i Oral History Program Stephen D. Nadauld Interviewed by Ruby Licona 11 November 2011 ii Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Stephen D. Nadauld Interviewed by Ruby Licona 11 November 2011 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Nadauld, Stephen D., an oral history by Ruby Licona, 11 November 2011, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. Stephen Nadauld ca. 1985 1 Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Dr. Stephen D. Nadauld. It was conducted on November 11, 2011 and concerns his recollections and experiences with Weber State University. The interviewer is Ruby Licona. Rebecca Ory-Hernandez was also present during the interview. RL: Today is November 11, 2011. We are meeting with Dr. Stephen D. Nadauld, who is president of Dixie State College of Utah, and who served as president of Weber State College and was instrumental in its development into Weber State University. I am Ruby Licona from the Stewart Library of Weber State University. Also present is Rebecca Ory-Hernandez from the Development Office at Weber State. Thank you for meeting with us and sharing your story. We’d like to start with you giving us a little background on growing up in Idaho and where your life took off from there. SN: Sure. Growing up in Idaho was a wonderful thing because I grew up in a small town and we had to work. My parents weren’t wealthy at all. Learning to work early in your life is good. I worked in the fields picking potatoes, hoeing beets, and moving sprinkler pipe. I had a paper route and I worked in the grocery store. There were two kinds of kids in town. There were the college prep kids and the kind of cowboy/farmer kids. Both were nice groups. I fell into the college prep group. I didn’t have a pickup truck and a gun rack and a dog. I simply went to school. I was on the football team, the basketball team, and the track team. We won state championships in all three of those sports in either junior or senior year. I was also a good student. I got very good grades all through high school. I would go to practices and work in the grocery store and get A’s in all my 2 classes. To say it that way makes it sound like I can’t believe I really did it. But sometimes things come easy and those things seemed to come easy. I went off to the University of Idaho to start my college education because it was the place where I got a scholarship. In those days, BYU was not very well thought of academically. When I got back from my first year at the University of Idaho, I headed off to France to be an LDS missionary. I spent nearly two and half years there. I came home when my father died—my father died on a Tuesday and I made it home to his funeral on Saturday. I started school on Monday at Ricks College with a scholarship from the college president who knew something of my circumstances. I started a week late. Then I transferred down to BYU and had a great three years there. I majored in chemistry and minored in math, physics, and French. I was elected student body vice president for my senior year. I was able to get President Wilkinson to write me a letter of recommendation to get into Harvard Business School. I scored high on the law and business school admission tests. So I was actually accepted at Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, and Stanford Law School. I didn’t know which of the four to go to. I guess I chose the one that offered me the most money. I got a scholarship from Harvard Business School and that’s where I ended up. I don’t think I was cut out to be a lawyer and in retrospect I’m really glad I didn’t try to be a lawyer. I met a young woman during the first part of my senior year. We dated and she was graduating the same time I was. She graduated and went off to teach high school and I graduated and went off to Harvard Business School. We 3 continued to communicate and we got engaged in the spring. We got married between my first and second years at the business school. RL: What was her name? SN: Her name was Margaret—Margaret Dyreng from Manti, Utah. I lived at Harvard in the dorms with the guys my first year, but my second year, Margaret and I found an apartment as a young married couple. She taught high school in the Boston suburbs and was an outstanding teacher. She has gone on to teach in many settings all over the world and has been extraordinary in all of those settings. I graduated from Harvard Business School and went to work on Wall Street. I enjoyed that, but I sensed in the last part months at Harvard and during the Wall Street experience that I really wanted to be involved in education. I needed an experience to tell me if I’d like to be a professor. So after a year on Wall Street I was hired by the University of Utah to be an instructor in the business school there. I taught undergraduate and MBA classes. In fact, I went overseas and taught on Air Force bases. After a year of doing that, I realized I really enjoyed the lifestyle. I loved teaching and the academic environment. I applied to the University of California at Berkeley and was accepted and after two years at the University of Utah I went to Berkeley and spent four years there working on my PhD. That was an interesting experience because the Harvard Business School education is case oriented and experiential. You do it in teams and you learn how to do analyses—not a lot of implementation, but you certainly get to be a pretty bright analyst. Berkeley, by contrast, is purely academic. It’s lecture, 4 take tests, study the concepts hard and make sure you can replicate the formulas. These were two really different kinds of education in two of the best institutions in the country. I think that has been a great preparation for what I’ve done since then—to have both ways of thinking about things. RL: Being able to draw from the two different methods—I would imagine that would help in your success—being able to adjust to whatever the situation calls for. SN: For sure. I think that it’s turned out that in the circumstances I’ve been in I’ve needed to be able to conceptualize the problem and then I’ve needed the interpersonal and analysis skills to get it from the conceptual stage to everybody else and the finding a way to solve the problem. It also helped in teaching. When I graduated from Berkeley, I went to BYU and became a professor of finance. After a couple of years I was director of the MBA program there. That was great because I knew what an MBA program ought to run like and what ought to happen, but I had the conceptual strength from the PhD from Berkeley. This was the first place I noticed this nice educational marriage. RL: Outside the educational scenario, what were the differences socially and environmentally that you saw between Boston and Berkeley? SN: The east coast and the west coast are entirely different cultures. On the east, you live to work. Work is your life. You work day and night. In the west, you work to live. Work is a means to having a pleasant lifestyle. That carried over. Even though Berkeley was a very rigorous institution, people were there because they loved the lifestyle as well. The cultures are entirely different. I remember in Boston after I’d been there six weeks—I want to say this in a non-pejorative 5 way—in the classroom I was surrounded by people whose attitudes and opinions were quite unlike anything I had ever encountered. It was sort of eastern establishment, very liberal, there were accents that I thought were unusual. Remember, by this time, I’d spent two and half years in France, so it wasn’t a culture shock being away from home. It was that I was surrounded by people who were very different than I, and had such a different orientation toward life. I wanted to say, “I don’t think that way.” The best I could do was to call home and say to my little brother, “Bill, you gotta send me a pair of cowboy boots.” I’ve never worn cowboy boots in my life; as I said, I was not a cowboy kind of guy. I said, “Bill, I gotta have a pair of cowboy boots because this is really weird out here.” So he sent me a pair of cowboy boots and I started wearing them to class. It wasn’t just me but some of the other kids from the west started wearing Levis and such. Essentially we broke the dress code, which was sport coats and ties or suits and ties. It was happening all over the country. It was inevitable that it would get to Harvard. I just happened to be there during that time. But we ended up with a dress code at the end of our first year that was much different. I was able to say to people, “I’m from the west. I don’t share your attitudes. I don’t dislike you, but think of me as different than you.” I realized on a trip to Hawaii that when you step off the plane in Hawaii— the first thing that hits you is the warm, moist air—you think about it, you’re on a little spot in the middle of three thousand miles of water in every direction, so your environment is going to be totally dictated by being on the dot in the water. When you grow up in Idaho, even though you think you’re college prep and that 6 none of that other stuff really affects you, it turns out that you’re really in the middle of 500 miles of cowboy and country in every direction. There’s big sky and room to stretch out. So I realized that my upbringing and my approach to life were considerably different. Not good or bad, just different. Harvard turned out to be a lot of fun. I made a lot of friends. I played