Washington State University’s 12th president is the first woman to fill the role in the institution’s 135-year history. “It’s about time for an institution like WSU to have a woman president,” Elizabeth “Betsy” Cantwell said Monday during her visit to the university’s Vancouver campus. After WSU’s board conducted a nationwide search and considered 260 candidates, it unanimously appointed Cantwell. She stepped into the position April 1, succeeding Kirk Schulz, the president since 2016. Schulz will continue the rest of the year as a senior adviser to support the transition, according to a university news release. Cantwell’s Monday tour of the Vancouver campus was her first time there, but she’s visited the Pullman campus many times. One of her daughters is a current graduate student there. She said her familiarity with WSU and its role as a land grant institution are reasons why she wanted the position.

Land grant colleges and universities were established under the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 to offer the working classes access to higher education, according to WSU’s webpage. “It has so much promise to demonstrate the future value of the land grant mission,” Cantwell said. “And I just really appreciate the way the state of Washington, albeit it’s got some financial challenges, has really stood behind its institutions of higher education.” Her entrance comes amid Washington’s $15 billion budget deficit and at a time when Trump’s administration aims to dismantle the Department of Education. “My thought on that in the simple form is we have an obligation to stay alive, if you will,” she said. “What we have the opportunity to do, and what we will do, is design our own future.”

Going forward, Cantwell said she plans on looking at the state of technology and the needs of the university’s students to figure out a way to combine the two. “There are some amazing examples of public institutions of higher education across the U.S. who have stepped up and said, ‘We’re going to take on AI,’?” Cantwell said. “We’re not going to leave AI lying on the table, but I would argue we haven’t really developed a strategy for that or really taken that on fully.” In the fall, Cantwell said she plans on hosting listening sessions to understand more about the needs of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff, but also to learn the differences of each of the campuses. “What I would tell our students is to look for those opportunities to be a part of the conversation about what we want to do and deliver,” she said.

Cantwell served as Utah State University’s president for 1½ years before making the switch to WSU. The Salt Lake Tribune described her departure as a surprise and reported that the school continues to face “allegations of a toxic culture within its football program and, more recently, concerns that prompted legislation about transgender students.” During her time at Utah State, she led the university’s system of 30 campuses. One of her achievements at the university includes a record-breaking $495 million in sponsored research expenditures. When the president role at WSU opened, Cantwell anguished over the possibility because it was her dream job, but she had already been selected as Utah State’s president. WSU was persistent in its recruitment, she said. “It just became more and more clear that if I was going to make a move in this time of real challenges for our institutions, I should do it right now so that I have a long term,” Cantwell said.

Before Utah, she held research and innovation leadership positions at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. Prior to her career in higher education, Cantwell worked in national labs advancing “critical missions in energy, defense and space exploration” through U.S. national security agencies, according to her WSU biography. Cantwell earned a bachelor’s degree in human behavior from the University of Chicago, a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s of business administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “I do want people to know that this is a hard time to be president. I chose it,” she said. “I am not surprised, but to be able to do this on behalf of everyone, I will ask for grace repeatedly — especially in this first year.”