Utah Tech University
Utah Tech University, formerly named Dixie State University, is a polytechnic four-year public university in St. George, Utah, United States. UT offers doctoral degrees, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, associate degrees, and certifications. As of fall 2022, there were 12,556 students enrolled at UT.
Located in "Utah's Dixie", the institution began as the St. George Stake Academy, founded in 1911 by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and sponsored by its local stake. In 1935, it became a state school of the Utah System of Higher Education. From 1923 until 1970 it was a two-year junior college named Dixie Junior College, and from 1970 until 2000 it was four-year Dixie College. From 2000 until 2013 it was named Dixie State College, and from 2013 until 2022 it was Dixie State University. In 2021, after continued controversy over the use of the term "Dixie" in the school's name, the Utah State Legislature and the Governor of Utah approved the bill that allowed the school to be renamed as Utah Tech.
UT's 16 athletic teams compete in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and have been known since 2016 as the Trailblazers. UT was reclassified from Division II to Division I in 2019 and joined the Western Athletic Conference in the 2020–2021 season. When the Trailblazers were in NCAA Division II, the football team had been part of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference since 2014, while the Women's Swimming team competed in the Pacific Collegiate Swim Conference, and the school's 14 other athletic teams competed in the PacWest Conference.
History
Originally a secondary school institution, it was founded by the LDS Church and its local stake on September 19, 1911, as the St. George Stake Academy. The academy, located in a region long referred to as "Utah's Dixie" by LDS Church president and governor of the Utah Territory Brigham Young, and local settlers in the southern portion of Utah. was renamed to the Dixie Academy in 1913, Beginning in 1916, it was known as Dixie Normal College, and then became Dixie Junior College in 1923. In 1933, the LDS Church discontinued its financial support of the institution, and rather than give up on it, the local citizenry came together and maintained its operation through donations and labor for the following two years during the Great Depression.In 1935, the Utah State Board of Education took over the funding for the school, but wanted to split the college students from the high school students, with the high school moving away and relocated with a separate building under the direction of Washington County local government and its public school system. The community resisted, feeling that the approximate 200 college students and similar number of high school students needed to be combined to provide a good-sized student body for the many social and higher quality of the academic curriculum programs. Another concern was that the county did not simply yet have the tax revenue and available funds to build a new high school building during the Great Depression era.
In the three decades between 1935 and 1963, there were close calls when various state leaders proposed closing the college, but local citizens were willing to donate and support it to keep it alive. These local citizens, particularly the Dixie Education Association, raised the funds to purchase four city blocks of land on the 700 East and 100 South streets for a new school campus. They presented that land to the state which, in turn, agreed to fund a few buildings for a new campus there. In 1957, the Old Gymnasium was finished and by 1963, four other newly-constructed buildings were ready for college students with the high school students still remaining on the previous older downtown campus. In 1970, the college name was changed again from the Dixie Junior College of the previous 47 years and shortened to Dixie College, signifying its expansion of the number to four years of a collegiate education and empowered to award bachelor's degrees like a full senior college.
On September 7, 2007, the Dixie State College Board of Trustees members announced that Dixie State College of Utah would petition the University of Utah to become a branch campus known as the University of Utah–St. George. The proposal was approved by the Dixie State College Board of Trustees on October 7, 2007, and by the University of Utah Board of Trustees on October 14, 2007; however, this did not officially come to fruition.
In 2011, a bill was drafted for review by the Utah State Legislature and the Governor of Utah to support Dixie State College's transition to university status.
The institution contracted with a local advertising firm, Sorenson Advertising, to investigate and survey future names for the college if it were approved to become a university and found that alumni overwhelmingly supported the name Dixie while less than half of faculty/staff supported the name Dixie. Controversy over the name Dixie has arisen many times. In December 2020, the new university's board of trustees unanimously voted to recommend removing the word Dixie from the school's longtime name and title.
In 2013, the Utah Legislature passed a bill changing the status of the institution from a college to a university and named it "Dixie State University". Utah Governor Gary Herbert signed the bill into law in a ceremony on the St. George campus, calling the new university into existence on February 16, 2013. DSU president Stephen D. Nadauld and others recognized this step as the fulfillment of the dream of the original Mormon pioneers of southern Utah to have a university for their communities. That same year the Board of Trustees approved a student-driven proposed campus-wide tobacco ban. The ban prohibits all varieties of tobacco products, including the newest invention of electronic cigarettes. The ban went into effect on January 1, 2014.
Also in 2013, DSU student Indigo Klabanoff pushed for the creation of a sorority for women students and its financial support. The DSU board did not approve it or the subsequent creation of social clubs or similar associations with Greek letters in their names, because they said introducing Greek Life properly requires significant funding and the inherent "partying" stereotype of a Greek system was not a culture they wanted to encourage on campus.
"Dixie" name, old Confederacy symbols, and mascot changes
The Dixie College sports teams were called the "Rebels" starting in 1952 and a Confederate soldier was used as a mascot starting four years later in 1956. Until 1994, the university used the Confederate Battle Flag as a school symbol, and the college annual yearbook was called The Confederate. The Salt Lake Tribune described the college yearbooks containing "troubling photos, some as late as the early 1990s", in which "White students sing in black face, dress as Confederate soldiers, stage slave auctions and affectionately display the Confederate battle standard."In 2009, the college dropped its "Rodney the Rebel" mascot and "the Rebels" as the name for the sports teams, renaming the teams to the "Red Storm", with a bull mascot. In 2016, the UT athletics team name was eventually changed to the "Trailblazers" with "Brooks the Bison" as the mascot.
The process of changing the university's name began in June 2020 during the George Floyd protests in the midst of the 2020–2022 racial unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement. In December 2020, both the university board of trustees and the Utah Board of Higher Education unanimously voted to recommend a name change to both chambers of the bicameral Utah Legislature, which established the name in state law. Although the state legislature delegated the task to a committee that collected suggestions and decided on Utah Polytechnic State University, the Dixie board of trustees recommended Utah Tech University after the original proposed name received negative community input. The Utah System of Higher Education voted unanimously to recommend the name change to UT, which the Utah State Legislature approved with the condition that the main St. George campus will be named the "Dixie Campus" of UT. The name change took effect July 1, 2022.