Continuum

University of Utah recycling coordinator and waste management supervisor Josh James last fall watched a man walk up to a recycling station in a tailgate lot at a U football game. The man proclaimed, “Recycling, that’s awesome,” and then proceeded to throw away his own recyclables in a nearby trash can.

The man’s garbage contributed that day to what James estimated is about six tons of trash generated before, during, and after each U football game. That adds up to about 36 tons of trash generated during the six home football games in 2011. About one quarter of that was diverted from landfills and recycled.

People power—or sometimes the lack of it—is the biggest reason those who are champions of improved recycling efforts at U athletic events aren’t ready yet to give an A grade for the University’s efforts to achieve greener games. The U often makes it easy for people to recycle at U football games, and yet it seems difficult for many people to take the critical next step, James says. “It’s really amazing.”

Still, James can at least feel comfortable giving a B+ these days to recycling work during U football games at Rice-Eccles Stadium and at gymnastics meets and basketball games at the Huntsman Center. “It’s catching on,” he says. That B+ is an improvement from the C that James would have issued just a few years ago. Since then, student volunteers have worked with U Facilities Management to take recycling to a whole new level at University athletics events.

Fans watch a basketball game at the Huntsman Center, and put their garbage on the floor.

Football, gymnastics, and men’s basketball are the three sports that generate the most waste out of all University athletics events; hence they are the three areas getting the most attention so far with the recycling efforts. Since 2007, the U has purchased two cardboard balers (think hay balers, only for boxes) for use campuswide, a battalion of bins for placing under desks, bins on wheels, and flatbed trailers to haul the bigger bins. Those changes have had a spillover effect on athletics events, but it was only minimal without a more collective endeavor on the part of students.

Winning ever more ground in the bin game, students came up with the idea of using three bikes with more bins on the backs. Previously, the bikes had been used elsewhere around campus but not at athletics events. Last football season, student volunteers rode the bikes around tailgate lots, mainly along Guardsman Way, spreading the green word and collecting recyclables.

Last year, U student Seth Crossley, who this past year has been associate director of sustainability for the Associated Students of the University of Utah, changed the game even more. Crossley showed what can happen when one person is able to mobilize more students than ever with the shared interest of reducing waste at athletic events. “He did a lot to get us where we’re at now,” James says.

Students in prior years had begun a “Recycle Rice-Eccles” petition drive to obtain signatures of people
who supported the idea of having paid facilities workers separate garbage from recyclables, as well as encouraging more people to be recycling volunteers, but the effort gained little traction.

As Crossley looked for ways to improve the U’s recycling efforts, particularly at athletics events, he researched what other Pac-12 schools were doing. And it turns out many are doing more than the U on that count. So to help bolster the work at the U, Crossley set out to find sponsors who could help incentivize recycling support by giving T-shirts to students who volunteer to help reduce waste at U games. The students help by standing at recycling stations, encouraging others to recycle, and sorting through garbage. Crossley found support from the U Athletics Department, the Office of Sustainability, ASUU, Coca-Cola, The MUSS (the U’s esteemed student cheer section for sports events), and alumni. Fans who participate in the recycling efforts are now issued Frequent Recycler cards and awarded prizes for their efforts. And the “Recycle Rice-Eccles” movement has evolved into an annual initiative complete with its own brand and logo.

Josh James, the University of Utah’s recycling coordinator and waste management supervisor, sits at a gymnastics event in the Huntsman Center.

“If you give T-shirts to volunteers, it unites them,” says Crossley, who was scheduled to graduate from the U this past spring with degrees in political science and environmental and sustainability studies. He has used social media, email, and old-fashioned word of mouth to find students to help out. Volunteers dubbed “green police” began to feel like they’re part of something “bigger,” Crossley says. “Branding and marketing were the biggest thing for me.”

Back in 2010, before his efforts, often only 15 or so volunteers would show up at an athletics event, and it wasn’t enough to make a dent in the mountains of garbage generated. Some games now draw 50 volunteers who collect and sort recyclables and help with getting the word out during the events. The volunteers often stand at bins and urge people to deposit their plastic, paper, and aluminum in the recycling cans. Students also stick around after games to sift through garbage in the stands for recyclables before paid crews move in to sweep up.

Student volunteers help break down boxes for recycling at an athletics event at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center.

It’s that kind of people power that compels Crossley to raise the recycling grade at Rice-Eccles from what he thinks was a lowly D to a B+ and to a B at the Huntsman Center, where he says the older, indoor crowd isn’t as messy as football’s younger, outdoors audience and generates less garbage. The reason for the slightly lower grade at Huntsman, he notes, is because fewer student volunteers show up at events where the team (such as men’s basketball this past season) does poorly. “There’s a lot of work to do, but we’ve made up a lot of ground,” says Crossley.

The Sierra Club in 2011 ranked the U at 97 out of 118 colleges and universities that replied to a questionnaire looking at environmental issues such as energy use, transportation, and waste management. U Sustainability Coordinator Jen Colby answered in the questionnaire that 32 percent of the campus’ waste is being diverted from landfills. Vital to that percentage is what students have been able to help accomplish at football games, where volunteers helped divert an estimated 19,000 pounds of recyclables from landfills last season.