on the rugby team. We had a man from New Zealand who was the Mickey Mantle of rugby. He retired from the New Zealand All Blacks and came to Harvard to study and help us improved our rugby team. We beat pretty much everybody on the east coast during my second year on the rugby team. Of course, these people with different thoughts about life became very dear friends and I still keep in touch. That was a great experience for a kid from the west to be immersed in an eastern establishment culture and then to realize that I had an identity and I was happy with it and I could share it in a gentle way by wearing my cowboy boots and using western language on occasion. RL: In a way, you think about the old sixties’ song about little boxes—you didn’t fit into any of their little boxes. SN: It was a perfect example of what we’re trying to do here on our Dixie College campus. Our kids our really homogeneous, they come from a similar, common background, but they aren’t going to go to work in a homogeneous world of work. They’re going to have to work with folks with other genders, ethnic origins, and nationalities and viewpoints. If they can’t figure out how to do that, they’ll fail. One of the things we’ve done at Dixie, and did successfully at Weber, was to begin to get more heterogeneity into the campus community. We have gone 7 from 600 folks in minority categories to nearly 1,200. So we’ve had a 100% increase in our minority students. Deliberately. Deliberately as a policy that we have been implementing and a policy that has been embraced. Everyone on campus is delighted with what we have been able to do with our minority students. RL: How has the community accepted that? SN: The same way. It does not take somebody very long to understand. In this community if you can’t get along with a variety of people then you’re not going to be successful. It’s been really well received. RL: If you’re trying to expose the students to more diversity, by bringing in minority students from other areas, how have you helped create an environment in which they can feel welcome and fit in? SN: We have a multi-cultural center. We have advisors. We have all kinds of opportunities that we put in place for interaction. We celebrate it as a value. We’re on the cusp of becoming a university and we talk about the difference between a college and a university and one of the things that happens at a university is you have diversity. You gain appreciation for other people’s opinions and other people’s origins. That’s played really well. We haven’t roiled the waters. They’ve said, “Absolutely, we’re on board with that,” and it’s been great. RL: It’s great to have that experience. SN: It’s been really great. So, after BYU I left and became CEO of a large dairy cooperative. We had a couple thousand employees. I had a payroll of two 8 million dollars a week that I had to meet. I had ten manufacturing plants, my favorite one was the popsicle plant—I love popsicles. [Laughter] RL: That was Intermountain Milk? SN: Yes, Intermountain Milk. Cream o’ Weber Highland was their brand name for their fluid milk products. We had a number of different cheese products—we had Cache Valley cheese and Star Valley cheese. ROH: What city are we talking about here? SN: The headquarters of the business was in Murray but we had a plant in Ogden. That was when I started doing just a little bit of visiting in Ogden. RL: Was it a result of a cooperative that you got into this? SN: Yes, it was a cooperative. It was the result of a group of dairy farmers that came to me and asked if I’d be the CEO. Not long after I started there, I had a conversation with several folks who knew me well. One of them was Dallin Oaks, who was the president of BYU. I talked to him about my interest in the possibility of education administration—that I might sometime like to try running a college or a university. That kind of came over me at Harvard. I said, “I’m not sure I want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company but I really would love to see if I can make a difference in an academic setting with young people and help them get started in life.” I said to someone the other day while we were in a meeting, “I just didn’t see myself selling cheerios as a career.” [Laughter] I looked around the room before I said that because I could get myself in trouble. Sure enough, my friend Dave Jepson, who I’ve known for forty years and who is a boy from Idaho like I am, said, “Did you know I worked for Proctor and Gamble 9 in the early part of my career?” I said, “I am so glad you enjoyed that, Dave, but it wasn’t my thing.” Everybody laughed. RL: You preferred popsicles to cheerios. SN: I preferred milk if I was going to be in that kind of business, but I really preferred academics. So, to make a long story short, Elder Oaks nominated me to be the president of Weber State. I think his nomination carried a lot of weight with the search committee. I think I came out of the blue. Nobody knew me. I was an unknown. I was forty three, so I was not very old. But I had a passion for education, which I think came through. I had a pretty good pedigree—I had a Harvard Business degree, a Berkeley PhD, and I’d been running a corporation. There were a number of people on the board of regents and on the search committee that felt that having some business experience was really important to running an institution. While our product is education, if you don’t understand the financing of these institutions, if you don’t understand how to make operating decisions, you can be swept away in some difficulty. So I think they viewed my background as what they needed. I went away from the interview with Margaret and I said, “I guess we failed, but it was a fun experience.” We went to our friend Lynn Cottrell’s house in Ogden. We were packing up our stuff, getting ready to go back to the dairy when the phone rang. They said, “We want you to come back over here.” I went back over. They said, “We want you to be the president.” I was absolutely flabbergasted and completely delighted. I remember when I gave an opening address, I said, “You would have to be on a controlled 10 substance to be this high.” That’s how I felt about that opportunity. It was a dream. RL: Yet you had felt that your interview had not gone well? SN: I didn’t think I’d done that well in the interview. We had some funny experiences getting started as President of Weber State University. We lived in Provo at the time. We’d kept our house in Provo while I worked at the dairy in Salt Lake. The first introduction to campus was supposed to be at a fireside at 7:30. So we got the kids ready—I think we had seven boys at that point—and we left. We were a little early, so we pulled into a Howard Johnson’s on the east side of Harrison Boulevard. We were two or three blocks from the Dee Events Center, which was where the event was going to take place. We were sitting there with plenty of time before we needed to be over there. Then, here comes a policeman who says, “Are you Steve Nadauld?” I said yes. He said, “I’ve come to get you. You’re late for the assembly.” So we got a police escort from where we had been. Everybody was there, the meeting had started, and we were escorted into our seats on the front row of the stand. We were both chagrined. RL: Had you just gotten the wrong time? SN: Yes, either I had written it down wrong or they had communicated it wrong. Dean Hurst got a big kick out of it. I love Dean and Bob DeBoer. Bob Smith was a great academic vice president. Jerry Story could not have been more kind. In fact, Jerry came in to see me about a month ago. He’s moved down here. These folks had the most wonderful attitude. Their attitude was to help me succeed. 11 Marie Cotter was another one. Marie was especially wonderful because she had a sense about things that I didn’t do well—she picked up the slack. If there was a situation that maybe I wasn’t as comfortable with or familiar with, if it had to do with some kind of a policy for something, she sat me down and we’d walk through it and she helped me understand the nuances of it. Women have a better social antenna than men do sometimes. Men just go down this road and get it done. Maybe they didn’t do it with a lot of flair or maybe it wasn’t politically correct. Marie never let that happen. The other funny thing that happened when we got started was during the second introduction to the community. It was the 24th of July parade. They had a car for us to ride in during the parade. It was a Cadillac and I have a real aversion to Cadillacs. They just seem to me to be too ostentatious. I don’t think that’s the way to relate to people is to do it with your $500,000 Bugatti. Anyway, they had a Cadillac for us and the Cadillac windows wouldn’t roll down. They were those dark windows, so we’re inside this Cadillac with windows that don’t roll down and being driven by somebody that looks like he’s the son of a mafia don. I’m saying, “What are they going to think of us? What kind of introduction is this to the community?” So I was obviously concerned. I was very self-aware. I wanted to start out right and relate to people. RL: That was not warm and fuzzy, was it? SN: I’ve often said, “Well, this was not the way we anticipated getting started.” Fortunately, Margaret is absolutely off the charts in terms of charm and warmth and ability to interact and meet with people. So all through our career, she’s 12 been by my