Month: February 2025

This winter in Utah, the grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side, but the snow is deeper.

The northern and southern halves of the state have been experiencing two different winters. The north, including in the Wasatch and Uinta mountain ranges and their skiers and snowboarders, can delight in a snowpack that’s slightly above average — thanks in large part to last week’s storm that dropped more than to six feet of snow in the Cottonwood Canyons.

The southern part of the state? Even for a desert climate, it’s dry.

The Wasatch Mountains are at 110% of average snowpack, according to Glen Merrill, a hydrologist based out of the National Weather Service office in Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, the Pine Valley Mountains, which are situated near Utah’s southwest border and feed the Santa Clara River and the St. George area, are at 12% of average.

“That’s a record low,” Merrill said. ” And to really highlight this, elevations below 9,000 feet have no snow.”

Southwest Washington County and portions of Iron County are in an extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. That is one step above the worst possible drought status. A little more than three-fourths of the state is in drought, according to the monitor. The rest is “abnormally dry.”

It started to feel dry in northern Utah early last week, as brown replaced white on the sides of Mount Olympus rising above the Salt Lake Valley, and the same happened at Round Valley in Park City. Jim Steenburgh, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, posted on his Bluesky account on Feb. 17 that the 9.2 inches of snow Salt Lake City had received since October was the second lowest in history. The lowest, 6.8 inches, came during the 2014-15 season. That season went on to become the least snowiest in Utah history.

But last week, a major storm rode to the rescue. It started snowing Feb. 20 and continued for the better part of four days. That added to the bounty from the weekend of Feb. 13-15. In all, about 50 inches dropped in the northern half of the state, with a snow-water equivalent of about five inches, according to a report from OpenSnow forecaster Evan Thayer.

“The storm cycle since February 13th sure has been good to us!” Thayer wrote in his report. “We saw up to 75 [inches] of new snow and quite a bit of water content in the snow to help bolster our snowpack.”

Southern Utah also got some moisture from that storm cycle. Merrill estimated most mountains saw a couple inches of snow. But it has already melted, he said, with most of that moisture going into the soil and little, if any, making it into the streams and rivers.

Southern Utah needs more storms like that to catch up, Merrill said. A lot more.

“We’re essentially saying that we’re nine storms behind,” he said, “as we enter into March.”

To come to that determination, Merrill looked at the highest and typically snowiest SNOTEL site in the southern mountains — one located near the Brian Head Resort ski area, which has the highest base elevation in the state at 9,600 feet. It has received the snow equivalent of 7.5 inches of water. That’s the second lowest on record for that site and nine inches less than normal. And Merrill estimates a decent winter storm carries about an inch of water on average.

Trying to look at the bright side, Merrill noted that municipalities in southern Utah still have plenty of water stored in reservoirs as a result of the past two winters — one of which was the snowiest on record.

In addition, Thayer reported he expects the southern part of the state could get some moisture Sunday, with mountains across the state potentially seeing snow Monday or Tuesday. More storms, he noted, could be on the horizon for the following weekend.

That could be good news for skiers and city managers statewide. But like the longevity of its snow, the relief in the south is expected to be fleeting.

“The pattern does look more favorable,” Merrill said. “But we’re getting late in the season, especially for the southern Utah mountains.”

SALT LAKE CITY — Nevaeh Parker, president of the Black Student Union at the University of Utah, has spent much of the school year scrambling to salvage her organization, undercut by matters far beyond student control.

A new Utah law banning diversity, equity and inclusion programming at public colleges took effect July 1, eliminating the Black Student Union’s $11,000 in university funding, shutting down its gathering center and taking away staff support for an organization that for more than 50 years has been helping Black students succeed in college.

As a condition of remaining a university-sponsored and funded organization, the group had to agree to never talk about bias, discrimination and identity politics on campus. The students refused — along with three other campus affinity groups.

Now the Black Student Union, the Asian American Assn., the Pacific Islander Assn. and LGBTQ+ students are fending for themselves, scrambling to find community support, advisors, mentoring and a place to meet, while feeling they are no longer valued on campus.

As President Trump sets out to ban DEI efforts across the federal government and in schools, colleges and businesses, Utah’s law and its impact at the University of Utah offer a case study on what a college campus looks like without race- and gender-based campus programs. Utah is among at least 15 states with DEI bans in schools and higher education institutions.