Ashley Patterson, the U Sustainability Office’s outreach and education coordinator, attributes last year’s success to Crossley and others including ASUU student volunteers Allison Boyer, a stalwart at the Guardsman Way tailgate lot, and Alec Van Huele, who was at every game and organized meetings to coordinate the efforts of the masses of green-minded student volunteers. “[Crossley] did a really good job of turning this into a collaborative effort,” says Patterson, who uses her office’s Facebook page (and its 830 or so followers) to help get the word out to rally volunteers. “Students say they want to do something, but they don’t know what to do or how to do it. Seth fully grasps all of that.”

Crossley pointed out in a presentation earlier this year to volunteers, “Fans’ views of recycling need to be influenced rather than forced—they have to want to recycle!” Even on a bad day at Rice-Eccles. James says that when the Utes have a big loss, fans are much less enthused about recycling. “Everyone says, ‘Leave me alone—I want to go home,’ ” he says. Happy fans are more apt to recycle.

Student volunteers pick up trash in the stands at the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center after a gymnastics meet.

Despite the U’s great strides with recycling at athletics events during the past few years, other Pac-12 schools get higher praise for their efforts, including the University of Washington, Arizona State University, and most notably, the University of Colorado at Boulder, which on its Web site lists 1976 as the year it officially began an on-campus recycling program. In 1991, University of Colorado student government leaders and campus administration officials became partners in recycling with the signing of a memorandum of understanding. Today, the students’ fingerprints on recycling are all over campus, not just at sports events. “Students here have a rich history of speaking up and putting their money where their mouth is,” says Ed von Bleichert, Colorado’s environmental operations manager for Facilities Management. “It really comes from our student body, and it has permeated up.”
From the first minute students hit the Colorado campus in the fall, they are met by “zero-waste ambassadors” at residence halls, where students are educated then and throughout the semester about how to recycle. Between 25 and 30 ambassadors, also known as “goalies,” are also at each football game at zero-waste stations, and each volunteer receives a shirt, hat, meal ticket, and entry to the game. In order to get fans to use recycling services at games, von Bleichert says, “you’ve got to make it easy.” The university also touts a $470,000 facility built in 1992 near the football stadium, Folsom Field, to help with campuswide recycling. And Colorado collects a small fee each semester from its 30,000 students to support education and outreach about recycling at the university.

The recycling facility today employs about 25 students to help divert recyclables from landfills, which accounts for the university’s overall 42 percent diversion rate. “We’re shooting for 90 percent,” says von Bleichert. The current diversion rate puts Colorado in the middle of the pack among other colleges and universities, he says.

A big key to the recycling success at Colorado, von Bleichert says, is the full support recycling efforts receive from the university’s athletics department. Planning goes into what type of packaging will be used at concessions during football games, and garbage cans inside the stadium have been eliminated. All waste from inside the stadium, even while a game is still being played, is sorted by students at the nearby recycling facility.

Other institutions, including the University of Utah, over the years have sought to emulate what’s happening in Boulder. “They definitely get the most attention,” James says. “They have a very well-designed program.” Students from other places in the nation tell James that Utah as a state is behind the times on recycling, and they’re upset that more people are not doing it. James says it will take continued student support to sustain and improve the U’s current recycling efforts at athletics events.

U student Seth Crossley, associate director of sustainability for ASUU, drives student volunteers through a football tailgate area last fall to encourage people to recycle. The student efforts have had good results.

Steve Pyne BS’11, director of events and facilities for the U Athletics Department, says he supports the work of James and the student volunteers to improve recycling at athletics venues. “Whatever they recommend, every football game, I support them,” Pyne says. As part of those efforts, Pyne notes, vendors for games are now making sure boxes they use for supplies are being broken down and recycled instead of simply thrown away. “In my mind, I think we’re doing everything within the resources we have that we can do,” he says.

Universities including Colorado and the U have seen a spike in recycling at football games when sponsors such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the ESPN television network create a competition among institutions to see who can recycle the most. Crossley said earlier this year in a report to student volunteers that an ESPN game-day challenge at the U motivated the crowd to get involved without feeling forced, and volunteers were excited to be working alongside ESPN employees. “Much more fun than Dumpster diving,” Crossley says.

With the U as a new member of the Pac-12, James predicts audiences—and their trash—will increase at all U sporting events, requiring an even more expanded recycling effort on campus. When crowds again roar inside Rice-Eccles and Huntsman Center for the 2012-13 season, James and Crossley are planning on more outreach and more student volunteers. But success will depend once again on two words: people power. “People complain there are not enough bins, but at some point you’ve got to take responsibility for yourself and your purchase,” James says. “You are the consumer; you bought the product.”

—Stephen Speckman is a Salt Lake City-based writer and photographer and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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Under the lawn behind the University of Utah’s Sterling Sill Center, mechanical engineering professor Kent Udell MS’78 PhD’80 has buried a 35-foot-wide by 40-foot-deep “ice ball” about 10 feet below the surface. On a spring afternoon, he stops to sit on a patch of grass marked by a web of shallow trenches as he checks the tubing covered by green valve boxes that provide the only evidence above ground of his experiment in testing how heat and cold can be stored for later use.

Like much of Udell’s current research, the ice-ball experiment focuses on various aspects of what he calls “Tivo-ing” energy. His initial idea for the ice ball was for it to be a collector that would absorb some of the many days of deep cold that northern Utah gets in the winter for later use as building air conditioning in the summer. But with the “aha!” addition to the experiment’s equipment of a simple compressor from a standard air-conditioning unit, he says, the project developed the potential to be used for both cooling and heating. “It opened up the possibility that even in the worst climate, you could still save a lot of money and a lot of carbon dioxide being produced.”