side. There couldn’t have been a better ambassador for me or for my family. Every situation we’ve been in, Margaret has been just off the charts good. I had Margaret to charm people and she went to work. We had the seven little boys and people were quite interested in our family. The president before Rod Brady—Joe Bishop—had five boys and had a big home north of campus on maybe five or eight wooded acres. In an unfortunate experience, the boys managed to burn the house down. So in my first speech to the faculty, I explained that we had seven boys— RL: Was there a gasp in the audience? SN: A pause. I said, “We’ve spent quite a bit of time teaching them not to play with matches.” Well, the place just erupted. I had, I think, humor and a certain ability not to take myself too seriously. It makes it more fun. People find that they can relate to you. You don’t seem like you’re on a pedestal. I’ve never felt better than other people. It’s important to be able to relate. I’ve always tried to do what my father in law did. He had a great ability to treat everybody in every walk of life the same. It didn’t matter whether it was the maid at the hotel or a clerk at the store or the highest up that he’d meet—he’d always approach them with a cheerful demeanor and an interest in their lives. I thought, “I want to be just like that.” It was something I wanted to work on. I wanted to treat the grounds people and the cafeteria people and the faculty and the regents all the same. I think people came to know us and we got over those first two introductions that sort of made us seem imperious. 13 Weber was a fantastic place to be a president. People there loved their jobs. They loved to work in higher education. Our first order of business was to deal with a 6% budget cut imposed on higher education by the legistlature. So that was an interesting time. As I said, my vice presidents were willing to help me avoid mistakes and to teach me. I teased Bob DeBoer a couple times. He was our government relation’s specialist and he was masterful at working with the regents and at working with the legislators. We would go up on the hill and he knew all the secretaries by name. He’d give them all presents every time we were there. They’d let him through doors that nobody else could get into. They’d make sure a senator or a representative would come out to talk to Bob. Most of the time when they knew it was Bob DeBoer they just invited him to go back in. So I went up on the hill for the first time. I’d never done any lobbying. I’d never been around the legislature. I followed Bob around like a puppy dog. He knew how to introduce me and let me make the pitch for this building or that funding or whatever project or program we were trying to get to happen. He knew how to couch it and spin it and make it fit into the way they had to do business. We became a great team. I remember going home to Ogden and meeting with the faculty and staff and telling them that we had just bowled a 300 game because every initiative, every piece of legislation, every dollar amount we had asked for, we had gotten. We just had a sensational session. It was Bob’s magic. I said to people, that I had gotten a PhD in political science and Bob DeBoer had been my professor and mentor. He’s an outstanding guy. 14 I hadn’t been there more than a few weeks when Dean Hurst said, “President, we need to develop a capital campaign.” I said, “I don’t know anything about that, Dean. You’re going to have to teach me.” We went to see John Lindquist and asked John if he’d be the chairman of the capital campaign. Capital campaigns are intricate and require a lot of work behind the scenes before you have a public posture. Dean had been looking forward to a new president and the opportunity to go out and cultivate folks. We began to visit people. The Stewarts, Don and Elizabeth became dear friends and money they donated has gone to fund almost everything that’s on the campus. John Lindquist also became a great friend. A great story about John is that he went into the Second World War and when he came back, he went to a place in the mountains to go fishing and he never would tell anybody where it was. He went every year and by the time I got to know him in 1985 or 1986, he’d been fishing in this place for thirty five or forty years. I could tell you endless stories about how he got the key to the old place and worked with the sheep herders and the cow guy, but I’ll skip all that and tell you that one day after I’d been there a couple of years—John knew that I liked to fly fish—he called me up and said, “Steve, would you like to go fishing with me? Meet me at my house at nine and we’ll take my truck and we’ll stop for lunch and we’ll go fishing.” So I met him at nine and on the way through Eden, he stopped and bought two cans of soda and two chocolate cupcakes and that was our lunch. [Laughter] 15 When we got up there, you had to have a key to get through the gate. He was telling everybody that he fished at Blacksmith Fork but it was nowhere near there. So, we went fishing and caught all kinds of fish. We ate our chocolate cupcakes and root beer for lunch. We had a great time. You could probably say that John was the single most respected man in the community. I came home and said to Margaret, “The most wonderful thing has happened. I have finally been accepted by the big Brahman in the city. John Lindquist took me fishing with him in his secret fishing place.” You know, John and I have been fishing almost every year since then. His birthday is on the fourteenth of July, which is Bastille Day. My French roots allowed me to keep track of that. Every Bastille Day I call up and say, “John, let’s go fishing.” He always says okay. I was a General Authority for the Church and I called John and we’d go fishing because I had July off. Everywhere I’ve been I’ve tried to figure out how to go fishing with John. In 2003 Margaret and I went to Switzerland for three years to preside over the mission in Geneva, and I didn’t get to go fishing with John. I think I called him from Switzerland a time or two to wish him a happy birthday. So I started fishing with him in 1987 and I returned from Geneva in 2006, so it was nearly twenty years. I’ve missed a few years but I call him up. We don’t miss a beat and we’re back out fishing again. John is not as healthy and as strong as he used to be and I’m thinking, “I hope this isn’t my last fishing trip with John.” He’s still alive. He’s beat cancer three times. He’s the most unbelievable guy. I shed some tears thinking that John and I aren’t going to be able to go fishing 16 again. Now we talk about fishing and the times we had. He absolutely loved Weber State. Anyway, so Dean Hurst and I started the capital campaign. Dean taught me everything I needed to know about fundraising. We got reasonably good at it. There was a fellow in town named Hemingway. He was the chairman of the board and owner of a bank and we’d been talking to him about making a donation to the college. He had a place in Sun Valley and I loved to fly fish and I called him and said, “My wife and I are going to be over in Sun Valley. Can we go to lunch with you?” Well, the only reason I was going to go over to Sun Valley was to take him to lunch, but he didn’t need to know that. He probably suspected, but we had a fun relationship. I was a lot younger and he probably thought of me as a son. So I went over to Sun Valley the night before. I actually did go fishing the night before. I caught some nice big fish. I met him at about eleven and his daughter was there and we talked fishing for about an hour. Finally I said, “Well, Mr. Hemingway, the real reason I came over here was to ask you to give us a million dollars for our capital campaign.” He looked at me and he said, “Well, Steve, I’d be glad to do that. I’ll give you a million dollars.” I said, “You know what? I believe you’re the biggest fish I’ve ever caught.” [Laughter] He got the biggest kick out of that. He laughed and laughed. He thought that was the greatest. Everybody knows that college presidents are fundraisers and they’re always out trying to get money for scholarships and programs. We sat down with Hank Hemingway Jr. and talked about how we were going to spend the 17 money—mostly on faculty development. That was what we needed the money for. Not many people were astute enough to give money for faculty development. A lot of them wanted buildings or programs with their name on it. The Hemingways didn’t want something with their name on it. They wanted something that would make a difference to the college. RL: Those faculty vitality awards have a big difference in a lot of things that have developed on campus. SN: They really have. We designed it that way so faculty could submit proposals and get award money. We got Hank Jr. involved in the committee to decide who gets the money so he could keep seeing the value of the money. It was a great thing. So we went on to have a very successful capital campaign. We talked to people all over the place and Dean and I worked together to do that. It was a sensational experience for me. About two years after I got there, maybe three, I began to sense that it was the right time for us to do a thorough job of strategic planning. I’d done a strategic plan for the dairy and begun to implement that before I left. It was a great exercise to think ahead and position yourself competitively with other organizations and with the trends in the environment. RL: You were the one who developed the first faculty retreat for strategic planning. SN: Probably. So we got into the business of strategic planning. We called for the first meeting and we did it on Martin Luther King Day. