engineering. His chosen footwear reflects exactly the kind of man Pershing is: an individualist who makes no apologies for who he is. That quality is one of the key factors that led the State Board of Regents to select him from among 80 applicants as the 15th president of the University in January. He began work as president in March, and will be formally inaugurated in October.

U President David Pershing plans to make the undergraduate student experience one of his top priorities. (Photo by August Miller)

“He does not change his personality to please any one constituency; he is always himself,” says Phyllis “Teddi” Safman, assistant commissioner for academic affairs with the Utah System of Higher Education. “[During the interview process] he gave answers that were to the point, short, concise. He also clarified when he was conjecturing. More than these, he is known for working hard and getting things done without excuses.”

Pershing took the helm of the University at what may well have been one of the most crucial times since its founding. With the departure of former president Michael K. Young to the University of Washington in the nascent days of the U’s membership in the Pac-12 conference, many wondered publicly and privately what the next step would be. Young had built the U’s reputation as a business and technology powerhouse, with the U spinning off more tech companies than any other major research university in the nation. And with a jump to a high-profile athletic conference, a lot was at stake. But when the Board of Regents announced that Pershing had been selected as the U’s new leader the first from among the institution’s ranks within the last 30 years—the enthusiasm was palpable. “When President Pershing’s name was announced at the open meeting where the regents voted, there was an upwelling of excitement,” former Board of Regents Chairman David Jordan told The Salt Lake Tribune. “There was a shout of excitement that went up from the University community that was gathered there.” Those who had worked with Pershing knew the right man had been selected for the job.

Safman, who has known Pershing for nearly three decades, says he’s smart and understands issues well. “He chooses good people and then gets out of their way except to discuss his vision and elicit the visions of his staff. He brings these qualities to the job,” she says. “In addition, he does not have an arrogant bone in his body.”

Had things played out a little differently, however, Pershing might not have been president of the U—and in fact, might not have been in the halls of academe at all.

There was no doubt the young Pershing would attend college. It wasn’t even up for discussion. His father had worked his way up through the ranks of General Motors to become an electrical engineer, but never managed to get a degree. “My father wasn’t financially able to complete college because of the second World War,” Pershing says. “What that did is that it made him absolutely convinced that I was going to college. He was bound and determined from the get-go that I was going to get a degree.” First came a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Purdue, then the doctorate from Arizona, where he specialized in studying techniques to remove pollutants from industrial emissions.

In the mid-1970s, Pershing met Philip J. Smith, then a grad student at Brigham Young University and now professor of chemical engineering and director of the Institute for Clean and Secure Energy at the U. Smith was impressed from the start. “I knew he would do great things,” Smith says. “But I admit I didn’t expect it to be in the administrative area.” Pershing could have easily settled into a lucrative career at a research lab in the chemical or petroleum industry. It was typical for young chemical engineers at the time to carve out a niche in the private sector. But that’s not exactly what happened.

“At the time I was graduating [from Arizona],” says Pershing, “I just decided that I would take a look at academics, and I had offers to interview at Texas, Cal Tech, and Berkeley,” he says. “One of my professors was a very ‘pro’ academic person, and he wanted me to go interview at these very prestigious places. I came here to the U during the trip that I took to Berkeley. I ended up with a firm offer from Berkeley. But this is the sort of weird part of the story: I actually turned the University of California-Berkeley down to come to Utah.”

U President David Pershing, right, talks with Bryan Harris, development manager at First Wind Milford, about renewable energy potential in the southern Utah desert. (Photo by Lawrence Boye)

Pershing had discovered a passion for teaching. Standing in front of a group of students or assisting a grad student in research trumped everything else. “One of the things I loved about the U was that they not only saw me as a person who could bring in research money and build a research program,” he says, “but they also saw me as a teacher. And that wasn’t true at many of the schools I interviewed at.”