Udell’s deep belief in the importance of environmental sustainability permeates his research and his life. With decades of groundbreaking work in environmental mitigation under his belt, he now directs the U’s Sustainability Research Center, conducting research and fostering the work of others on campus to help modern civilization become more green.

In casual interactions, Udell exudes a mellow grooviness. Dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, khakis, and Merrells, he refers to his wife, Cherise (a onetime ecotourism guide in Ecuador who later went on to graduate school at Yale), as “my Amazon jungle lady.” His office shelves are dotted with small brass Buddhist figures. (“I enjoy contemplating Buddha. Concerns disappear. If there was a mudstorm, everybody would be muddy but Buddha. It would just run off.”) Ethics for the New Millennium by His Holiness the Dalai Lama sits on a shelf right alongside Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer.

When Udell starts talking about the latter, it’s evident that he’s really smart as well as groovy. He spent more than 25 years as a professor at the University of California-Berkeley and is now professor emeritus there, having been lured back to the University of Utah in 2005.

Udell’s path to the U began in the quiet little town of Lehi, Utah. But when he was 4, his father, “a bit of an adventurer” who worked in a midlevel job with the U.S. State Department, took a position in Afghanistan and relocated the household to Kabul. The youngest of seven, Kent and his three next-youngest siblings (the others were already out of the house and married) attended an international school there for the next few years, meeting other young students from around the world and learning a smattering of French and Farsi and Arabic. Udell points to the experience as one that opened his eyes to the world’s possibilities.

Transplanted back in Utah, Udell says he was always “into building stuff, making things, taking stuff apart and putting it back together.” He recalls taking a skills test in about ninth grade that concluded that he “seemed to have an aptitude for a Ph.D. in engineering mathematics. I had no idea what that meant. But when the time came, I looked for a major that was something related to my background in hands-on, mechanical construction, and mechanical engineering just seemed like it fit me.” He headed to Utah State University for a bachelor’s in the field, then to the U for master’s and doctoral degrees in the same. Udell’s doctoral thesis at the U was on oil shale, which continues to resurface as a hot new thing in energy about every 10 years. Yet Udell’s conclusion then, more than 30 years ago, remains the major concern of today, with no workaround yet found: It creates a huge amount of waste product, at great environmental cost. “It’s probably the most carbon-intensive form of energy possible,” he notes.

Kent Udell, left, a University of Utah mechanical engineering professor, talks with graduate student Michael Beeman BS’10 MS’10, who has been helping with work on Udell’s ice-ball experiment at the Sill Center.

As he was completing his doctorate, Udell in 1979 took his first position at Berkeley, where he taught petroleum engineering for about five years. After achieving tenure, he decided he wanted to branch out and began exploring more in environmental engineering. At the time, California was just beginning to tackle cleaning up its Superfund sites, where hazardous liquids such as dry-cleaning solvents had been dumped into the subsurface. Udell says he and his colleagues “applied stuff from petroleum engineering to removing those contaminants and developed technologies that are still the gold standard today in terms of their effectiveness.” With the new technologies, Udell says, they found they could “take something super-polluted to drinking water standards in less than a year.”

In 2004, Udell was approached by University of Utah College of Engineering Dean Richard Brown, who was looking to bring in a new chair for the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Brown had asked for the names of some potential candidates from K.L. “Larry” DeVries BS’59 PhD’62, now a Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering at the U, who has taught here for more than 50 years. Brown was looking for promising candidates with a U connection who were at “name universities,” DeVries recalls, and Udell’s was one of two names that DeVries put forward. “I remembered [Udell] from when he was here, of course,” DeVries says. “And I had talked to him a time or two when I was down to California for NSF [the National Science Foundation], evaluating programs for potential grants. He had talked about his work down there in cleaning up oil spills and things of that sort, and those are things, of course, of considerable interest nationally and to Utah.”

In considering Brown’s invitation, Udell realized that though he’d loved his time at Berkeley, he wasn’t sure it was where he necessarily wanted to spend the rest of his career, and he found the prospects at the U—and back in Utah in general—intriguing. He had also recently started a new family, and having already raised a daughter in Berkeley, he knew it was expensive and difficult to find good, safe neighborhoods and schools. Between extended family and recreation, Udell had regularly returned to Utah during his time in California, and after visiting the U with an eye for a new home base and new professional challenges, he returned as professor and chair of mechanical engineering.

Udell notes that his focus had long been shifting toward examining the ramifications of human-caused global climate change. “As an engineer and as someone who teaches ethical engineering, I realized I had abilities that I could bring to that problem, and that my best use in serving people and serving society would be to look for ways that I could make a contribution to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. So, it was something I’d been wanting to do for a long time, and coming to Utah gave me the opportunity.”

While Udell was resettling at the U and refocusing his efforts toward sustainability-related research here, the U’s Craig Forster was helping work on two related proposals, one for what eventually became the Office of Sustainability and another for a “Sustainability Research Center.” After Forster’s death in late 2008, Dean Brown and then Senior Vice President David W. Pershing approached Udell about taking a look at Forster’s nearly complete proposal for the research center.

Kent Udell, who directs the University of Utah’s Sustainability Research Center, talks to some of his engineering students about his ice-ball experiment in storing heat and cold.

