A Utah school is chuffed to bits to be accepting a major invitation from the University of Oxford to build a brand-new facility at the renowned English institution and send hundreds of students to study there each year.
The unexpected overseas partnership involves Utah Valley University, which has already been collaborating with Oxford for the last decade. Now, after a short chinwag Thursday and formal approval from the Utah Board of Higher Education, UVU is moving forward with an expanded agreement.
“This project has been in conversation for a very long time,” said Utah Valley University President Astrid Tuminez. “We do believe this is a bit of a game-changer for the UVU student experience.”
The schools’ current agreement centers on UVU’s Center for Constitutional Studies, Tuminez explained. Since 2015, the center has worked with Pembroke College within Oxford since 2015 in a collaboration called the Quill Project.
The project has focused on mutual studying of foundational legal texts, such as the Magna Carta and U.S. Constitution. About 30 to 50 UVU students have been going to Oxford each year to take part.
Now, Tuminez said, UVU hopes to send 300 to 500 student annually under the expanded partnership.
That would branch into new areas for Utah students, including history, English, theater, architecture and computer science, she said.
“This is such an unusual, such an exciting partnership with a new and young university like UVU and a very established, very old university like Oxford,” Tuminez added.
It’ll require some serious pounds paid out by UVU. The new building planned for the English campus will house some of the Utah students who attend, but also offer faculty offices and host events. It will include an assembly hall with about 100 seats for classes and lectures, too.
The ground lease has a £2.1 million premium (or about $2.8 million to be paid up front). And annual rent would be an additional £115,000 (roughly $155,900) with a 60-year lease expected in the anticipated contract, plus an option for to extend.
Constructing the facility itself will add another $30 million to $35 million to the cost for UVU; and ownership would revert to Oxford if the two institutions ever say “cheerio.”
The Utah university plans for all of that funding to come through donations, so there will be no state or taxpayer dollars going to the project.
At this point, Tuminez said the school has the money for the initial lease of the land and will need to fundraise the rest.
UVU Vice President of Finance Jim Mortensen said without even launching a campaign yet, the school has pledges for about 10% of the rest needed (or about $3 million so far).
“We don’t see that being an issue,” Mortensen said about raising the money.
The Board of Higher Education debated the proposal, asking additional questions about how UVU has ensured there’s enough student interest and long-term viability for the partnership.
Tuminez said Oxford has been established for 1,000 years and expects to exist for centuries more. And “because of what it is, because of what it represents, because of its history,” students have expressed they want to attend.
Four students who have already studied abroad there through UVU later went on to formally study at Oxford, receiving degrees from both institutions.
She said she’d initially wanted a lease longer than 60 years and added the provision to the contract to be able to extend it.
“The draw will be there,” she said. “We have been doing our homework in that area.”
Val Peterson, UVU’s vice president of administration and a state lawmaker, also said it’s a “very real rarity” for any school to get to open a center at Oxford. And Tuminez said there were other interested schools, but Oxford administrators indicated that they specifically preferred to partner with UVU.
There is some heartburn over the expensive expansion coming at the same time that the Utah Legislature ordered substantial budget cuts from public higher education institutions. Under that, UVU saw a nearly $9 million reduction.
But Peterson, a Republican representative representing Orem who voted for the cuts, added: “I think this is really about the student experience.”
And, he said, UVU would also be open to hosting other Utah colleges and universities at the facility.
The other school in the state that already has a presence in England is Brigham Young University, which is privately owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It has an established center in London where students can spend a semester studying abroad. BYU also has a center in Israel.