So in 1977, he found his calling—not in a lab for a chemical mega-corporation, but at the U, working his way through the ranks of the Chemical Engineering Department to become dean of the College of Engineering in 1987. Along the way, he won both the Distinguished Teaching and Distinguished Research awards, as well as the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the U’s highest honor for faculty. He became director of the University’s Center for Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions and eventually ascended to the rank of senior vice president for academic affairs in 1998. In September 2010, he married his wife, Sandi, the U’s assistant vice president for outreach and engagement, who is creating new undergraduate initiatives. In addition to his two stepdaughters, Pershing has a 28-year-old daughter, Nicole, who is in medical school at Duke University.

As for his career path, he says: “I had no intention of being any kind of administrator, because I love teaching.” But what he has discovered is that being an administrator gives him an effective pulpit to enact change on a much broader and grander scale. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.

University of Utah President David Pershing, right, visits with WECCO’s Dave “Andy” Thayer at the company’s Cedar City facility as part of the statewide “Great Red Road Trip: Bringing the U to You.” (Photo by Lawrence Boye)

As president, Pershing has already adopted a platform that will continue to emphasize faculty research, creative work, and technology commercialization, but also focuses the U’s strengths on the one area that has meant the most to him: the undergraduate experience. After extensive research, the U is looking to revitalize undergraduate education. “It starts from the very beginning with recruiting, clear through graduation and beyond,” says Pershing. “The University of Utah is clearly not going to be the undergraduate institution for everyone in the state—nor should we be. But for the students who are prepared to come and enjoy what we offer, I want to provide an excellent experience. And it doesn’t matter whether you grow up in St. George or Moab or Ogden. I want the University of Utah to be accessible to those students.”

Specifically, Pershing’s plan is to take a more “holistic” approach to admissions, rather than relying on a rigid standard of weighted grade-point average and ACT scores. Under the old metrics, little consideration was given to a student’s background or the classes he or she may have taken. Essentially, if their GPA and ACT gave students an index score above a certain line on a chart, they were admitted. Clear cut, but fraught with inherent problems. What if a high school didn’t even offer challenging courses for college-bound kids? The new system is geared to address just that.

“A human being will actually take the time to study what you did in high school, what courses you took. Were you working 40 hours a week in high school? Because if you were, your GPA might be low, not because you weren’t working hard, but because you were working very hard,” says Pershing. “Were you taking AP classes, or part of the International Baccalaureate program? Those kinds of things are much more important in ways than the absolute GPA.”

University of Utah President David Pershing, second from right, and his wife, Sandi, right, chat with students in the U’s Spencer Fox Eccles Business Building. (Photo by August Miller)

Getting qualified students accepted to the U is the easy part. The linchpin to Pershing’s vision is for students to complete their courses of study more quickly and efficiently. An integral part of that is encouraging more students to invest more time on campus. At present, about 13 percent of the U’s students live in residence halls, with the majority commuting to the school from around the Salt Lake Valley. But if Pershing has his way, this could change.

“If we can get the students living on campus and if we can get at least part of their work on campus, those things help the students’ probability that they will graduate,” he says. The new Donna Garff Marriott Honors Residential Scholars Community residence hall that just opened up this fall is a first step and will provide a home to about 310 students. “Beyond that, we hope to add several more residential living areas for students,” Pershing says.

The sheer size and scope of the U has been a double-edged sword for students—yes, there are numerous opportunities in research and learning, but the quantity of choices can be dizzying. Combine that with a campus that’s just more than 4,000 acres, and it becomes all too easy to slip between the cracks—and fail to graduate. In some disciplines—chemical engineering, for example—there may be only 40 or 50 graduates each year, and faculty are likely familiar with every student in the program by the time they’ve been in school for four years. It’s a different story for students majoring in biology. “With these big, big majors,” says Pershing, “if we don’t do something special for you, you may not know any member of the faculty well by the time you graduate, particularly if you’re a bit shy, and if you’re a drive-on student.”

The goal, Pershing explains, is to redouble efforts in encouraging students to participate in at least one engaging activity during the trek from admissions to commencement. To help facilitate this, the U will begin beefing up student and academic advising resources. Pershing calls this initiative the “Presidential Promise.”