Utah’s law prohibits public universities, K-12 schools and government offices “from engaging in discriminatory practices” based on a person’s race, color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion or gender identity. The law states it “does not impact” academic freedom or research and classroom instruction, among other issues.

When it comes to speech, “an institution may not take, express, or assert a position or opinion” on anti-racism, bias, critical race theory, implicit bias, intersectionality, prohibited discriminatory practices, racial privilege,” the law states. Diversity training is also banned.

Parker and others said that agreeing to limit their speech on issues important to them was the line they could not cross to keep their university support.

“Those things are not political, those things are real, and they impact the way students are able to perform on campus,” Parker said.

Alex Tokita, a senior who is the president of the Asian American Student Assn., said obeying the law is “bonkers.”

Alex Tokita, a senior at the University of Utah, is the president of the Asian American Student Assn.

(Olivia Sanchez / Hechinger Report)

“It’s frustrating to me that we can have an MLK Jr. Day, but we can’t talk about implicit bias,” Tokita said. “We can’t talk about critical race theory, bias, implicit bias.”

As a student, Tokita can use these words and discuss these concepts. But when speaking as part of a university-sponsored organization, using such speech is against the law.

The university responds

Utah’s law, House Bill 261, known as “Equal Opportunity Initiatives,” arose from a conservative view that DEI initiatives promote different treatment of students based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Violators risk losing state funding.

To comply with the law, the University of Utah closed its Black Cultural Center, the Center for Equity and Student Belonging, the LGBT Resource Center and the Women’s Resource Center — in addition to making funding cuts to the student affinity groups.

Instead, the university opened a new Center for Community and Cultural Engagement to offer programming for education, celebration and awareness of different identity and cultural groups. A new Center for Student Access and Resources offers practical support services such as counseling to all students, regardless of identity.

A student looks at a National Coming Out Day exhibit in the student union at the University of Utah. The exhibit was set up by the new Center for Community and Cultural Engagement.

(Olivia Sanchez / Hechinger Report)

The law allows Utah colleges to operate cultural centers, so long as they offer only “cultural education, celebration, engagement, and awareness to provide opportunities for all students to learn with and from one another,” according to guidance from the Utah System of Higher Education.

For many students, the changes had little effect. Utah’s undergraduate population is about 63% white, 14% Latino, 8% Asian and 1% Black. Gender identity and sexuality among students are not tracked.

How students are coping

Parker said she is dedicated to keeping the BSU going because it means so much to her fellow Black students. She said several of her peers have told her they don’t feel they have a place on campus and are considering dropping out.

“The students are hurting,” she said, adding that she too is struggling.

“I feel as though me living in this Black body automatically makes myself and my existence here political, I feel like it makes my existence here debatable and questioned,” Parker said. “I feel like every single day I’m having to prove myself extra.”

So she continues her work, organizing the group’s monthly meetings on a bare-bones budget — about $1,000 from the student government, which serves more than 100 clubs. She often drives to pick up the pizza to avoid wasting precious dollars on delivery fees. She’s helping organize community events outside the purview of the university to help Black, Asian and Latino students build relationships with one another and connect with professionals working in Salt Lake City for mentorship and networking opportunities.

A group of queer and transgender students formed a student-run Pride Center, with support from the local Utah Pride Center. A few days a week, they set up camp in a study room in the library. They bring in Pride flags, informational fliers and rainbow stickers to distribute. Without an official center, they sit at a big table in case other students come looking for a space to study or spend time with friends.

What the university is doing

Lori McDonald, the university’s vice president of student affairs, said so far, her staff has not seen as many students spending time in the two new centers as they did when that space was the Women’s Resource Center and the LGBT Resource Center.

“I still hear from students who are grieving the loss of the centers that they felt such ownership of and comfort with,” McDonald said. “I expected that there would still be frustration with the situation, but yet still carrying on and finding new things.”

Katy Hall, a Republican state representative who co-sponsored the legislation, said in an email she wanted to ensure that support services were available to all students and that barriers to academic success were removed.

“My aim was to take the politics out of it and move forward with helping students and Utahns to focus on equal treatment under the law for all,” Hall said. “Long term, I hope that students who benefitted from these centers in the past know that the expectation is that they will still be able to receive services and support that they need.”

A student wears a beaded bracelet made at a “Fab Friday” event hosted by the LGBT Resource Center at the University of Utah. The center was closed recently to comply with a new state law.

