Utah's flagship university opened, collapsed, and restarted before settling on an army fort
The University of Utah was founded in 1850 as the University of Deseret, just three years after Mormon pioneers reached the Salt Lake valley. Classes met in private homes, money ran dry, and by 1853 it had closed. It took well over a decade, several buildings and a former army post to give it a lasting home.
Brigham Young began assembling a board of regents soon after the pioneers arrived, and the provisional State of Deseret chartered the school on 28 February 1850, with Orson Spencer as its first chancellor. Without funding or schools to feed it students, it shut down after three years. Teaching resumed on and off in the city council house, and a proper revival began in 1867 under David O. Calder, followed by John R. Park from 1869.
The campus kept moving: to the Union Academy building in 1876, onto Union Square in 1884, and finally to land taken from the Army's Fort Douglas on the valley's east bench, where it settled for good in 1900. It had adopted the name University of Utah in 1892, four years before statehood. Park, who arranged the land deal, left his whole fortune to the school when he died in 1900. More fort land followed over the decades, and the post itself closed in 1991.
The twentieth century brought turbulence. In 1915 the president recommended firing five professors after a commencement speech criticised the governor, and a third of the faculty walked out in protest; he resigned the following year. Wars and the Depression then took their toll, with enrollment sinking to 3,418 by the final year of World War II. Under president A. Ray Olpin it rebounded to 12,000 by 1964, and the school grew into a research centre for computing and medicine.
For the 2002 Winter Olympics the campus housed the athletes' village and staged the opening and closing ceremonies. By fall 2024 it enrolled 36,881 students, and it opened a branch campus in South Korea in 2014.
Source: University of Utah
