Elizabeth Cantwell took office as WSU System president Tuesday, marking the first time a woman has served in the role.
Cantwell said she plans to kick off her presidency with stops at each WSU campus in order to learn more about the WSU System.
“I’ll spend a lot of time here and at all the campuses, understanding just basic operations and meeting community members and Regents,” Cantwell said. “So that’s not as student-focused as I would like it to be, but because we have big issues with the federal research landscape and the state budget, that’s what I’m going to have to do.”
She said she plans to host listening sessions with faculty and students to better understand what the WSU community needs.
“I’ll do them at all the campuses, but they will include a lot of students—graduate students, postdocs, undergraduates and student athletes, as well as faculty and staff.”
Cantwell said she has not decided whether she wants attendees at the listening sessions to be selected, rather than open doors. It was a combination of both at Utah State University, where Cantwell previously served as president.
“I asked [USU] student government to help, but not exclusively pick,” Cantwell said. “If I do one listening session with undergraduates and 300 people come, I’ll hold it in a venue where I can have tables of no more than eight [people].”
WSU has been hit by federal funding and grant freezes from the Trump administration over DEI initiatives. This, coupled with the shuttering of the University of Idaho’s multicultural student centers, have left students worried, according to an earlier Daily Evergreen article.
“If we care too much about whether we call it literally DEI or something else, we have missed the mark because we will not only paint a target on our backs. We won’t have examined what the work that needs to be done is,” Cantwell said. “How are we going to make sure that we can do what we need to do in order to support our students and not lose money or risk having our students targeted? I think that’s as dangerous as losing money.”
Cantwell said people are not as aware of the risk of students being targeted as they should be.
“I’m not sure that we are cognizant of how that could happen, because in Washington, it’s much less likely than in other states,” she said. “But it can happen.”
Cantwell’s first public appearance since taking office was at the annual Murrow Symposium, where she led a discussion with journalist Harry Smith, who received the Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award.
Cantwell comes from Logan, Utah, where she served as USU President for nearly two years. Before WSU and USU, she served as vice president of research at Arizona State University.
Cantwell will end her inaugural tour of the WSU campuses with a reception in Terrell Library at 4 p.m. April 8.