Udell eagerly took up the cause, and the center became a reality in 2010. Based in a small corner office adjoining his on the second floor of the College of Engineering’s Kennecott Building, the center is a bit of a living demonstration lab in sustainability, with cork flooring, a conference table made from recycled milk cartons, and an abundance of plants to optimize the air quality in the room. But the center’s primary purpose is to attract and disperse sustainability-related research funding.

“As engineers, we always need to be thinking about the larger implications of what we do,” says Udell. “We always should be thinking about the ‘if’ and ‘why.’ I’m lucky that being an academic I have the opportunity to be able to shift my focus, to say, ‘This is what I believe, and these are the kinds of technologies that need to be developed,’ and then with a little bit of an understanding about how to get technologies out there and into the marketplace, to be able to make a contribution. So, given that I can and I should, it’s obvious that I will.”

That technological exploration is the significant difference between the Sustainability Research Center and the Office of Sustainability. “What we’re worried about is the creation of new knowledge and funding research and understanding all of the interactions between the various forces that determine whether we’re moving in a sustainable direction,” explains Udell. “What they deal with is looking at the sustainable attributes of the U itself.”

Udell emphasizes that he is looking to create marketable, real-world solutions, so he is at least as much concerned with the economics as the gee-whiz of inventing. With his ice ball experiment, for example, he notes: “Everywhere we look, every thing that we’re examining, the cost becomes a big issue. How can we make this cheaper? How can we produce it with fewer materials? How can we install it using less energy, as well as less destructive technology? We’re always looking at ways to make it as efficient as possible, because ultimately, it’s the economics that will determine whether this thing will really run.”

Through his connections with a dean at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, Udell is also working on a giant ice ball project there to provide inexpensive air conditioning for some commercial buildings. “And yes, really, they have air conditioning needs in Fairbanks, Alaska,” he notes. With long days of sunshine during parts of the year, plus high energy prices, air conditioning can be very expensive. Udell helped come up with an experiment that will essentially freeze a good portion of a lake. “If the data can show some good economics from that, great—then that idea can migrate down to the south,” Udell says. “Same thing with the heating technology: If we can show that it’s a great idea in Southern Utah and down in Arizona, then the idea will migrate north.”

This concept of energy storage has so far been neglected in most work on renewable energy, Udell says, including solar energy. “You’ve got to figure out some way of storing energy so you can get past those cloudy, dark winter days.” Energy storage is a key to being able to make the transition to renewable energy, and thermal energy storage is just as important as electrical energy storage, he says. “There’s been a lot of money put into electric batteries, but not as much put into the idea of storing energy as heat.”

Udell’s most recent project is examining how to build thermal batteries for an electric car. An electric car can use 40 percent of the energy from its electrical battery just to heat or cool the car, he says. “So, in Minnesota on a cold day, if you think you’re going to get 100 miles out of your car and you’re using your heater, in 60 miles, you’re dead. In Arizona, if you think you’re going to get that 100 miles out of your car and you’ve got your AC on, 60 miles and you’re dead.” Udell and his team want to develop batteries that would be used for thermal storage, so that the air conditioning and heating systems would run independently from the battery driving the car down the road. The researchers won a grant for the project from a Department of Energy program focused on “transformational energy ideas,” and Udell is collaborating with colleagues from metallurgical engineering who have been working with various metal hydrides that store hydrogen at high and low temperatures, trying to create separate batteries to provide heating and air-conditioning. Further, the technology is not limited to cars and could be put into a building, Udell says. “You could have a big concentrated solar collector, with one system that you’re recharging one day while you’re operating the other, and the next day switch. So you could get all the heating and air conditioning for a building from solar.”

Next year, Udell is taking a year’s sabbatical from the U to go back to Berkeley, do some writing, spend time with his grown daughter there, attend lectures and seminars by longtime colleagues, and work with some of those colleagues to explore additional projects. His enthusiasm and curiosity are boundless as he plunges into still more possibilities: “Another area I’m really interested in pursuing is compressed air energy storage, and the injection of fluids for energy storage—using geologic material for storage. I think compressed air is a really interesting technology and will be really valuable for Utah.”

— Marcia Dibble is associate editor of Continuum.

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The University of Utah almost lost honors freshman Bettymaya Foott to one of several other colleges she had considered while in high school in her hometown of Moab, Utah. “I really wanted to get out of Utah,” says Foott, who now spends some of her spare time showing off the U to prospective undergrads.

Academically, Foott fits the profile of what the U wants more of on its campus. She graduated from Grand County High School with a 4.0 GPA. She was valedictorian, captain of her soccer and debate teams, and she was a volunteer at the Moab Valley Multicultural Center. A full-ride Eccles Distinguished Scholar Award and the University’s study abroad and student exchange programs sealed the deal for Foott, who at first was fearful of attending a big university. “I really like it,” she says of her University experience. “I’m surprised how much I like it up here.”

Foott is in it for the long haul now at the U, concentrating on environmental studies and Spanish. “My goal is grad school and beyond,” she says. Her honors advisor, Charlotte Hansen Terry HBA,10, says a lot of bright students like Foott might overlook a good thing in their own backyard. “This happens in every state,” Terry says. But that—and a lot more—will gradually change during the next few years if a new first-of-its kind enrollment management plan being put in place by U officials is a success. Foott is exactly the kind of well-rounded, bright student U leaders want as the University works to shift its overall academic profile.

