In 1989, Ruth Watkins completed her graduate work in child language/speech-language pathology at the University of Kansas. Less than 20 years later, she was overseeing 600 faculty members as dean of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
As a U. senior vice president for almost five years, Watkins knows the turf. The flagship of Utah education, the U. is arguably the most important economic and cultural institution in the state, producing fruit today and planting seeds for tomorrow. It is also a massive entanglement of 32,000 students and 25,000 employees in hundreds of roots and branches.