Utah State University

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Utah State University
Motto Research, Service, Teaching
Established 1888
Type Public
Land-grant
Space-grant
Endowment $97 million
President Stan L. Albrecht
Faculty 870
Staff 1,800
Undergraduates 19,775
Postgraduates 3,848
Location Logan, UT, USA
Campus Urban
Sports Aggies
Colors Aggie Blue
Mascot Big Blue
Website www.usu.edu

Utah State University's main campus is located in Logan, Utah. It was established in 1888 as the Agricultural College of Utah, and was subsequently renamed Utah State Agricultural College. In 1957 it became Utah State University. USU has 870 faculty, and 23,623 students (total) were enrolled in autumn of 2006.

Contents

[edit] Academics

Utah State University Wordmark
Utah State University Wordmark
Old Main building at Utah State University
Old Main building at Utah State University

As Utah's land-grant university, USU conducts world-class research into many agricultural and natural resource disciplines. USU contains seven academic colleges and 47 individual departments, and offers degrees in more than 200 majors. Under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education USU is classified institutionally as Doctoral/Research University–Extensive, awarding at least 50 doctoral degrees per year across at least 15 disciplines. It spends approximately $186 million annually for research.

Beyond its Logan campus, Utah State's Extension community provides academic resources and support for the state as a whole, including an excellent Continuing Education program. Created in 1907, Extension now includes USU Regional Campuses at Brigham City, Tooele, and the Uintah Basin, as well as USU Centers at Moab, Ogden, Price, and Salt Lake City. USU also operates Extension locations in each of Utah's 29 counties.

USU is well-known for its engineering program and Space Dynamics Laboratory (SDL). The SDL is a world-famous research facility focusing on military and science applications. It frequently submits projects to the Department of Defense and NASA. According to the most recent National Science Foundation statistics, USU ranked first among all universities in the U.S. in funding for aerospace research.

Other USU research centers include the Center for Persons with Disabilities, the USU Ecology Center, the Utah Agriculture Experiment Station, and the Utah Water Research Laboratory. The Intermountain Herbarium, operated by the Department of Biology, contains more than 245,000 specimens of native and introduced flora, fauna, and fungi from Utah and the American West. USU also operates research facilities beyond its main campus in Logan, including the Utah Botanical Center in Kaysville, north of Salt Lake City.

The College of Natural Resources includes the departments of Watershed Sciences, Environment and Society, and Wildland Resources. USU has been nationally prominent for decades in the sciences and management of forests, rangeland, wildlife, and fisheries and watersheds. Many graduates of the College of Natural Resources have gone on to careers in the National Forest Service, National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. The College of Natural Resources also operates the Quinney Library, with collections relevant for natural resources education, management, and research.

In the Humanities, USU has longstanding strengths in the study of the American West. The university, through its departments of English and History, is the host institution for the scholarly journals Western American Literature and the Western Historical Quarterly, the official publications of the Western Literature Association and the Western History Association. The Mountain West Center for Regional Studies, a Humanities outreach center at USU, sponsors public events and research focusing on the cultures and history of the Interior West and larger American West. University Special Collections and Archives, located in Merrill-Cazier Library, has extensive archival holdings documenting the histories of Utah, the Intermountain West, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as collections pertaining to American folklore and the lives and works of western authors such as Jack London and poet May Swenson, a native of Logan.

USU's College of Education and Human Services has been ranked 26th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, and ranks 3rd nationally in research funding. The college contains a wide range of disciplines beyond teacher education, including departments in the fields of Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education, Elementary Education, Health, Physical Education and Recreation, Instructional Technology, Psychology, Secondary Education, and Special Education and Rehabilitation.

USU has undertaken an ambitious plan to expand Arts programs and facilities in recent years with the creation of the Caine School of the Arts, a division of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Performance facilities include the Kent Concert Hall and the Manon Caine Russell-Kathryn Caine Wanlass Performance Hall,[1] completed in 2006. The 400-seat Performance Hall, designed by the architectural firm Sasaki Associates, has been praised as one of the best acoustic performance spaces in the American West, and received an Honor Award from the Utah Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in 1982, contains one of the largest art collections in the Intermountain region. Its holdings include nationally-significant collections of ceramics, Native American art, and especially artworks produced in the American West since 1945. Notable departments within the Caine School of the Arts include Art, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, Music, and Theatre Arts. The faculty of the music department includes vocalist Michael Ballam, famous as the founder of the Utah Festival Opera and an actor for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[edit] Athletics

USU's sports teams are known as the Aggies. Recently, the men's basketball team, under coach Stew Morrill, has become known as a nationally respected program, with several trips to the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship. USU's men's basketball team has had one of the most successful programs in the country since 2000, winning at least 23 games in each season and appearing in the NCAA tournament numerous times. The football program, which has a rich history (Merlin Olsen an alumnus), has struggled lately, following an ill-fated two-year stint as an independent program and two more years in the geographically distant Sun Belt Conference. Following the decision of the Big West Conference to stop sponsoring football in 2001, USU's other teams remained in that conference until the school was finally invited to join the Western Athletic Conference (AKA the WAC) (a long-sought goal) in 2005.