Starting this year, admissions requirements for incoming freshmen will change, as the U has dropped its so-called admissions index in favor of a more comprehensive evaluation of students’ accomplishments. Dovetailing on that plan will be the fall 2012 opening of the new Donna Garff Marriott Residential Scholars Community, a unique 309-bed residence hall that U officials are counting on to help woo and retain some of the nation’s best college students.

In 2010, the U brought in consultants from the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers to help orchestrate a new enrollment plan. And U officials plucked an enrollment expert from Louisiana State University—Mary G. Parker—to put the plan in place. Parker, now the U’s associate vice president for enrollment management, arrived in September 2011 and was given responsibility for bringing together the entire enrollment process, including student recruitment, admissions, registration, financial aid, and network support. She also has the task in the coming months of writing the University’s first Integrated Strategic Enrollment Management Plan. The new enrollment plan is expected to be ready for implementation by the start of the new recruiting season in August.

U Student Affairs Vice President Barbara Snyder, front left, and Mary G. Parker, associate vice president for enrollment management, stand as students walk by in the Olpin Union Building.

Parker will be working from a one-page snapshot of change that lists overall enrollment profile goals. The goals document also sketches an “ideal” freshman class of the future, with average ACT scores for incoming students migrating upward from 24.4 to 26 (the upper 15 percent in the nation). Half of those students would live on campus, compared with the current 34 percent. And ideally, 30 percent of freshman students would qualify for the U Honors College, and 20 percent would enroll in it, instead of the current 10 percent. Average SAT scores would be up by about 90 points in each of the test’s three categories. Another ambition is to raise the graduation rate, within the current standard of six years.

In short, if the plan’s goals are achieved, the U student body soon won’t look quite like the one left behind last spring when Associate Vice President for Budget and Planning Paul Brinkman retired. Part of his job during his 20 years at the University was to help piece together the U’s enrollment puzzle. He helped arrange the funding for and hiring of the consultants for advice on creating an integrated enrollment plan unlike any previous strategic plan at the U. The puzzle pieces included a growing university, lack of student housing, changing admissions requirements, and entry into the Pac-12. “It’s just a lot of things coming together to where you sense the need to develop a more coherent vision,” Brinkman now says.

Sources: University of Utah Office of Student Affairs; U Office of Budget and Institutional Analysis

The U has gone from an open-enrollment policy in the ’80s to being “moderately selective” today, he says. “It has come a long way, but it can go further. We need to do a better job of recruiting students who will succeed and in retaining them. That’s a complex process.”

The U shouldn’t strive to be an “ivory tower” or a Stanford University, Brinkman says, but it should be among the “upper echelon” of public universities while still providing opportunities for “reasonably able” students in Utah. Going after more students like Foott fits with Brinkman’s idea of a slowly changing campus makeup.

With the number of high school graduates in Utah on the rise (while many other states are in decline), the new plan is expected to help shape exactly how the University grows. Utah Higher Education Commissioner William Sederburg is cheering the U’s efforts, including the plan to “ratchet” up GPA and ACT requirements, and says, “I think this is a little of a new game for the U.”

He wants to see the U avoid becoming a “mega” university like Arizona State University as public institutions in Utah continue to grow. He’d prefer that the U zero in on its research and flagship functions and maintain high standards while the state’s other public institutions absorb some of the projected growth.

Freshman Bettymaya Foott, who is focusing on environmental studies and Spanish at the U, sits in her dorm room on campus.

Student Affairs Vice President Barbara Snyder says the U’s entry into the Pac-12 provides a perfect opportunity for re-examining enrollment. The U for years used an index system that weighed a student’s high-school GPA and ACT scores in correlation with one another. Students with higher ACT scores could have a lower GPA, and vice versa, and still qualify for admission to the University. Under the new admission profile that will be used starting this year, grades will have twice the importance of test scores. U officials also plan to take a closer look at the whole academic profile of an applicant and ask more probing questions. What did the student do outside of school? What activities did the student participate in during school? What kinds of classes did the student take? Were there any honors classes?

The days of an “I’m getting in” attitude, with just the minimum required GPA and ACT score, are fading away. “We are no longer doing that,” Parker says. “There is no more guarantee.” Qualified Utah students are the U’s first priority, and they will be admitted. The U also will continue recruiting qualified out-of-state students who have Utah ties.

U Student Recruitment Director Mateo Remsburg BA’94 (who holds a master’s from Kansas State) says that as word is spreading about the new profile goals for incoming freshmen, he is hearing a common refrain from high school counselors, who are saying, “Well, it’s about time.” One ripple effect will be that as U admissions requirements tighten and the University starts asking high schools for students’ final transcripts (instead of merely confirming that a student graduated), those students may be less likely to squander their senior year.

Change will be gradual. “It’s like a cruise ship; you can’t turn it on a dime,” Remsburg says. The challenge, he says, will be to become known as a “highly selective” school without being perceived as “elitist.” But morphing enrollment expectations will likely mean that marginal students who would have barely made it into the U in the past might not get a nod from the U down the road.

And more of those who do make it in will live on campus, if the U has its way. “I hate the term commuter campus,” Snyder says. She wants to see higher retention rates and students who are more invested in their university, and she believes more campus residents can help achieve those goals. But a new honors dorm won’t be enough, and estimates for new digs put the need at 1,000 to 2,000 beds down the road if the U wants to meet its campus living goal.

Honors College advisor Charlotte Hansen Terry, left, sits with freshman Bettymaya Foott on the front steps of the Honors College office in Fort Douglas.