“We promise that you will have the opportunity to have at least one deep engagement experience while you’re at the University of Utah,” he explains. “That could be study abroad, it could be the Honors College, it could be LEAP [Learning, Engagement, Achievement and Progress, a program for first-year students to assist with the transition to college], it could be an undergraduate research experience, the Bennion Center, working with UNP [University Neighborhood Partners], an internship—any of those things where you get involved deeply with something. And part of the motive here is so that when you get ready to apply for graduate school or for a job, there’s somebody who can write you an in-depth recommendation.”

Pershing emphasizes that these changes are part of a larger vision. “I’m going to continue to push research excellence, and we’ll continue to push our niche strength in entrepreneurship and all the things that does for our state,” he says, “but I want to balance that with strengthening the undergraduate experience for the kids from the state of Utah. If we are to be the flagship university for the state, it is incumbent upon us to make sure our students succeed.”

Money to pay for some of these initiatives (and many more) is another issue. But Pershing seems to have a talent for bringing folks to the table when it comes time to discuss potentially sensitive issues—such as funding. “He is a consensus builder,” says Smith in the Chemical Engineering Department. “His ability to listen to people and bring them together is exceptional.”

Pershing’s summer bus trip was, in part, an effort to rally the state—and its decision makers—behind his plan, and to persuade legislators that the U’s best interests are deeply intertwined with that of the state. His schedule is now packed with meet-and-greets, speeches, and those long bus trips through the hinterlands of Utah. He’s up with the sun and frequently doesn’t get home until late into the night. Although that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, he’s adamant about carving out some time for his family. “I had a long talk with my younger daughters before I agreed to do this, and they were both very supportive,” he says. “We’re trying to keep at least one night of the week that’s a family night.”

When Pershing makes his way toward the podium during his inauguration, you can bet that his family will be his loudest supporters. And there will be a pair of handsomely polished cowboy boots poking out of his ceremonial robes.

—Jason Matthew Smith is editor of Continuum.

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The worn quilt that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich holds in her lap has faded from generations of daily use. As she sits in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she examines the pattern and stitching, looking for historical clues. Quilts like this one might not seem like much. Yet to Ulrich BA’60, quilts and other objects such as looms, stockings, and wooden cupboards, as well as women’s diaries of the quotidian details of housework and everyday life, hold rich stories of the people who used them. Until recent years, those stories often went unrevealed in American history. As Ulrich put it in the now-famous phrase she first wrote back in 1976: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

Over a career spanning decades, though, Ulrich, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a history professor at Harvard University, has added previously untold chapters to history by exploring the lives revealed by those household objects and diaries.

Ulrich herself started out far from the spotlight of history, as a student and wife in the rural West. She was born and raised in the small farming community of Sugar City, in eastern Idaho, where her father was a teacher and school administrator and her mother was a housewife. The family was active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Both her parents had attended the University of Utah, so after she received a General Motors National Scholarship, she followed her older brother to her parents’ alma mater. The U also is where she met her husband, Gael Ulrich BS’59 MS’62, who was studying engineering. She married him between her sophomore and junior years.

“I took the education courses that allowed me to become certified as an English teacher, thinking that was what one did with a degree in English,” she says, with a hint of wry humor. “But by the time I finished, I was married and pregnant, and so I didn’t [become a teacher].” While taking those English classes, she took a course in colonial American literature. “I was totally entranced by that early material,” she says, “but I never imagined it would become my specialty.”

Ulrich received her English degree from the U in 1960, and she and her husband promptly moved to Cambridge, so he could begin work on his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a student in Utah, Ulrich had read so much early and classic American literature—most of which is centered in New England—that, she says, arriving in Massachusetts provoked “a strange feeling of coming home.” At a time when the women’s and civil rights movements were rising across the nation, Ulrich gave birth to her first child and settled into her role as a young student wife. In 1970, Ulrich’s husband took a faculty position at the University of New Hampshire, and she moved with him to Durham, where their family would eventually grow to include three sons and two daughters. During those years, Ulrich worked on her master’s degree in English from Simmons College, and she began meeting with a group of LDS friends in the Boston area to study women’s issues. Like many women of every background and faith in the nation at the time, Ulrich and her friends were moved to examine their roles as women and what it meant to have—or not have—rights and opportunities.