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that nobody wanted to come to work on Martin Luther King Day and especially not to be involved in a terrible strategic planning exercise. I remember as if it were yesterday—in the ballroom, which isn’t there anymore 18 because it’s been renovated, we had the tables and the faculty and I was stuck right in the middle of them trying to make some progress with this. It was just not going great. Somebody finally got after me for having the dumb thing on Martin Luther King Day and I apologized and said, “I didn’t realize—would you be okay for another hour if we just kept working?” Most people there laughed, but there were some that were irritated. The strategic plan for Weber was to keep being the teaching institution. To decide not to start doing large research projects or pushing the regents to make WSU a research institution. It was to continue to pay attention to the community college role that we would play, to develop additional degrees for undergraduates and add some masters and to take care of the educational needs of the community. We got a really great buy-in to that strategic plan. I encapsulated it into two thick three ring binders. We didn’t have jump drives at the time. Fortuitously, as it turns out, the binders were thick and looked impressive. On a side note, I went to the legislature with my five axis Okuma part. A five axis Okuma is a Japanese-made milling machine that is a CNC (computer numerically controlled.) They make very precise parts for the aircraft industry. So I had an aircraft part that was worth about $10,000. I put it in my briefcase and I carried it around to the legislature and to the fundraising community. I’d get out my part and tell them how much we needed this million dollar five-axis Okuma to train students to take these jobs in the aerospace industry. The legislators got a kick out of it and I got my million dollars because I carried around this silly five-axis Okuma part. 19 The interesting part of the strategic plan story is that about 1988 or 1989, we were celebrating our 100th anniversary here at Weber. We began to think about why we should be a university instead of a college. We had a masters degree or two at that point. The defining difference between a university and a college, as it turned out, was not masters degrees. That’s a useful addition, but generally colleges are smaller in terms of the number of students and they have a narrow academic footprint. They don’t have a lot of degrees. Universities have a lot more students and a much broader portfolio of degree offerings. So we didn’t look like a college. Calling us a college wasn’t the right nomenclature for us. It didn’t communicate what we were. We began to try to think about whether it was the right time to take a run for university designation. I had a nice strategy meeting with members of the institutional council—it’s now called the board of trustees. We made a decision with the help of the trustees that becoming Weber State University was the right thing to do for the community. It would help students get job interviews—companies would come to a university that might not come to a college. We could hire faculty that would come to a university that might not come to a college. Companies coming into Ogden would feel that they could get their vocational resources from a university better than they could from a college. A university has broad offerings. Those arguments made sense, so I said, “Let’s go for it.” We started the campaign to become a university. Essentially what I did was put my three ring binders—I had two of them—in the trunk of the car and I 20 made an appointment with every single regent. I would go to their business or home or wherever and I’d sit down and tell them about our strategic plan and about how we were a teaching university and we were going to honor our community college commitment. We weren’t interested in research, we were interested in economic development for the community. We had the size to be a university. I made all the arguments, then I took my three ring binders and I said, “Here’s our plan,” while I turned through the binders. I used them to give the impression—and it was more than an impression, it was a reality—that we knew what we were doing and that we were all together in knowing what we were doing on campus, and that we had thought this through and we had a plan. The really interesting part of that was having a strategic plan was not in the vocabulary of other state institutions. I had come out of the business world, I’d had the Harvard Business School training and I’d done a strategic plan in the corporation I’d just come from. But that hadn’t gotten into higher education. We were the only ones in the state that could use the term strategic plan. People did academic planning, but the notion that Weber had a strategic plan and here it was in the three ring binders, was very helpful. My favorite experience with those three ring binders was when I found myself in the kitchen of Karen Huntsman. Karen was on the board of regents. It was no secret that Karen and John were avid University of Utah fans and supporters. Karen’s kitchen is a big, beautiful room and we sat together at the table and I spent an hour with them going through all the reasons Weber ought to be a university. When I finished, I said, “Karen, can we have your support?” 21 She said, “You know, you made a lot of good points and I see where you’re coming from. Let me think about it and I may be able to help you.” In the meantime, Gerry Sherret from the college in Cedar City said, “Me too. I don’t want to get left out of this. I want in.” If we hadn’t brought it up, I don’t think he would have thought about it. People said to me, “We can’t let him do that.” I said, “In the first place, it’s not going to make us any less if they’re a university. Think of abundance, don’t think of scarcity. It might be helpful to us.” So Gerry began, in Gerry’s inimitable style, to talk to regents and to make some headway there. In the meantime, the Haven Barlows and the other legislators who were in the Ogden area began to do their thing behind the scenes. Gerry got quite a bit of support from the southern Utah legislators. The regents were in a meeting and we were sitting on the edge of our chair as they voted. It’s my recollection that Karen Huntsman’s vote was the one that put us over the top. We knew that when she voted yes—and I’ll never forget the looks on the faces of everyone else in the room when she voted yes—that it was going to get through the regents. We knew that if it got through the regents, Haven and others had done enough work to get it through the legislature. It was an example of a community that worked together. I felt like a general in the battlefield sitting in my office and legislators would call in and say, “I just had a visit with so and so and they’ll support us.” Somebody else would say, “I’ve had a second conversation with Regent so and so, they’re having a little change of heart so we’ve got to go back and spend some more time with them.” So I’d make a note and put it on the list again. For 22 about a month or six weeks, I sat basically as sort of the central clearing house for who was yes and who was no and who was going to go see them. “John Lindquist, can you see so and so. Richard Myers, can you go see so and so.” I’d call Marty Stephens, “Can you help us here?” So I coordinated the battle. As we went along I could see that we were gaining strength and gaining support. I was pretty sure that we were going to make it happen. Of course, when it did, the whole community erupted in cheers. It was a great thing for the community and for our students. It made terrific sense. So, strategic planning was key because people could see that we had a plan. On the basis of that plan and on the impression that it gave, they knew that we were a serious institution. As I said, the other institutions hadn’t caught onto the idea that this planning showed that you knew what you were doing. We were able to motivate our network of supporters with the idea of becoming a university—they loved that. It was a huge success story for everybody involved. We had a lot of fun things happen. I hadn’t been there very long and I walked out on the football field and I said, “This grass is terrible. What’s wrong? You can’t play football on that.” They said, “We’ve got a drainage problem and this problem and another…” I said, “Have you tried water and fertilizer?” They said it was a worse problem than that. I thought it just needed water and fertilizer. So one night, about dusk, I took our fertilizer spreader from our house and I spread a big green W in the middle of the football field. [Laughter] That was in September and about six weeks later, we were in the little box above the field and I looked out and there was this wonderful green W in the middle of the 23 field. I said, “What is that?” They said, “It’s a green W.” I said, “How did that get there?” “Well, I don’t know how it got there.” So I went to our grounds people and I said, “See this green W? Do you know how it got there? Let me tell you how it got there. It got