Getting students to stay through to graduation will be a key indicator that all of the elements of the new plan are working. The U’s freshman to sophomore retention rate now is around 87 percent, and the six-year graduation rate is 57 percent. That graduation rate ranks the U at third from last in comparison with 21 research-focused institutions nationwide, according to a November 2011 report released by the Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General. Auditors noted that the University’s low rate also doesn’t compare well with the U’s new Pac-12 peers. The University “enrolls a relatively large percentage of students who are not ready to succeed,” the auditors said. “In mathematics and science in particular, many enrolled students [at the U] appear to be ill-prepared.”

Utah has a few more unique reasons why college retention and graduation rates lag. Snyder notes that many U students from Utah postpone college until after serving a mission for The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints—young LDS men typically serve two-year missions, while women may serve 18 months. Some students drop out to get married and start families. Others attend classes only when they believe they can afford them.

U officials hope that luring higher-achieving students from Utah and across the nation, in addition to more students living on campus, will mean more graduates. Parker knows she has a huge task: She will craft and put in place the new plan by August, and then there will be yearly analyses. In three to five years, the U will assess how it’s doing with the plan and its enrollment goals, including whether more academically stellar students like Foott have opted to attend the U.

“It is an ongoing process that we will continue to build upon,” Parker says. “It is the way we should be doing business.”

—Stephen Speckman is a freelance writer and photographer based in Salt Lake City.

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Three former Utah players make history with the NFL’s Miami Dolphins.

It’s uncommon to have two starters on an NFL team who come from the same college or university. The rarity increases when an NFL team has three from the same school who all play on one side of the ball.

Yet three former Utah players—Paul Soliai ex’06, Sean Smith ex’08, and Koa Misi ex’09—all start on defense for the NFL’s Miami Dolphins.

The only other time that anyone can recall this situation happening in the modern era was more than a decade ago, with the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens, when former University of Miami Hurricanes cornerback Duane Starks, safety Ed Reed, and linebacker Ray Lewis were Ravens starters during the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” says former longtime Dallas Cowboys Vice President of Player Personnel Gil Brandt, who has been a superior evaluator of NFL talent for more than 50 years and now is the primary personnel expert for NFL.com.

“It’s obviously something the University of Utah should be very proud of,” Brandt says. “They have such a good program.”

Brandt notes that Starks, Lewis, and Reed were all first-round draft picks. The three former Utes, however, didn’t have such auspicious beginnings. “The thing that makes it interesting is that these three guys weren’t first-round choices and are starting. That’s the rarity.”

Soliai was a fourth-round pick in 2007, Smith was drafted in the second round in 2009, and Misi was selected in the second round in 2010. And back when they were eyeing their college possibilities, Utah was pretty much the only option for all three, so the fact that they were even drafted at all is something of a miracle in itself.

Paul Soliai’s fellow Utah alumni say that he has been a mentor for them in the NFL.

Soliai—who was born in Orange County, Calif., and grew up in Pago Pago, American Samoa—had a difficult path. “At Coffeyville [Kansas] Community College, I was an offensive lineman before starting one year as a defensive lineman [at Utah] and then being drafted by the Dolphins,” says the 360-pound nose tackle who appears up close to be nearly as big as a Smart car. “Utah gave me another chance. I thought football was done for me. I thank Utah for everything in terms of getting me where I am right now.”

Although Soliai was very successful in college, especially as a senior in 2006, when he recorded 35 tackles, 3.5 for a loss, two sacks, four pass break-ups, a forced fumble, a fumble recovery, and a blocked kick, his transformation into an elite player took place with the Dolphins.

“Coming up into the NFL, learning how to play a real true nose tackle [in a 3-4 defense] in the league, was kind of hard,” Soliai admits. “Before that, I was a 4-3 guy, so it took me a couple of years to learn the system and become one of the best nose tackles in the league.”

He worked his way to become a full-time starter in 2010. For those who don’t know, in a 4-3 defense, a lineman doesn’t play the same position or technique as in a 3-4. An interior 4-3 lineman is called a defensive tackle, and a 3-4 lineman who is in the middle is a nose tackle because he tends to line up over the nose of the opposing center. The nose tackle in a 3-4 has to clog up the middle and constantly take on double-team blocking from the offensive line to free up linebackers to make plays. In short, it’s a thankless position that leaves little room for individual statistics and accolades.

“You have to stay stout and always hold your ground so you can take on the double teams,” Soliai says. “You pretty much want the ball to always go outside instead of inside.”

Soliai’s emergence on the NFL level earned him Miami’s franchise player tag and a one-year salary in 2011 of approximately $12 million. The mammoth defender will be a highly sought-after free agent when the recruiting season begins March 13.

The Dolphins hope to re-sign Soliai, who is 28, for his skills on the field and for being a mentor off of it. Not only does he regularly host his fellow Utah alums and other Dolphin players at his famous barbecues, he has also been an invaluable resource to his younger counterparts about what the NFL is like. “Paul made things a little bit easier for me,” Misi says. “He helped me get acclimated [to the NFL]. I didn’t really feel like I was a newcomer in the league, even though I really was.”

Soliai played a similar role in Smith’s arrival. “Paul took me in and talked to me,” Smith says. “He explained to me how things go in the NFL.”

Former University of Utah player Sean Smith is the tallest starting cornerback in the NFL.