For insight, the group began studying historic women of their own LDS religion. They soon discovered a Utah pro-suffrage newspaper from a hundred years earlier called the Women’s Exponent. Edited by Mormon women, the Exponent was outspoken in its support of almost everything dealing with women’s issues, including health, education, and employment. Ulrich and her friends were inspired by their historic predecessors to create their own periodical addressing the rising consciousness of women in the LDS Church. The group launched Exponent II’’s first issue in 1974. Within a year, they had more than 4,000 subscribers.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and University of Utah alumna Laurel Thatcher Ulrich stands outside her home, a renovated 19th-century carriage house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, Ulrich’s love of history was blossoming. Taking advantage of her husband’s half-price tuition benefit, she enrolled in a history course on the literature of early America and “fell in love with the field.” Solidly hooked, she enrolled in the doctoral program in history.

Her studies merged her two great interests: women’s issues and history. But she took a different approach from many of her contemporaries. As Ulrich explains, “A lot of early feminist interest focused on things like the suffrage movement, the history of witchcraft, the persecution of women—women as victims. My training in social history, and my own experience as a mother and neighbor, and the kinds of things we do when raising a family made me want to say, ‘What about these invisible people we know so little about?’ … I was trying to recover the very little-known lives of women.”

Research into the women who wove the fabric of ordinary society in early America was difficult because of limited records. But then she found an unusual source for her research: funeral sermons. In 1976, her research into those sermons evolved into her first scholarly article, “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,” in American Quarterly. In the first paragraph, Ulrich wrote, “[Puritan minister] Cotton Mather called them ‘the hidden ones.’ They never preached or sat in a deacon’s bench. Nor did they vote or attend Harvard. Neither, because they were virtuous women, did they question God or the magistrates. They prayed secretly, read the Bible through at least once a year, and went to hear the minister preach even when it snowed. Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history.” That last sentence would sit there for almost two decades before finding a life of its own.

By 1980, Ulrich’s children were grown and developing lives of their own, and she received her doctorate in history from the University of New Hampshire and accepted a position there as an assistant professor. She also began working on the draft of her first book, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. In it, she scoured the scant sources available—such as court, probate, and church records—to illuminate the heretofore hidden lives of women in early colonial America and the roles they played.

After Good Wives was published in 1982, Ulrich was looking for a new project. Then she came across the diaries of 18th-century Maine midwife Martha Ballard, locked in a vault at the Maine State Library. Ulrich had never seen so many pages written in a woman’s hand from that time period, because women’s diaries from then were extremely rare. She knew she’d found her project. Ulrich analyzed the daily entries in the mostly spare, ledger-style diaries, which had been reviewed and discounted as unhelpful by many other historians. With impeccable research, Ulrich merged the information from Ballard’s fragile pages with other sources, written and material, and wove a series of chapters that expose the village of Hallowell, Maine, in breathtaking realism. A textile industry blooms. Sexual attitudes manifest themselves. Disease cycles run their course. And labor issues, such as hiring, transferring, and docking pay for missed work, reveal the strikingly present female half of the workforce.

Ulrich’s book, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1991, as well as the Bancroft Prize in American History. And in 1992, she received one of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowships that have earned the nickname “genius grants.”

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich finds historical clues in everyday objects such as this antique quilt. “Some people think of the work I do as above-ground archaeology,” she says.

In 1995, Ulrich accepted a joint appointment in history and women’s studies at Harvard University. That same year, journalist Kay Mills used Ulrich’s “well-behaved women” phrase as an epigraph in her book about women’s history in America, From Pocahontas to Power Suits: Everything You Need to Know about Women’s History in America. “Then someone put it in a book of quotations, then someone got the idea of putting it on T-shirts,” says Ulrich, laughing. “It got out of hand. It was quite hilarious.”