there because I fertilized it there. So you’ve got six weeks and I don’t care who you assign to do it, but you’re going to fertilize and water this field. If this whole field doesn’t look like that green W in six weeks, then we’re going to have to go with some different people who will take care of the field.” My heck, the field looked great in six weeks! They paid attention to watering it and taking care of it and we didn’t have to spend a million dollars in excavation and draining. RL: So it was basically all about fertilizer. SN: They just didn’t want to get after it. So we got it fixed. Another thing—clocks. It drives me crazy when clocks don’t work because my sense is that if you can’t make the clock tell the right time, what does that say about the rest of what you can’t manage? The clocks at Weber were all on a central mechanism so all the clocks in all the buildings were wrong. They were all wrong all the time. I thought it was bizarre. So I tracked it down and there was something about a mechanism in the bell tower and a piece that was missing. So I said, “This is what we’re going to do—we’re going to buy clocks—the cheap ones that have a battery and sit on a nail. You go get the part to fix what you need and in the meantime we’re going to give extra batteries to the secretary in the nearest chair to the clock. It’s going to be her job to make that clock say the right time at all hours of the day and replace the batteries by asking a student to climb up there 24 and do it. We’re going to have the right time on the clocks on our campus. We’re not going to go to the central system and spend tens of thousands of dollars. If it needs one part, fine, but if it needs more than that, we’ll put a smiley face over the broken clock. And we did that. It’s interesting how you can create a culture by some small things that you do. Word got around that the president wanted green grass and clocks that tell time. Then I’d walk across campus and I’d pick up any piece of paper that I saw on the ground—anything out of place on campus as I walked around, I’d take care of. I tried to do some MBWA, which is Management By Wandering Around. I believed that if I was going to have a meeting, I didn’t tell everybody they had to come to my office. About half the time I liked to say, “I’ll come to your office.” It gave me a chance to walk across campus and pick up stuff. It gave me a chance to see what the environment was in that office space—what things people wanted to have and appreciate and what the culture was. After the first budget cycle I realized that the campus was kind of running on a centralized finance system. That is, you would make an allocation to the various departments for the money they were supposed to use for that operating period and then you held a bunch centrally. If the department used up all their money, they would come to the central people to ask for more. We would work with them and give them more money. I’m overstating this some, I think, but it didn’t seem to me that this was very efficient and it certainly didn’t seem like the way that you wanted a university to run. I wanted to have the various deans and department chairs be responsible for their own budgets and know that if they 25 overspent their budget, the money wasn’t going to come from another place because we weren’t going to keep any centrally. We were going to allocate it out to everybody. If they overspent their budget, they would have a negative balance at the end of the year and would have to make it up next year. On the other hand, if they had a surplus left over at the end of the year, they could carry that surplus over to the next year. We wouldn’t pull that surplus back and allocate it. They could spend it on their own projects. If they wanted to save up two years in a row to buy some big piece of equipment or fund some other project, they could do that. The culture that I wanted to put in place was, “You’re able to get things that you think are important for you and your faculty. If you have a project that makes a lot sense and needs help, then you come to the administration and we’ll help you with the project.” I said, “Don’t come to me with a problem and say, ‘President, we have a problem, what should we do?’ I want you to come with the problem and three recommendations for what we should do about the problem. I want to know that you’ve thought about it three different ways and then I want to hear about how you’re going to implement your solution to the problem.” I used to tease them and say, “Every once in a while, bring a softball—don’t solve all the problems at your level because the only problems I see now are the ones that are intractable and I don’t know the answer to intractable problems. Bring me what I can solve so that I can have a good day.” [Laughter] But they got it, instantly. 26 You see, when I was at the dairy, the dairy was an immature organization in the sense that what the vice presidents at the dairy wanted was that I would give them a list of things to do. They would go out to work and check off the things on the list and then they would come back and say, “Okay, give me another list.” What I wanted to say was, “Look, you’re the marketing guy. I shouldn’t be telling you how to do the marketing or giving you a list. You ought to know what needs to be done. You ought to have the initiative to know you’ve got to do these things and how you’re going to do them. Then I say, “That’s great. I think four of them are just right. Let’s hold off on the fifth one.” I wanted them to learn how to take responsibility for their own areas and to plan and make their own areas thrive instead of just coming to me for a list of things to do. Well, the college got that immediately. We began to have this great energy and enthusiasm that swept through as people began to realize that they could manage their own budgets, that they could have their own projects and programs, that if they went to the president for help, he’d try to find somebody to help them. If they didn’t have any ideas and didn’t have any initiative, then that was fine and they could keep doing their thing, but other people who did were developing and growing. So we kind of unleashed individual enthusiasm and power. From there, things started happening and at one point I said, “I don’t know if I have the bandwidth to keep up with this,” because so many things were happening. People were enthusiastic. I think they were excited about being at the institution. We signed a contract with Japan Airlines to train stewardesses. 27 We signed a contract with General Motors for multiple millions of dollars for equipment in the automotive area. We began to get Intermountain Healthcare to support us in new healthcare projects. We built an alumni house—the alumni had been asking for five or six years for an alumni house. I sat down with them and asked what they wanted. They didn’t know, so I said, “What you ought to do is start raising money and lets find a location on campus and build you an alumni house.” I don’t want to take more credit for it than I ought to. People went forward with enthusiasm and ideas. I think what you do as a manager is create a culture. You can create a culture of decision making by a few who have issues with control. I’m describing organizations in general where there’s tight control and decisions by a few people—or you can decentralize the decision making, decentralize the budget responsibilities, and you can give people a sense of confidence. You were hired to do a job and we have confidence in you. If you can’t keep your budget, we’ll give you a couple of years and if you don’t know how to budget then we’ll replace you with someone who’s better at budgeting and you can go back into the classroom and do your thing. If you take risks that work out, you can take more risks. If you take some that don’t work out, we’ll pull back a little bit and give you a chance to rethink some of your projects. In fact, that’s the mode we’re in here at Dixie. I’m almost describing us more than I’m describing Weber. Weber was farther along that path than Dixie, but you can’t believe the amount of vitality that we’ve generated here and the enthusiasm for the work and the commitment to 28 get things done and the unbelievable number of physical and academic projects—new degrees and new outside contracts. Just yesterday I signed a wonderful contract with the Tuacahn folks to produce 39 shows of White Chrstimas and The Grinch in our Cox Auditorium. It will be Broadway Equity Company that is produced with the highest standards. It’s a joint venture between Tuacahn and Dixie State using our facilities and as many of our students as they can use; as many equity actors as they need to bring in to put on a Broadway type show. Yesterday, they said, “We’ve been trying to get this done for five or six years. Now you’ve got Christina Schultz and Deward Wilson and we sat down with them and it took us three months.” Well, I just said to Christina, “Make something happen, Christina.” You can’t believe all the things she’s figured out how to make happen. It’s incredible. It’s a philosophy, it’s a culture. It’s a notion about how you believe in people and how you organize them and their responsibilities in a way that lets them know that you believe in them, that they can do things on their own. We certainly need to know what you’re doing and some things need approval, but we’re not going to say, “All good ideas come from three people, so you just do what we tell you.” It’s totally upside down from that. It’s: “You have as many ideas and as many exciting things that you can get going as you want. We’ll allocate money and if you can do it with your budget, great. If it’s a bigger project than you can handle then we’ll get an outside donor.” It’s a philosophy about how you handle institutions. I’m really confident about how you get an institution to jump out of the blocks and start doing really exciting things. 