Smith, who is now 24, was an extremely successful running back for Blair High School in Pasadena, Calif. But with his six-foot-three frame, he was actually a little too tall for the position at the college level. “Utah was the only place to give me a chance to play Division I football,” Smith says. “The University of Oregon kind of backed out at the very last second—which kind of only left me with one option.”

Not that Smith isn’t extremely grateful—even if it meant trying a new position or two at the University of Utah. “It was difficult at first. Initially, I tried out for safety, and that didn’t go so good,” he says with a laugh.

“I went from there to corner, and I went to Coach [Kyle Whittingham] and said, ‘I don’t know if I can play that,’ but he gave me a shot at it, and things just worked out from there,” Smith says.

Now Smith is succeeding with the Dolphins, despite once again fighting concerns that he is too tall for his position. In fact, he is the tallest starting cornerback in the NFL.

“Corner is pretty much a small man’s game,” Smith acknowledges. “It’s all about being quick and fast. Those aren’t really my strengths, so my coach [secondary coach Todd Bowles] has me spend a lot of time in practice staying low and using my technique. Tall guys tend to get tired and then play high. That will get you killed at corner.”

While Soliai and Smith certainly have overcome their share of challenges, Misi is perhaps the most improbable NFL player of the three. Coming out of Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa, Calif., Misi had scholarship offers to go play at Oregon and San Diego State.

“I took a year off from football and went to [Santa Rosa] Junior College, concentrated on being a student, and got a job,” he recalls. “I got my own place and paid my own rent. But I missed football.”

“Throughout the whole recruiting process, I ended up getting overwhelmed with the whole thing,” Misi says.

Misi, who is now 24, played one year of junior college ball before Utah came calling. It was a perfect match for a man who values those closest to him. “I actually have a lot of family out in Utah,” Misi says. “Kalani Sitake, the current Utah defensive coordinator there, is a member of my family, too. My grandma was really happy because I had family around me. [On the field], it was a great group of guys. Utah felt like my second home.”

Koa Misi

Misi’s extended family has found its way to Florida, as well: Miami’s assistant strength and conditioning coach Dave Puloka and Misi are third cousins.

On the field, Misi had 4.5 sacks as a rookie in 2010, but his numbers are somewhat down in his sophomore campaign as he tries to develop his all-around game to go with his nonstop motor and athleticism. The Dolphins also brought back longtime stalwart Jason Taylor during the offseason to play on passing downs, so Misi’s ideal sack opportunities have—for the moment—been diminished.

While Miami struggled in 2011, none of these three players has shown the least bit of drop in his resolve.

“The only thing I can control right now is doing what I have to do, which is cover receivers and come up in run support,” Smith says. “I am definitely not satisfied [with how we are doing as a team], but at the same time, I know I can definitely play better and help the team.”

Overall, the general consensus among NFL personnel evaluators is that all three players appear to have bright futures in the NFL and aim to be in the league for a long time. Their success is just one reflection of a Utah program that has several other players currently playing in the NFL, including quarterback Alex Smith BS’04 (San Francisco 49ers), offensive tackle Jordan Gross BS’02 and wide receiver Steve Smith ex’00 (both Carolina Panthers), and defensive tackle Sione Po’uha ex’05 (New York Jets).

“They are able to get guys in there at Utah that know how to play football really well,” Misi says. “The coaching staff there is exceptional, and for them to send guys to the NFL like they’re doing really says a lot about the program.”

—Robert Hoffman is a communications instructor at Pennsylvania State University and a freelance sportswriter who is a member of the Professional Football Writers Association.

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A new museum building opens a window on Utah’s natural history.

Just beyond the boxy, concrete-and-glass research buildings along Wakara Way lies a half-buried treasure of modern origin.

The Natural History Museum of Utah, tucked into the craggy face of the Wasatch Mountains, has opened as the University of Utah’s newest window to the past. Festooned with a glimmering façade representing rock formations and seismic fault lines, the angular exterior both blends in with and stands out from the surrounding hillside.

The exterior is just one example of how planners capitalized on the rare opportunity to wow visitors not just with the museum’s contents but also its container. The new facility—from the unique façade to the spacious, canyon-shaped lobby to the serpentine gallery layout—teems with opportunities for learning and understanding.

“We wanted the building and the exhibits to be reflective of each other,” says Sarah B. George, the museum’s executive director.

Located in upper Research Park near Red Butte Garden and nudging the Bonneville Shoreline Trail, the building represents a new chapter in the museum’s own history, starting with a name change. The George Thomas Building on Presidents Circle served as the base for the Utah Museum of Natural History for 42 years. With the move, the name became the Natural History Museum of Utah, emphasizing the focus on the natural world.

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The new structure, says George, is both beautiful and functional. “It’s so much better than I ever thought it would be,” she says. “We spent a huge amount of time thinking about how the building should be organized before they even designed it. Now, seeing it coming all together, I think there are a few things I’d change, but not much.”

Nearly everything about this museum is new. “Objects are not new, obviously, but the context, all the exhibits, are new,” George says. “There are things to do, things to experience, things to read, things to hold and manipulate. It’s very, very interactive.”

“There are things to do, things to experience, things to read, things to hold and manipulate,”  says Sarah B. George, the museum’s executive director.

Todd Schliemann, a design partner at Ennead Architects of New York, the museum’s architects along with GSBS Architects of Salt Lake City, says designers initially had no preconceptions about what the museum should look like but spent a lot of time trying to understand the region.

