Vince Lafferty leaves a legacy of 16 years in higher education in Tooele County

When Vince Lafferty returned to Tooele in May 2008 to take over as interim executive director of the Tooele Regional Campus, it was not his plan to make this assignment his last one.

Lafferty, who has spent 35 years working in Utah State University’s Regional Campus system, with 16 of those years in Tooele, recently announced his plans to retire.

“With the budget cutbacks at USU they have offered an early retirement incentive,” Lafferty, 60, said. “Essentially they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Lafferty came to Utah in 1974, fresh out of graduate school in Oklahoma with a master’s degree in history.

“There weren’t a lot of job opportunities for history majors,” he said. “To get the chance to teach history in Utah was wonderful.”

Lafferty started teaching history for the USU Uintah Basin Regional Campus based in Roosevelt in 1974. In 1980, Lafferty was appointed assistant director of the Uintah Campus.

Four years later, Lafferty was appointed executive director of the fledgling regional campus in Tooele.

“USU had been holding classes in the Tooele area for a while but around 1980 they organized a regional campus and started focusing on offering degrees, not just classes,” Lafferty said.

When he first arrived in Tooele, the regional campus was part of the USU Extension service. Lafferty had responsibility not just for academic programs, but he also supervised the USU Tooele County agriculture program, including the 4-H program.

Classes for the USU Regional Campus were held at the Tooele Army Depot and at Tooele Junior High School, Lafferty said.

“The roof at the Army Depot leaked,” he said. “When it rained we had to throw a tarp over the computers to protect them.”

When the Tooele Army Depot was realigned in 1993, people started thinking about building a facility for USU that would be separate from the base and accommodate an anticipated influx of students looking to retrain for new jobs, Lafferty said. The result was the current facility on 1000 West.

“It opened in 1997 and with about 3,500 square feet we thought it would last forever,” Lafferty said.

As the executive director of the Tooele Campus, Lafferty designed the first alternative program for licensure of special education teachers in the state.

By the time Lafferty left Tooele for Logan in 1999, enrollment at the Tooele Regional Campus was around 200 to 300.

“I can’t remember what the enrollment was like when I first arrived in Tooele, but it wasn’t that much. We grew over the years,” he said.

In Logan, Lafferty served as the director for distance education where he designed programs that used modern technology to bring education to rural areas, including Tooele. Then in 2005 he was appointed director of concurrent education and academic programs in the office of the vice-provost for distance learning and regional campuses.

In May 2008, USU announced that the Tooele campus had grown and matured to the point that a full-time academic dean would be hired to supervise the Tooele Regional Campus, according to Ronda Menlove, USU vice-provost for regional campuses and distance education.

Tooele Campus Executive Director Kathleen Robinson announced in April 2008 that she would be leaving USU and Lafferty was asked to return to Tooele as interim executive director while a nationwide search for a new dean was conducted.

So Lafferty returned to the campus he left almost 10 years ago. Tooele itself had grown tremendously since he left.

“When I left, the growth boom in Tooele had just started,” he said. “When I came back Tooele was no longer the sleepy little town I had left. People could shop, eat, and see a movie without leaving town.”

Enrollment at the Tooele Campus had increased, reaching more than 500 students when Lafferty returned.

Lafferty was given three missions to accomplish during his second, but brief, tenure at USU: First, to oversee the building of a 13,000-square-foot addition to the facility he built back in 1997. Second, to hire quality faculty to teach the new programs already planned for the Tooele campus. The third was to look for new ways that USU could meet the needs of the community.

“We are on target to open the additional 13,000 square feet of space in July,” Lafferty said.

This space will contain eight new classrooms, office space for 10 faculty, and a science lab.

Partially due to continued growth, this spring enrollment at the Tooele campus jumped 39 percent to 774 students. Another addition to the east side of the current building is planned to open in August with four more classrooms.

The Tooele campus added this year a bachelor of science degree in accounting, teaching programs in English and history, and a master’s degree in social work. In addition, Lafferty hired six new instructors, bringing the total full-time faculty to eight.

The campus will add a bachelor’s degree in management information systems in fall 2009 and a master’s in business in fall 2010.

“I can see the Tooele campus becoming the flagship of the regional campus system,” Lafferty said. “We are in a growth mode and that should continue in the future.”

Lafferty, although officially retired, won’t be leaving USU too far behind.

“Ronda Menlove has already approached me about working one-quarter time on development of academic programs,” he said.

Lafferty will work with USU’s college of Humanities, Art, and Social Science to develop bachelor’s and master’s degree programs to be offered at regional campuses, including Tooele.

“I’ll try to find room for work between spending time with family and golfing,” Lafferty said.

Tim Gillie: tgillie@tooeletranscript.com