New president of Salt Lake Community College faces ‘an anti-DEI political landscape’ and declining enrollment

Gregory Peterson has worked at community colleges, started new programs at several, studied how they operate best and even wrote his dissertation about them.

But what might guide him the most as he now takes the helm as the new leader of Salt Lake Community College is that he was once a student at one. Peterson’s experience with higher education started when he was 18 years old and enrolled at Clackamas Community College in Oregon in 1994.

“He is a first-generation community college student himself,” said Amanda Covington, chair of the Utah Board of Higher Education, which unanimously selected and announced Peterson as the next SLCC president Friday.

The room full of students there at the Taylorsville campus for the event, who are now following the same path with their education at the school Peterson will lead, erupted with cheers, whistles and claps.

Peterson beamed as he walked out to accept the position and shake hands, already wearing the school’s signature colors — royal blue and gold — with his shirt and tie and Converse sneakers.

“I have to admit when I started this process, I was intrigued by Salt Lake Community College. But over the last three days,” he said, as he’s toured the campus, met students and participated in interviews, “I have fallen in love with you.”

He’ll become the ninth president there, stepping into the role in July at the retirement of beloved SLCC President Deneece Huftalin, who has held the position for the past decade and been at the college for a total of 32 years.

SLCC’s board of trustees Chair Brady Southwick said Friday that Huftalin is “now a part of the school’s DNA.”

Covington added: “This is a bittersweet day. It’s so exciting for the future, but we all acknowledge and respect her wonderful leadership and history here.”

Peterson comes in at the tail end of a major shuffling of leadership at universities across Utah, with SLCC becoming the sixth campus to get a new president since 2021. Now, no president at any of the state’s eight public colleges will have been in office for more than six years. Utah Valley University’s Astrid Tuminez, appointed in 2018, is now the longest-serving.

Peterson will lead SLCC at a challenging time for the two-year institution with eight campuses across Salt Lake County.

The school has seen declining enrollment for the past few years as it has struggled to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. It now serves nearly 27,000 students — down from just shy of 30,000 students five years ago.

It has billed itself as a direct-to-workforce institution, with trainings, certificates and degrees for students to move straight into a job after completion. Interest in those programs has recently waned, though, with Covington noting that SLCC has a responsibility to address the “industry and education gap” and bolster Utah’s economy.

Peterson will be tasked with reviving that focus, and he acknowledged as much Friday, noting “the potential we have to support our communities and our state.”

“I look forward to reinforcing SLCC’s commitment to providing educational pathways for transfer and workforce that improve the lives of every member of our community,” he said.

SLCC also has the most diverse student population of any higher education institution in the state; and the school is on its way to becoming the first in Utah to be federally designated as a Hispanic Serving Institution. That is rewarded with grant funding and occurs once a school has a student population that is 25% Latino. Currently, SLCC’s Latino enrollment is the highest for any college or university in the state at 21.2%.

But with Utah’s new anti-DEI law taking effect in July and banning offices from using the words “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Peterson will be limited in the support he can offer to specific populations. Instead, any race- or gender-based programs are supposed to be, under the law, opened to all students.

Previously, Peterson had been serving since 2018 as the president of Chandler-Gilbert Community College in Arizona — holding the second highest administrative position at the school, in line after the chancellor. He wrote in his cover letter for the SLCC job that he faced a similar climate there.

“Arizona does have a similar legislative landscape to Utah, and we, too, have been challenged in maintaining our commitment to the success of all of our local communities in response to an anti-DEI political landscape,” he said.

With that pressure, Southwick noted during the announcement Friday that the school will be shifting its focus to more scholarships for low-income and first-generation students under the direction of Peterson.

He did some of that work in his prior positions. While Peterson led Chandler-Gilbert Community College, the student population grew to a record high of 19,000, which reversed pandemic dips, and also increased degree completion. In partnership with Intel, he also started the first artificial intelligence and machine learning associate degree program in the nation there in 2021.

His academic resume is pages full of committee and community work he’s done, awards he’s won and partnerships he’s forged in a long career as an administrator across a handful of urban, suburban and rural community colleges in Arizona, Oregon and California. One of his first faculty jobs, too, was as an instructional support technician at Portland Community College.

It was a monthslong search before Peterson was named to the position at SLCC. None of the three finalists was an internal candidate.

He received his doctorate in educational administration, with an emphasis in community college leadership, from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation was titled, “A Case Study of the Perceptions of Faculty, Administrators, and Staff Regarding the Development of a ‘Culture of Evidence’ at Two Texas Community Colleges.”

He also received a bachelor’s degree at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Taking the top spot at SLCC, he’ll be returning to the state and to his community college roots, supporting students like him.