“Pretty quickly, after touring the state and talking with many people, [we discovered] the region is about the land and how people interacted with it and interact now with it after tens of thousands of years,” he says.

At a site “on the edge of culture and nature,” as Schliemann describes it, the building rests in the chiseled hillside and features an exterior made of horizontally ribbed copper, concrete, and painted aluminum, suggesting the look of striated rock. The visual effect is broken up by vertical lines representing seismic faults.

“It’s very much a metaphor for Utah geology,” George says. And that’s just one of the metaphors at the new museum. Inside, the most conspicuous is the main lobby, where an uneven triangular network on opposite walls “evokes that massive feeling” experienced deep inside a granite- or limestone-lined canyon of northern Utah, according to George.

Schliemann says the lobby is intended to give visitors “an emotionally charged moment” akin to those people experience when entering a Gothic cathedral.

“Many museums are boxes, and they’re very clinical and sophisticated, but they don’t bring out that sense of awe and of the child in you when you see something that touches you personally,” he says.

The lobby also includes a tease. From the museum’s collection of about 1.2 million objects, about 800 are included in a three-story-tall display representative of what awaits in the exhibits: fossils, shells, insects, skulls, Native American artifacts, and other archeological material.

From the lobby, most visitors will descend through the galleries occupying the building’s south end. Many will start with the Native Voices section, which is above-ground, circular, and facing east, according to the wishes of an advisory committee representing Utah’s five Native American nations—the Goshute, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute. “It’s different because it doesn’t have the curator’s voice,” George says. “This is, in many ways, a cultural museum, whereas the rest of the museum is about science.”

The science portion includes the Sky Gallery and its outdoor terrace. Inside are weather and climate information, sky charts, and a heliostat that projects a real-time image of the sun, complete with sunspots, solar flares, and solar storms.

“[We discovered] the region is about the land and how people interacted with it and interact now with it after tens of thousands of years.” —Todd Schliemann, design partner at Ennead Architects of New York

Among other galleries are those focused on life, from the basics of DNA to five vast ecosystems, as well as exhibits on land and past worlds, complete with iconic fossils and reconstructed dinosaur skeletons.

But the museum’s exhibits offer more than just bones. The galleries are chock full of habitat dioramas and murals, a “digital globe” displaying information about various worlds, water tables for hands-on demonstrations of erosion, and rocks that visitors can touch. The building also has learning labs, classrooms that can be closed for special programs or open for viewing artifacts, and a “dinosaur dig” for youngsters. Folks can even watch staffers working inside a fossil preparation lab. And an area called “Our Back Yard” features a crawl-through habitat, water table, live animals, and a kitchen primed for experiments, all designed for children ages 2 to 5.

Freedom and flexibility infuse the galleries. “A lot of museums in the ’80s and ’90s had a mediated pathway—‘you enter here and follow this path’—and we didn’t want that,” George says. “We wanted people to be able to build their own experience, so they can walk through in different ways.”

The building’s north side comprises the “back of house” operations, which George acknowledged as vital to the university but “not all that romantic.” They include loading docks, five research collection storage rooms, an exhibit preparation area, staff offices and conference rooms, areas for students’ research, and a changing-exhibits gallery with climate controls allowing the museum to bring in exhibits it previously could not. The museum also contains about a dozen research labs. The former site had no labs, no room for students, and no more room for faculty offices. “Here,” George says, “we have room to grow our research contributions.”

The old site had only about 67,000 square feet, but the new building, called the Rio Tinto Center, contains 163,000 square feet. Much of it is open to the public—an outdoor terrace, community rooms, and the lobby—for either milling around or renting for events. And visitor amenities abound. A café is just one example. “At the old building, you couldn’t get a Coke, and we had one bathroom. We’re trying to be very welcoming to the general public,” George says.

The wheels began rolling for a new building with a 1980s study about the museum’s future, and the University designated the property in the late 1990s. Fundraising followed. Ultimately, the $102.5 million price tag was met with a combination of $25 million in state funds, $17 million from the federal government, $15 million approved by Salt Lake County voters, and about $45 million in private money. Donations ranged from $5 to a $15 million gift from international mining company Rio Tinto.

Moving began in February 2011, although the transfer of collections won’t finish until June 2012. A formal dedication took place Nov. 17. After more than three years of construction, George expects the move to spark growth in several ways. The number of collections and staff members should rise. Memberships likely will expand by six to seven times the 750 members the museum had last winter when it closed for the move. The number of volunteers, which George describes as “our lifeblood” and an ongoing need, is expected to climb from the current 350 to meet the museum’s goal of 500 in its first year at the new site. And the number of visitors expected the first year is pegged at about 265,000. That’s far above the typical 90,000 annually at the old site, although that latter figure is notable, considering that the former space on Presidents Circle had only 12 parking stalls.

With the new building, the number of objects on display jumps from fewer than 1,000 to more than 3,000. For all of its aesthetic sparkle and multitude of uses, George says, the Rio Tinto Center is “just a great platform.”

At the old facility, she says, the museum wasn’t able to fulfill its mission very well. “The things we can do now, the possibilities are endless,” she says. “Expanding research, new and cutting-edge educational programs, new ways of interpreting science—those things are possible here, where they were not possible in the old building.

“And while we’re interested in being a destination, we want even more to be a trailhead, a starting-off point, for people to explore the rest of the state of Utah.”

— Brice Wallace is a longtime journalist who now works as a freelance writer in Roy, Utah.