(Olivia Sanchez / Hechinger Report)

Concerns ahead

Research has shown that a sense of belonging at college contributes to improved engagement in class and campus activities and to retaining students until they graduate.

“When we take away critical supports that we know have been so instrumental in student engagement and retention, we are not delivering on our promise to ensure student success,” said Royel M. Johnson, director of the national assessment of collegiate campus climates at the USC Race and Equity Center.

Kirstin Maanum is the director of the new Center for Student Access and Resources; it administers scholarships and guidance previously offered by the now-closed centers. She formerly served as the director of the Women’s Resource Center.

“Students have worked really hard to figure out where their place is and try to get connected,” Maanum said. “It’s on us to be telling students what we offer and even in some cases, what we don’t, and connecting them to places that do offer what they’re looking for.”

That has been difficult, she said, because the changeover happened so quickly, even though some staffers from the closed centers were reassigned to the new centers.

The new way of doing things

Last fall, the new Center for Community and Cultural Engagement hosted a fall event around the time of National Coming Out Day in October, with a screening of “Paris Is Burning,” a film about transgender women and drag queens in New York City in the 1980s.

Afterward, two staff members led a discussion with the students, prefacing that talk with a disclaimer saying that they were not speaking on behalf of the university.

Center staffers also created an altar for students to observe Día de los Muertos, held an event to celebrate Indigenous art and has hosted events in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month. But some students lament the loss of dedicated cultural spaces.

For Taylor White, a recent graduate with a degree in psychology, connecting with fellow Black students through BSU events was, “honestly, the biggest relief of my life.”

At the Black Cultural Center, she said, students could talk about what it was like to be the only Black person in their classes or to be Black in other predominantly white spaces. She said that without the support of other Black students, she’s not sure she would have been able to finish her degree.

This article was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Nick Schmaltz had one goal and two assists, and Karel Vejmelka made 15 saves for Utah (27-24-9), who have won four straight at home and six of their past eight games.

“I think we were consistent in the way we played,” Tourigny said. “When we got to 3-1, 4-1, it did not change. We didn’t start to play differently or start to peel back. We stayed engaged and we stayed in the moment and we just kept going.”

Frederick Gaudreau scored and Marc-Andre Fleury made 25 saves for the Wild (34-21-4), who have lost two straight and four of their last seven games.

“I thought for large portions of the night tonight, we got outskated, we got out-competed,” Wild head coach John Hynes said. “We didn’t do a lot. We had some stretches where we pushed and we played, but I thought they were faster, harder, more competitive, and made more plays, other than some pushes in the game that we had, and that was the difference.”

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Clayton Keller had a career-high five points — scoring his 22nd goal and assisting on four others — and the Utah Hockey Club beat the Minnesota Wild 6-1 on Thursday night for its fourth straight home victory.

Nick Schmaltz had a goal and two assists, Barrett Hayton and Logan Cooley each had a goal and an assist, and Dylan Guenther and Sean Durzi also scored. Karel Vejmelka made 15 saves.

Frederick Gaudreau scored for Minnesota, and Marc-Andre Fleury stopped 25 shots.

Hayton opened the scoring on a power play 3:59 into the first period.

Utah added to its lead after gaining a two-man advantage late in the first. Marcus Foligno and Jonas Brodin were both sent to the box for penalties against Schmaltz. Foligno had a double-minor for high-sticking and Brodin was whistled for hooking.

Guenther quickly capitalized, threading the puck between Fleury and the post for his 22nd goal of the season with 30 seconds remaining in the first.

Gaudreau pulled one back for the Wild, snapping the puck in with 3:58 remaining in the second. Durzi countered with a dart from long distance and restored Utah’s two-goal lead with 2:10 left in the period.

Schmaltz, Keller and Cooley scored in the third.

Takeaways

Wild: Minnesota has been outscored 12-2 in three losses to Utah this season.

Utah: Guenther has five power-play points in his last six games, including three goals. He leads Utah in power play goals (nine) and is second in power- play points (21).

Key moment

Durzi’s first goal of the season snuffed out a potential rally after Gaudreau put Minnesota on the board.

Key stat

Utah scored multiple goals on the man-advantage in a single period for just the third time this season.

Up Next

Minnesota is at Colorado on Friday night. Utah hosts New Jersey on Saturday night.