29 RL: A lot of the things that you started at Weber have gone on. I know you mentioned diversity and exposing the students to new things. A lot of the things that were started in the late ‘80s are still going such as the multicultural center— and we now have a diversity and unity center that works with that—the women’s center and nontraditional student center. I think the students appreciate what that enables them to do because it gives them an identity. I know you were referring to academic and business programs but that bottom up philosophy really works. SN: Absolutely. You let faculty and staff know that it’s their responsibility to find ways to support students and you’re not going to tell them how to do their job and they go to work and figure it out. ROH: May I ask you a question? Just some comparisons between today and an earlier day. When you were talking about diversity, what were some of the particulars in the ‘80s? SN: I think in the ‘80s we were concerned with getting women into the educational environment. RL: One of the things I had planned to ask was about the minority faculty internships that you had in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had spoken with Bob Smith and he said that a lot of women and minorities were hired and the face of the faculty was changed. SN: Yes. Bob and Marie Cotter, they are superb administrators. Marie is still there. She became the student services vice president. They are the perfect example of the day and night difference between the dairy guys who wanted a list and 30 people who are self motivated and bright and understand. I never had to go to Bob and say, “I think we should do this academically.” Bob was always coming to me and saying, “Here’s an idea, do you think we can try that?” I would say, “Tell me more about it.” We’d have that conversation and he’d go out and do it. It’s the same thing with Marie. Anything that went on in those areas, we need to give them the credit for. The only thing I did was try to create an ambiance or a culture of: you have the ideas and the creativity, I have confidence in you. If it sounds at all reasonable then let’s try it. RL: Without the top down support, the bottom up ideas could not have developed. SN: I think it’s a collaborative effort. Academic enterprises really do work with the collaborative model. RL: In the ‘80s, the focus was more on getting more women on the campus and in the faculty. SN: And in the student body, yes. ROH: And today? SN: Today at Dixie we’re concerned about Hispanics, African Americans and international students—any minority. We have increased our outreach to Native Americans a great deal. Even, in a strange way, to the polygamist kids in Hillsdale. That’s a horrible situation for some of the young people and we try really hard to see if we can get them some education. But primarily, it’s Hispanics, African Americans, and Native Americans. RL: Are those existing communities in this area or are you recruiting? 31 SN: A little of both. Keep in mind that one of the dramatic changes that has happened here in the last several years is that we have gotten people to think of Dixie as a regional college—soon to be regional state university. Interestingly enough, we’re going through a strategic planning exercise right now and you might guess where we’re going with that. Part of what we’ve helped people understand is that we can reach out across state borders to Arizona and Nevada—and to California, even. Two legislative sessions ago, my current legislative liaison, Frank Lojko, and I got legislation passed through the state that is called a Good Neighbor Policy. It allows us to charge in-state tuition plus an $80 per credit surcharge to kids in two counties in Arizona and two in Nevada. We wrote the bill so that one of the two counties in Nevada is Clark County, which contains Las Vegas. So we are recruiting out of the south and out of the areas where there are Native Americans and these minority populations. We’ve always tried to serve them, but lately we’ve been able to go from 600 to 1200. We’ve just gotten after it, frankly. RL: What’s your total student population? SN: We’re at about 9000. We’re not a lot different than Weber was when I got there. One of the things I did at Weber was implement an aggressive recruiting strategy to grow the institution. We’ve grown Dixie 65% while I’ve been here. We were at 5500 students four years ago and we’re at close to 9000 students today. RL: How would you describe your relationship with the students then and now? 32 SN: Well, I can remember very clearly when I was a student myself. I was a student body officer. I could tell the difference between the administrators who liked students and the administrators that were just there to have a job. I said to myself, “If I’m going to go into education, it’s going to be because I like the students. It’s not going to be because I want a job—if I want a job I can go out and make a whole lot more in industry than I can ever make in education.” But I really like the young people. So before I had my interview at Weber, I took it upon myself to go to campus and meet the student body officers and every student who would talk to me. I introduced myself and said, “Tell me what you like about this institution. I’m a candidate to be president here and I’d like to know what you think about and what we could do better.” I spent a day with student body officers and students. I don’t do this job—especially at my age—for the stress or because the money is important. It’s corny, but I do it for the kids. The same thing happened when I came here to Dixie. The first group I met with was the administrators and the second was the students. I met with the students before I met with the faculty. I had them over to my house for pizza and I said, “Here we are. What can I do to help you?” The cool part about it is, Dixie is still at the size where you can be involved with the students. If I were an administrator at the University of Utah, I don’t know when I’d see the kids. It’s such a big place with so many things going on. Some years ago there was a woman at Dixie College named Roene DiFiore. She was in charge of the Program Bureau. The Program Bureau was absolutely the most loved institution that you can possibly imagine. When you 33 talk about Program Bureau, people start to cry—literally. Roene was a force, an unbelievable force. She taught kids to sing and to dance and to love each other. There’s nobody else you can compare Roene. After I’d been here for a year, I realized that the Program Bureau didn’t exist anymore and the spirit that it brought was not available. I found a Roene DiFiore clone—Merrilee Webb. Merrilee has been a friend of mine for a long time and she is an unbelievable musician and unbelievable at working with young people and helping them to love music. She hadn’t been here six months when she arranged a trip to China with our singing group, which is called Raging Red. We spent two weeks in China. By the way, it usually takes five years to get a trip to China organized, but it took us six months because we had Merrilee Webb, who is a force to be reckoned with and who has a reputation worldwide. We also have a guy named Del Beatty (our Dean of Students) who is also in that category. Del and Merrilee called up their contacts and said, “We want to go to China.” We performed on the Great Wall of China, we performed in the National Library at their theater, and we performed at Shanghai University. Margaret and I went to be with those kids and we know the names of all the Raging Red kids. We also know the names of the student body kids, the young ambassador kids, the football players, and the basketball players. For us, it’s all about the kids. RL: Speaking of kids, where did your kids earn their educations? SN: All seven of our sons and each of their spouses are BYU graduates. Including Margaret and me, we have sixteen BYU graduates. That’s their undergraduate education. I have one son who went on to Harvard Business School. Another 34 son has both an MD and a PhD. He’s a cancer researcher at Stanford. I have another son who has a PhD from Ohio State; he’s a professor of finance. The other boys are doing equally interesting things but didn’t get any post-graduate education. We have a variety. I think I was counting the other day that I’ve either worked at or been to school at eight or nine academic institutions. When it’s time to cheer for someone on television, I can always find somebody. [Laughter] There are three stories I want to tell because there’s a flavor to them that says something about Weber and maybe a little about me. One day I got a call from the physical plant folks at Weber and they said, “President, we’ve got a lot of ducks that have accumulated at the duck pond and we think we need to cull the flock a little bit.” I said, “That’s fine, what are you going to do?” They said, “Well, we’re going