More than two decades after Ulrich first wrote it, her well-turned sentence had finally blasted its way into popular culture, appearing on everything from bumper stickers to mugs to clothing. “I have a big collection,” Ulrich admits. She seems especially amused by items that wrongly attribute the quote to Eleanor Roosevelt or Marilyn Monroe.

Ulrich’s work received even more popular exposure in 1998 when PBS produced a documentary about A Midwife’s Tale as part of its series The American Experience, with Ulrich serving as a consultant, script collaborator, and narrator. The film showed not just the story of the midwife Ballard, but the remarkable detective story of how Ulrich pieced together Ballard’s life history. “Social history,” Ulrich says, “looks at society and history from the bottom up. It looks at the general or common person, and the uses of labor and work.” The stories of ordinary people in everyday life can reveal evidence about why history unfolded as it did.

Ulrich knew that although most history was originally written by and for men, women kept the local society together and, just as importantly, kept the local economy thriving. While men’s documents included political treatises and records for particular industries, women’s records might reveal entire parallel, but hidden, industries of their own, such as food exchanges, midwifery and medicine, and textile production. She found that “most male diarists do not write about women, but all women diarists write about men.”

So as Ulrich’s search for untold stories continued, she found herself relying on another of her passions: material culture, a broad field that focuses on the material world and uses objects, landscapes, and artifacts as evidence for historical study, she says. “Some people think of the work I do as above-ground archaeology.”

To produce her third book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, Ulrich analyzed the household objects that women made, used, and handed down from mother to daughter in the household economy of textile production. Her work yielded new glimpses into the local economies that underpinned the “bigger” events documented by men.

In 2007, she decided her popular “well-behaved women” slogan deserved a book of its own, and she published Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. She examined “how and under what circumstances women have made history,” ranging beyond New England to look at the historical significance of individual women from different times and places.

Ulrich is now the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard, an honor awarded to “individuals of distinction … working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way as to cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties,” according to the Harvard Gazette. She and her husband still call New England home. The renovated 19th-century carriage house they live in is within walking distance of Ulrich’s Harvard office and the Harvard libraries and collections that continue to fascinate her.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has a large and varied collection of items bearing her famous phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

She has been on sabbatical this past year while she writes her latest book, “A House Full of Females”: Faith and Families in Nineteenth-Century Mormon Diaries. Although Mormonism hasn’t been Ulrich’s area of professional specialization, she has continued to be engaged in church activities and service.

“The time was right for me to move into a new area of research, one that I had long been interested in but hadn’t had time to explore,” she says. “The opening of the new Church History Library with its amazing resources and ability to connect with some collections digitally was also an attraction.”

The new book, she says, is “about polygamy, but it’s also about women’s organizational life in 19th-century Mormonism and the surprising relationship between a form of family organization that seems very patriarchal and the emergence of a very powerful women’s rights movement.”

Ulrich returned to the University of Utah this past August to talk about those 19th-century LDS women’s diaries when she gave the 2012 Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture for the Tanner Humanities Center.

Over the decades, Ulrich has watched the field of women’s history go from an under-appreciated offshoot to mainstream. “Women’s history is now very well established. In fact, I think maybe it’s even more than that,” she says. “It would be irresponsible today to try to write serious history without paying attention to gender and women.” And Ulrich has been a crucial contributor to that change.

As for “well-behaved women” making history? In the introduction to her book that uses the quote in its title, Ulrich writes: “When I wrote that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history,’ I was making a commitment to help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women. I had no idea that thirty years later, my own words would come back to me transformed. While I like some of the uses of the slogan more than others, I wouldn’t call it back even if I could. I applaud the fact that so many people—students, teachers, quilters, nurses, newspaper columnists, old ladies in nursing homes, and mayors of Western towns—think they have the right to make history.”

—Kelley J.P. Lindberg BS’84 is a freelance writer based in Layton, Utah, and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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