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OREM — Astrid Tuminez remembers well the day the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything about her job.
Utah Valley University’s first female president was at the Western Athletic Conference basketball tournament in Las Vegas, where the UVU women’s basketball team had just lost its tourney opener. The men’s team was scheduled to tip off the postseason the next day.
But there would be no postseason. After Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the novel coronavirus and the NBA suspended its season, the landscape of college sports changed as well.
Following a meeting with the WAC presidents and athletic directors, the conference tournament was canceled. The NCAA followed that afternoon, canceling the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments — and then the entire spring championship season across the nation.
On-campus classes were disrupted next, sending most of Utah Valley’s 39,000-plus students home or to isolate in their apartments, most of them continuing their education online.
It’s been five months since that day. And everything is still completely different.
But as Tuminez has navigated the state’s largest public university through a generational pandemic, she’s also done it without forcing lengthy layoffs, mass furloughs or a drop in student attention.
Utah Valley hasn’t had to undergo a round of layoffs. While a large part of that is due to federal programs like the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, it’s also in large part because of the leadership of the university president who has been in office for barely two years.
“That’s part of the bigger story of higher education today,” Tuminez told KSL.com recently. “The pandemic has been a very big challenge. I think our core values have provided guideposts for us: exceptional care, exceptional accountability, and exceptional results.”
Back to March 11, when Tuminez and athletic director Jared Sumsion sat in a meeting that would determine more than the fate of a basketball tournament. Beyond a decision about college hoops, the decision to cancel the NCAA Tournament would set a standard that dramatically altered how higher education would work.
The Wolverines also knew the care they were under in moving forward: a former BYU valedictorian with advanced degrees from both Harvard and MIT.
Sumsion said the UVU administration had a plan in place, a contingency plan for that plan, and a contingency for each contingency plan, it seemed.
“We are so thankful for the leadership, communication and exceptional care that President Tuminez has shown us throughout this pandemic,” Sumsion told KSL.com. “President Tuminez and the executive team have adapted to the ever-changing onslaught of information with the best interest for our students, faculty, staff and community at the forefront.”
Fortunately for the Wolverines, they were returning to Orem with students on spring break. For nearly every hour of the ensuing nine days, the university’s leadership team — including Tuminez, her cabinet, and vice presidents from every area of campus — met to facilitate the school’s response to the pandemic.
The 55-year-old Tuminez would sometimes spend all day on campus — some meetings didn’t end until close to midnight, she recalls. In one week, they moved 4,000 courses to online-only instruction.
They also set up a line of communication that they would tap regularly to communicate with students, parents, faculty, the media and others. It wasn’t perfect in the beginning. But it was vital.
“Communication has been a very, very big deal for us – and to be very honest, from the get-go, I could see we were not doing some things in communication right,” Tuminez said. “That’s very candid; one of the immediate reasons was if we fail in communicating, we will fail in managing COVID. People are nervous, people are worried, and they feel like they have no control.”
They used every channel of communication they could: direct-to-student emails, television and print media, and digital platforms like social media. Just over a week later, the school filmed a message from the president to clearly lay out the university’s academic calendar for the rest of the semester.
Then, they did it again. They carefully responded to thousands of emails and other messages to the dean of student life, and those messages eventually dropped to hundreds, and then tens.
“You cannot overcommunicate during a pandemic, because the same questions will keep coming up, whether it’s about travel or masks or anything else,” Tuminez said.
There was plenty of work to do. And work requires funding.
Fortunately, the university was allocated $22.9 million from the federal CARES Act, split evenly for allocation to students and for institutional expenses. The school had also recently received the second-largest donation in UVU history, a "game-changing" $17.7 million gift from local business doTerra.
Tuminez said the school immediately began dispersing those much-needed funds to its students, beginning with the most high-need students and continuing across campus. The funds were sorely needed — so much so that it became more newsworthy when a student opted to return her portion of the funding because “others needed it more” than her.
“We did it very carefully; we were probably the fastest in the state to do it,” Tuminez said. “We didn’t feel a need to delay because every waiter or waitress in this valley was at risk of losing their job. You can imagine the suffering from all of it.”
To date, more than $8 million has been dispersed to students, and the university has used much of the other $12 million to renovate and “modernize” classroom space so as to open during the upcoming fall semester. Utah Valley University will operate on a blended learning model, with both modified in-person classes and online coursework, depending on the needs of its students.
For most upperclassmen, the move to online classes hasn’t had a huge effect on their academic study, Tuminez said. But freshmen and sophomores have wanted more in-person courses. So, as soon as one on-campus class fills up, they open another section, she said.
It’s all an attempt to move forward with a plan but also to stay flexible. Tuminez and her cabinet meet every other day to discuss the state of the university and she’s in regular contact with each of her vice presidents.
The only constant during a global pandemic is change.
“We are really headlining the word ‘flexibility,’” Tuminez said. “It really has to be our mantra. Right now we are trying to respond to what the students want.”