to catch them and put them in crates”—this was sometime around Thanksgiving and Christmas—“and we’re going to take them down to the mission and they can eat them for holiday dinners.” I said, “Okay, let’s do that.” So they crated them up and put them on the dock of the mission. The mission people came out and said, “What the heck are all these ducks in these cages doing on our docks?” They didn’t know. They said, “Well, the college has a great duck pond, so let’s take them up and put them at the duck pond.” [Laughter] So the ducks got a scenic round trip from Weber to Ogden and back because our people forgot to tell the mission what the ducks where there for. Another time, I was walking past the Lindquist Basin and I thought, “You know, if I were a kid in a wheelchair, this would be a great place to catch a fish because I could get my wheelchair right up to the water.” So I said, “You know 35 what we’re going to do? We’re going to have a handicap fishing day.” I called up the Fish and Game and said I wanted to buy some fish. They asked what I was going to do. I said, “I’m going to have a handicap fishing day for all the kids in the county that are in wheelchairs because we’ve got this apron of concrete all the way around the basin.” They said, “We’ll just donate the fish. We’ll give you 1,500 fish.” So we picked a day and we got the student body officers to bring fishing poles and some worms for fifty kids. Buses started arriving. The kids got out and got in their wheelchairs. The students came and it was the greatest thing. There were kids all around the Lindquist Plaza catching fish. My favorite episode was: I was standing next to a kid who basically had the use of his fingers and a joy stick. So we taped a pole on his arm—he couldn’t use his fingers but he could move his arm up and down. We cast the line out for him and he caught a fish right away. He was so excited he tripped the brakes on his wheelchair. There’s a slight decline on those concrete aprons and before we could grab him, this kid went—pulled by the fish—whipping down the concrete apron and flopped right over in the water—totally underwater and strapped to his chair. Well, we were just dying. We ran down there and grabbed him out and pulled him back and he was sputtering but he had a grin on his face that was a mile wide. He still had the fish on the fishing pole that was strapped to his arm! The kid had the day of his life. He caught the fish and he fell in the pond. It’s every kid’s dream when you go fishing. It was almost my favorite day on campus. 36 I got a call one day from a lady who said, “President Nadauld, I know that you’re such a kind young man and that you would be really upset by what’s happening.” I said, “Oh my gosh. Tell me what’s happening.” She said, “I went by the stadium the other day. It was early in the morning, and I noticed that your officers were shooting pigeons off the stadium.” I said, “Oh my gosh. Thanks for letting me know.” Well, what happened was that we had these pigeons and they would roost above the doors of the buildings and cause all kinds of messes. Pigeons are kind of like flying rats; they carry a lot of diseases. We tried owls, we tried noises—you can’t poison them—we tried everything we knew to do and I kept lamenting that we still had this pigeon problem. The chief of police said, “President, I’ve got an idea.” I asked what it was. He said, “Don’t ask, don’t tell. I’ll take care of it.” So what they were doing was shooting the pigeons with pellet guns. So here’s where I have to admit my guilt. [Laughter] I called up the chief and said, “Chief, a woman told me that she’d seen one of your men shooting pigeons at 6:30 in the morning.” He said, “Remember I said I’d take care of it?” I said, “Yes, but I think it could be a potential public relations problem.” He said, “Don’t worry President. I’ll just have them go at 5:30 in the morning when there’s nobody around.” I said, “Whatever you do, just don’t tell me.” [Laughter] So with the green grass, the fish, the pigeons, and the very serious business of new degrees, new programs, diversity, blessing the lives of students, and becoming a university, those were some of the most rich and rewarding experiences that anybody could ever have. I would have thought, appropriately so, that WSU was the highlight of my career. The day we left, I 37 could not have been more upset. I was absolutely sure that I’d made a terrible decision. It was my decision to leave. I was off to do some things that I thought would have some other benefits. I would have said, unequivocally, that that was the highlight of my career, until I got here. I don’t know what divine providential hand got me here to have this capstone experience in my life—I’ll be seventy on my next birthday. ROH: When is your birthday? SN: May 31. But here I am and I’m having an experience that’s equivalent to the one at Weber. I could not be more excited about what we have been able to do and more enthusiastic about the institution, more appreciative of the faculty and staff and what they’re able to do. There are some difficult conditions—I didn’t talk about the budget cuts at Weber and everything we had to go through, but we’ve had a similar experience here. It turns out that all those experiences at Weber were wonderfully instructive to me to take care of this assignment. I’m a huge fan of young people. I love higher education. I can’t imagine any more satisfying career in my life—including the times I was a professor. I taught finance for twenty years in three or four different settings. To be here as an administrator of an institution where I can still be involved with students; to be at Weber where I could be involved with students—and Ann Millner is better at that than I was—I count myself among the most blessed and fortunate of anyone I know for the way this has turned out and is turning out. I have no idea what I did to deserve such an extraordinary experience at Weber and here. ROH: What did you do when you left Weber State? 38 SN: I went into the private sector. I’d been a professor of finance and I thought I’d like to finance some big projects. I went to a company that was building power plants and doing energy related projects. I worked with New York banks and developers to try to finance those projects. That lasted less than a year. I was asked by the LDS church to come and be a General Authority. I spent five years supervising stake presidents and mission presidents in the Southeast of the United States. I was also head of the Church’s historical department—either the assistant or the head during those five years. I was also in the Young Men’s General Presidency, that worked with all the young men of the Church, ages twelve to eighteen. I traveled quite a few places, but not as extensively as my wife did. I was released from that five year assignment and shortly thereafter my wife was called to be the General Young Women’s President for the Church. She was responsible for half a million young women worldwide, so she traveled to train leaders and speak to young women all over the world—in pretty much every country in South America and every state in Mexico, all the countries of Europe, eastern Europe, New Zealand and Australia, Africa. So, for five years she was a world traveler and a world speaker. She spoke at the United Nations. During those years I held down the fort at home with the twins. We had twin boys who hadn’t graduated from high school yet, so we had Domino’s Pizza on speed dial and we took care of each other. Margaret would go to the office every day, I would go to teach at BYU, and the twins would go to school. They were unbelievably good boys. They didn’t have any inclination at all to get into trouble. And they are still as good today as they ever were. 39 RL: What drew you back to academia? SN: As I say, I love teaching. We were called by the Church to go to Switzerland and preside over the Geneva mission. We spent three years there. When we got home, I went back to teach at BYU. It was my third reincarnation there. It was a February day in 2008 when I got a phone call from the regents saying, “We have some challenges at Dixie and we may need to make a change down there. Would you ever be interested in going to St. George?” I looked out my window at the three feet of snow on the ground. I had said to Margaret the day before, “We’ve got to get out of here. Let’s go down and spend a few days in St. George.” So they had a huge advantage. I said immediately that I would take a leave of absence from BYU and go down and help at Dixie for six months or a year or whatever it took. He said, “Well, we really don’t have anybody that we feel we can ask to be the interim president.” So I waited for a few weeks, then got a call saying, “You need to join us at the office on Thursday. We’re going to name you the interim president.” On Friday, I called Marilyn and said, “Hi, I’m Steve Nadauld and I’m the interim president.” She said, “I know who you are. Do you know who I am?” I said, “I don’t think so.” She said, “Before I was Marilyn Lamoreaux I was Marilyn Foreman.” She was the secretary of the student body when I was the vice president of the student body at BYU. We had known each other and worked together in student government there. She said, “We’re all excited to have you come down here.” From that day, people have reached out and been very kind. After a few months, they said, “What can we do to