Before the beginning of its decline in 1998, the football program had experienced some successes, including Big West Conference championships in 1993 and 1997. In 1993, the team earned a trip to the Las Vegas Bowl, where they defeated Ball State University. In 1997, the team lost to the University of Cincinnati in the Humanitarian Bowl.

In recent times, the men's basketball team has won invitations to the NCAA tournament in 1998 (under coach Larry Eustachy), 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006 (all under Morrill). Prior to 2006, all of these invitations were a result of winning the Big West Conference tournament. In 2006, the Aggies received an at-large bid to the tournament, after finishing second place in their first season in the Western Athletic Conference and losing in overtime of the WAC tournament championship game to Nevada-Reno. Despite a stellar season in 2003–2004 and a national top-25 ranking toward the end of the season, the Aggies did not receive an at-large tournament bid after being upset in the conference tournament. This was the most notorious snub in that year's tournament, and earned the derision of head coach Morrill, as the Aggies held a 25-3 record and were nationally ranked in the top-25. A highlight was a first-round victory against fifth-seeded Ohio State University in 2001.

Of women's sports at USU, gymnastics has probably been most successful, and the school also sponsors women's softball and volleyball. Women's basketball returned in 2003 after a fifteen-year absence. At the time, USU was the only Division I program that did not have women's basketball besides the mostly male Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel. The women's team has not yet produced a winning season.

The most used sports venue is the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum, where basketball, volleyball, and gymnastics events are held. Its reputation as a tomb for visiting men's teams (as of Summer 2005, USU has only lost eight games there since the 1997–98 season), and its loud, rambunctious atmosphere have contributed to difficulties assembling a nonconference schedule.

The football team plays in Romney Stadium, slightly north and west of the main campus. The stadium had natural grass until 2004, when artificial turf was installed.

As of the 2005-2006 season, the Aggies compete in the Western Athletic Conference.

[edit] Media

Two primary print outlets serve the USU student body: (1) The Utah Statesman is sponsored by the university and is published three times per week. The Statesman won best non-daily student paper for region nine in the SPJ awards last year. (2) The Hard News Cafe news website is operated by USU's Department of Journalism and Communications and has won numerous awards for its student reporting, partially because it is often the only entrant in the categories in which it wins.

Utah Public Radio is heard on KUSU (91.5 FM) and KUSR (89.5 FM) in Logan, and throughout Utah on a system of 26 translators. UPR "broadcasts a mix of information, public affairs, and fine arts programming." KUSU is a National Public Radio member station, and an affiliate of Public Radio International.

Aggie Television (ATV) is a cable service lineup of approximately 110 channels offered free of charge to all on-campus residents. ATV produces Crossroads, a bulletin/announcement channel; and Aggie Advantage, providing local and student video programming.

[edit] Speech and debate

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USU sponsors a successful speech & debate program. The program is led by Director of Forensics Dr. Tom Worthen, who re-organized the program in 2003.[2] Since that time, the program has won the Northwest Forensic Conference championships three years in a row.[3]

[edit] Colleges and departments

USU has seven colleges, each is shown here with its respective departments:

Agriculture

  • Agricultural Systems Technology and Education
  • Animal, Dairy and Veterinary Sciences
  • Economics
  • Nutrition and Food Sciences
  • Plants, Soils, and Biometeorology

Business

  • Accountancy, School of
  • Business Administration
  • Business Information Systems
  • Economics
  • Management and Human Resources

Education and Human Services

  • Communicative Disorders and Deaf Education
  • Elementary Education
  • Family, Consumer and Human Development
  • Health, Physical Education and Recreation
  • Instructional Technology
  • Psychology
  • Secondary Education
  • Special Education and Rehabilitation

Engineering

  • Biological and Irrigation
  • Civil and Environmental
  • Electrical and Computer
  • Engineering and Technology Education
  • Mechanical and Aerospace

Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

  • Aerospace Studies (Air Force ROTC)
  • Army ROTC (Military Science)
  • Art
  • English
  • History
  • Intensive English Language Institute
  • Interior Design Program
  • Journalism and Communications
  • Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
  • Languages, Philosophy and Speech Communication
  • Music
  • Political Science
  • Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology
  • Theatre Arts

Natural Resources

  • Aquatic, Watershed and Earth Resources
  • Environment and Society
  • Forest, Range, and Wildlife Sciences

Science

  • Biology
  • Chemistry and Biochemistry
  • Computer Science
  • Geology
  • Mathematics and Statistics
  • Physics

[edit] Notable alumni

[edit] External links

  • Campus Maps 1 or 2

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ USU.edu: Wanlass Performance Hall: Chamber-Music Heaven. Retrieved on March 6, 2006.
  2. ^ USU.edu: Utah State Today: Speech and Debate. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
  3. ^ utahstatesman.com: Debate Team. Retrieved on February 2, 2007.
Western Athletic Conference
Boise State • Fresno State • Hawai'i • Idaho • Louisiana Tech • Nevada • New Mexico State • San José State • Utah State
Colleges and universities of Utah
BYU • CEU • Dixie State • LDS Business College • SLCC • Snow College • SUU • Stevens-Henager • U of U • USU • UVSC • WSU • Westminster
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