PART 3 Ken White

some state legislators. At the time, there was one in the House of Representatives named John Mathis who was a veterinarian from Vernal. And I think Kerry also helped because he was the Utah State Extension veterinarian, so we relied on him to work with the Utah Veterinary Medical Association to get support.

The first presentation we gave to legislators was in May prior to the legislative cycle in 2010. Bryan Slinker and I gave the presentation to the interim Natural Resources and Ag Committee about setting up this school, and then I spent the rest of the summer and fall with our government liaison, Michael Kennedy, visiting 40 or 50 legislators across the state to explain the idea. We’d answer their questions, and if we didn’t have the answers, we’d get the data.

Many of the legislators were surprised and thought we already had a veterinary school. Part of what I did was explaining that no, what we had was WICHE, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which would fund three Utah residents to let them pay resident tuition at a participating vet school for four years. Sometimes I was by myself with Representative Mathis or Neil Abercrombie helping me, and other times, Dr. Slinker came down and helped.

I agreed to look into it and started asking questions. It had already evolved into creating a partnership with an existing veterinary school, which was nothing new, but they were thinking about this enormous budget, like $10 or $11 million, and that seemed a bit ridiculous.

We had a meeting to get input on what everyone was thinking. The question for us was which schools were our students going to now, and the answer was probably about half to Washington State and half to Colorado State.

I sent Kerry and Tom up because of Tom's connections with the WSU faculty. Their dean was Bryan Slinker, and he was really keen on the idea. I then reached out to him and assembled several committees to look at feasibility and how we would put this together, and I got a lot of help from Bryan Slinker.

The guys were thinking of hiring a bunch of new faculty, and as I looked at the proposal, I realized that was unnecessary, we already had physiologists and cell biologists here. So I developed a plan with Chris Davies, and we decided it made a lot more sense to use existing ADVS faculty for the most part, which meant mostly changing teaching assignments and managing teaching roles. Although for some things, like anatomy and some pathology, we did need to hire brand new faculty.

We had committees look at what the curriculum would be in partnership with WSU, and I got some estimates for how we could remodel existing classroom laboratories to do an anatomy lab and so on. We were able to put together a budget that was a bit more realistic: about $3.4 million, of which about half went toward Washington State for taking the 20 Utah resident students and letting them pay resident tuition during their last two years in Pullman. The other half was paying for the new faculty, operating budgets for the classes, and buying out time from existing faculty.

Once we had all that, we vetted it with

Keep in mind that we had a huge fiscal downturn from '08 through essentially '11, and we got this thing approved and funded in 2010 when they were cutting budgets. I think we did a good job highlighting to them why it was so important. We had huge demand for veterinarians in Utah, and we weren't able to fill job openings, yet every student other than the three in the WICHE program had to pay non-resident tuition. $60,000 to $80,000 a year in tuition can really limit how fast you can recover the money you paid for education.

I’d been a faculty member both at the ADVS Department here and at the animal science department at Louisiana State University before I came to USU, and there were so many highly qualified students that wanted to go to veterinary school but couldn’t. They had the passion, but when you look at a $60,000 a year tuition, it's pretty hard to make the math work out. I wanted to create more opportunities for those kids to access that profession.