coax you to stay?” I said, “Well, you don’t have to do too much. Just change my title from 40 interim to president and check with the faculty and staff and make sure they’re okay with that.” By then, we’d gotten acquainted and they felt just fine with it, so here I am. The only question now is how long I’ll have the energy to do the job. I don’t have the same energy that I had when I was forty three and starting at Weber, as you can imagine. RL: Are there any of the different private institutions or any of the boards or anything that you’ve served on that you’d like to talk about? SN: Well, one of the things that happens when you’re a college president is that people either think that you have something to offer to a board in terms of expertise or, if nothing else, prestige. So you get invited to serve and that’s a good thing. While I was at Weber I was invited to serve on the board of the OC Tanner Company. I’m still on that board. I served on the board of Deseret Book Company and I served on the board of Intermountain Healthcare for seventeen years. Part of that time was really valuable because IHC was helping Weber to create and fund allied health care programs. They still do that today with us here at Dixie. We work very closely with the Dixie Regional Medical Center. Jack Goddard was very influential in the Ogden community and I was on the board of his savings and loan for a number of years. RL: First Security? SN: I was on the First Security advisory board, but Jack was Western Savings and Loan. Those opportunities were really good for me. I became part of UHEAA— the Utah Higher Education Assistance Authority. I’m still on that board. I was thinking in the course of those years between the hospital bonds and the student loan bonds. I’ve probably signed off on somewhere around two or three 41 billion dollars worth of bonds. I was a professor of finance. My involvement in the bond issues was probably more than others who have the same financial background. In fact, yesterday I spent an hour talking about a billion and a half dollars worth of financing that we are just finishing and six hundred million dollars worth of financing that we need to do. So my PhD in finance has really come in handy. It helped me get through the budget cuts at Weber and I said to myself when I left Weber, “I’m never going to do that again. I am never going to take a job where I have to do budget cuts at an academic institution because it’s just too hard.” I’ll be darned if I didn’t go through that same thing here at Dixie. But I was way better prepared. I knew how to do it this time. That made a lot of difference. If I could point to one thing that’s been most helpful to the faculty and staff, relative to my experience, it’s been having had the experience of managing budget cuts in a prior circumstance and then doing it here, I think we made it through pretty well. No one lost their job. So yes, those board assignments have been useful. What else has been really fun? We’ve lived in Provo, Ogden, the Salt Lake area, and now here we are in St. George. We have pretty much covered the state except for Logan. We have met people in all walks of life in every different community or religious or leadership position that they might be in. We have made many wonderful friends and acquaintances through the years. The problem is that we go places and people come up and introduce themselves and say, “Do you remember?” Margaret and I have to rifle through and think, “Was that Ogden? Was it BYU? Was it Provo? Was it Switzerland?” Except for 42 the embarrassment of trying to figure out how we’re connected, there’s a great joy in being associated with so many wonderful people in so many communities. It’s a blessing that is unusual. One of the really fun things about being a college president is that you get to work with your spouse. I’ve alluded to Margaret as the quintessential ambassador for our family and for me, as well. She certainly was that while we were in Ogden. Even though she had seven sons she was still involved in activities and going places. We made a rule that we wouldn’t both be gone two nights in a row. That was a good rule. But where I was going with that was that there aren’t very many men or women who have the kind of job that allows them to work closely with their spouse. Margaret and I have been hand in hand, starting with Weber where they kind of hired the team, and going on to the General Authority assignment I had in which she traveled with me to many of the places I went. When she was in the Young Women’s program I traveled with her to a lot of places. When we were in Switzerland we were inseparable. It was 24/7. Now we don’t have children at home and she’s with me in all of the settings—if we have any social things going on and I have a lot of committees that I’m on. I’ve had the extraordinary experience of having by my side the most able, most wonderful, most fun and charming companion in my jobs. There’s no way to describe or express the love I have for her and the respect and admiration for her abilities—not just as the mother of our children and not just as my wife, but as a real partner in the adventures that we’ve had. I count that as a unique and special blessing. Some people live parallel lives with their 43 companions and we haven’t done that. We were laughing with some friends the other day that the only problem with retirement—this is the woman speaking—is that she gets half as much money and twice as much husband. But Margaret and I have been inseparable for so many years that we wouldn’t know how to function without being together on a daily basis. ROH: How did the two of you meet? SN: Margaret and I got to BYU at the same time. She came from Snow College and I came down after one semester at Ricks College. I began to notice cute girls around and saw her at a dance and thought, “Wow, she’s really a pretty girl.” But she was so pretty that she was really popular and I was just a kid from Idaho and I didn’t drive a good car and I could wear nice clothes as long as it was always the same slacks and sport coat. I didn’t have a lot to recommend me. I had the confidence, but not the opportunity. In fact, she was attendant to the homecoming queen along with another girl I knew. The other girl, Christine, had an out-of-town boyfriend who asked me to take Christine to the homecoming dance because he trusted me not to try to make a move on Christine. Margaret had a date. Finally, I got myself elected student body vice president, which made me feel like I had enough stature. I tease her—outside her apartment, she was so popular that there was one of those Baskin Robins machines where you have to take a ticket and stand in line before you can get your ice cream cone. I went the first year I was on campus and got my ticket and it said 349, so I had to come back two and a half years later to take my turn. We started dating and found out we liked each other a lot. It was not the smoothest thing. We had 44 pretty strong opinions about things. So we had to figure out how to work together. It wasn’t an overnight thing. RL: And seven sons later, how many grandchildren do you have? SN: We have twenty eight and we’re hoping for a few more. We have a fun family home in Heber that’s large enough to accommodate everybody. Life could not be more sweet or satisfying. I get frustrated at the same things in this job that I got frustrated about at Weber—the inability of the legislature to understand why we need to fund education and all of the machinations that go on politically to try to get something done. I don’t react in quite the same way, but I get easily frustrated. If you ask about education—I love the students, I love being involved, I love being a professor and I love being a college president. It’s provided me a richness and texture in the fabric of life that I can’t imagine anything else could have done. So you’re looking at one happy camper in every conceivable way. ROH: I have one question I ask every person who’s been a professor or teacher and that is: who was your favorite teacher? SN: When I was a little boy, I sat outside my house when I was four years old and we had no lawn and I was pushing the hose into the ground drilling water with the hose. I saw some kids go by on their way to school and I immediately turned the hose off and went in the house and asked my mother to change me out of my muddy clothes and put me in something more presentable. I sat on the steps of the porch and wanted to go to school. I’ve never not wanted to go to school and every teacher that I’ve had that has at least been engaging or provided the 45 least bit of insight has been a favorite. I can remember the thrill of the first grade and the things I was learning. I remember the enthusiasm I had for my PhD advisor, David Pyle at Berkeley, and all of the other teachers in between. I’ve always loved learning and I love anybody that loved learning and teaching as well. RL: If you’re lucky, it never ends. SN: I hope not. I worry about heart attacks and strokes and Alzheimer’s. I wouldn’t want to be without my physical faculties or my mental faculties. If that happens, I guess I’ll take it as it comes, but so far I think my brain’s working okay. RL: You’ve accomplished a lot and you have reason to be proud of what you’ve done. You’ve helped a lot of people and I’m glad we were able to get this record. SN: I’m glad you were, too. I appreciate it very much.