___

AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

A team of biological, Earth and environmental scientists from North Carolina State University, Stellenbosch University and the University of Minnesota has found new types of ancient eggshells in the Mussentuchit Member in Utah. Their study is published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The Mussentuchit Member is a sedimentary rock layer that is part of Utah’s Cedar Mountain Formation. Researchers have been digging at the site for more than half a century. It was also the site of the first fossilized egg find from the Cenomanian age. Because of work conducted at places like the Mussentuchit Member, a new branch of science called “oodiversity” has evolved, which is the study of the diversity of fossilized eggs.

The researchers examined the range of ancient eggshells recovered from the Mussentuchit Member over the years to learn more about the creatures that laid them. Their work involved studying more than 4,000 fossilized eggshell fragments and attempting to categorize them based on their features and data found at the dig site, such as fossilized bones that might have been associated with the eggs and their shells.

They also put them under microscopes to learn about their structure and to differentiate them from one another. In some cases, they went even further, using scanning electron microscopes to better understand some of the details in the fossils.

Their task was difficult, to say the least, but they still managed to find a category for most of the samples they studied. They also found some eggshell types that had not been identified before and were able to confirm that at least six egg-laying species lived in the area approximately 100 million years ago—three that had been laid by oviraptorosaur dinosaurs, two by ornithopod dinosaurs and one by a crocodylomorph, a type of ancient reptile.

The research team notes that several of their findings mark the first time that these eggshells have been identified in North America. They suggest that Cretaceous North America was more complex than has been thought.

© 2025 Science X Network

After more than a year of searching, Utah Tech University finally has a new president.

Shane B. Smeed, currently the president of a small liberal arts college in Missouri, was named Wednesday to take the helm at the St. George school. At the announcement of his name, a room on campus filled with students, faculty and staff waiting to welcome their next leader erupted with cheers and claps, and many jumped up from their seats.

The roar didn’t stop until Smeed, wearing a red tie to match Utah Tech’s signature redrock color, got to the podium.

“The momentum is here,” Smeed said. “It’s already here.”

Smeed was named last week as one of three finalists for the job that has been open since January 2024 — one of the longest vacancies for Utah’s public institutions of higher education and for a school that’s been dogged by turmoil in those months.

“Our new president will lead Utah Tech as we come together,” said Deven Macdonald, a member of the university’s board of trustees and co-chair of the search committee, on Wednesday.

Of the candidates, Smeed has the longest record as a university administrator — a nearly three decade-long career in academia that started in 1998 when he was named a manager and advisor at the private for-profit DeVry University.

That’s also where Smeed got his bachelor’s degree in business operations and a master’s of business administration, in addition to a master of arts in student personnel administration from St. Louis University; none of the state’s other public school leaders have received their education at a for-profit school. Smeed worked his way through enrollment management positions and later became president of DeVry from late 2007 to 2011.

DeVry has a controversial reputation, which includes being chastised by the U.S. Department of Education in 2022 for being among four for-profit schools in the country that had misled students into taking loans by making false promises about about their job placement rates.

That included some of the time when Smeed was president.

Education Department investigators said, according to reporting from NPR, that students who attended DeVry from 2008 to 2015 were eligible to file claims for loan relief. DeVry had attested that 90% of its students who graduated found employment. Job placement rate was actually about 58%, investigators said.

DeVry was originally on the hook to repay some of the money, but the loans were later forgiven under a federal program during President Joe Biden’s administration. It’s the last of four for-profit schools that remains open and accredited today.

After his time at DeVry, Smeed went on to be a vice president and the chief operating officer at Ottawa University, a private Christian school in Kansas, for two years. And he spent a year as a vice president of Kaplan University, now Purdue University Global, another for-profit school.

He leaves his current position as president of Park University — where he’s been an administrator since 2015 and president since 2020 — to come back to his native Utah. He’ll be Utah Tech’s 19th president.

“I’m excited to return to my home state to serve this deserving student body and work closely with our dedicated faculty and staff,” Smeed said in a statement Wednesday after the announcement.

The Utah Board of Higher Education, which is tasked with hiring and firing presidents, added in that message that “transition details are still being finalized,” including a start date for Smeed.

Controversy with previous president

He takes over Utah Tech University at a difficult time, after it was embroiled in controversy for the past year and has waited 14 months for a permanent leader to find a way forward.

The previous president, Richard “Biff” Williams, stepped down in January 2024. It was later revealed in a lawsuit that he did so while he was under investigation.

Williams is accused of leaving a phallic gag gift for one of his vice presidents after the man had surgery in November 2023. Williams left a note with the present that credited the gift to staff members who are now suing — the university’s top attorney, its second-in-command attorney, and its Title IX coordinator, who is tasked with responding to complaints of sexual misconduct.

Those three employees — Becky Broadbent, Jared Rasband and Hazel Sainsbury — say in their federal case that attributing the gift to them felt like payback for their efforts to clean up issues with harassment and racism at Utah Tech University. They say the school has a toxic culture that stems from the top.

The lawsuit claims that the Utah System of Higher Education conducted a “sham investigation” that served to protect Williams. He continued to receive pay from the school for six months after stepping down, until he started as president of Missouri State University in July 2024. Williams has acknowledged that he left the gift and apologized.

A few of the administrators who are also named in the lawsuit and were alleged to have contributed to that environment had thrown their names in to be the next president of Utah Tech. That includes Courtney White, who was serving as the school’s interim leader.

None of them were selected as finalists, though. And that was a welcome development for many faculty members who signed a resolution last year pleading that the next president be an outsider who could come into the school with a fresh perspective.

The Utah Board of Higher Education acknowledged some of the controversy Wednesday during the announcement.

Board chair Amanda Covington said the search for a new president was thorough and deliberate. Members of the board and search committee, she noted, reviewed every comment sent in about the candidates.

“We know how critical it is for the next university president to be a bridge-builder,” she said.

She thanked White for his work in the interim. And she said: “I feel very confident in where we’ve arrived today.”

Smeed will be faced with addressing the continued fallout from the previous administration and restoring trust. In his bio, he wrote that he’s ready for the job.

“Recognizing the importance of transparent communication and collaboration,” he said, he has “introduced an extensive communication plan to foster engagement and trust among students, faculty, staff and other stakeholders” at his previous institutions.

‘An exciting new chapter of growth’

It’s also looking like Smeed could be the last public university president in the state named in an open process.

Currently, Utah law requires that a presidential search committee publicly name three to five finalists. Staff, faculty, students and community members are then invited to weigh in, give feedback and vet the candidates.

State lawmakers, though, are currently moving forward with SB282, a measure that would shift that selection to behind closed doors.

Search committee members would be required to keep all discussions confidential. They would forward three picks, in ranked order, to the Utah Board of Higher Education. The board would only vote on one finalist in a public meeting.

It’s all part of a massively shifting higher education landscape — in Utah and across the nation — that comes as Smeed takes the post.

In that whirlwind, he’ll be tasked with impending budget cuts set by the Legislature, which amount to a $2.6 million reduction for Utah Tech University. State leaders have instructed that schools can earn that money back if they prove they’ve cut low-enrollment programs and reinvest in majors that have higher wage and job outcomes.

There’s also increasing pressure from the federal government and likely cuts to several budget items that universities rely on for funding.

On a local level, Utah Tech University, too, continues to face a battle over its name. The school switched in 2022 from a name that had been tied to slavery and the Confederacy of the Civil War South. But many in the community still hold firm to the heritage the old name had. Smeed gave a nod to that during his speech Wednesday.

“So many people have given their blood, sweat and tears to building up this community and this university,” he said.

Only a decade before that, in 2013, the school also shifted from operating as a college to a university.

Today, Utah Tech has more than 13,000 students and a strong technology and career focus. And its burgeoning campus is growing with expanding enrollment each year and new buildings, including a general education center currently under construction.

“Utah Tech has accomplished much over the last decade-plus,” Macdonald, the trustee, said. “But there’s more work to do.”

Macdonald said Smeed is the right person “to build on our legacy and now lead Utah Tech University into an exciting new chapter of growth and development.”

The search committee was particularly excited by Smeed’s work at his previous schools forming partnerships between institutions and businesses, such as the collaboration at Park University with the Kansas City Chiefs football team. Macdonald said that would serve students well at Utah Tech, as they learn to work with industries while still studying in their programs.

Smeed thanked his wife, Angela, and three kids, Samantha, Andrew and Landon, as he accepted the post, saying he looks forward to bringing them to Utah and building a home here.

And after more than a year without a president, he said to the students and staff at Utah Tech, he’s most excited to come in “to lock arm and arm with each of you.”