As a first-generation student at Saint Louis University, Dr. Diana Natalicio, the long-serving president of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), initially set out to teach in the St. Louis public schools that served students like her.
However, completing her undergraduate degree in Spanish – followed by a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil in which she studied Portuguese – proved to be transformative for the ways she viewed the world and thought about the value of higher education. Reflecting on her experiences in academe as she prepares for retirement this summer, the leader says her SLU degree “completely changed my life.”
“I became much more aware of other opportunities. They broadened my view of the world,” she says, noting that this shift sparked a desire to “move up a notch” from teaching in the K-12 space to higher ed, but specifically, public higher education.
“I am a huge advocate of public higher education because, when I was growing up, there were no public universities in St. Louis,” she says. “I began to understand how important access to higher education was for students like me who were the first in their family to go to college [or] from families with modest means.”
Natalicio would go on to earn a master’s degree in Portuguese and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin before arriving at UTEP in 1971 as an assistant professor. The university has also known her as a vice president for academic affairs, dean of liberal arts, chair of the modern languages department and professor of linguistics.
She became UTEP’s first woman president in 1988.
Many community leaders acknowledge that it is hard to imagine UTEP without Natalicio, as her leadership spans three decades. Recognized as one of Fortune magazine’s Top 50 World Leaders in 2017 and included on the 2016 TIME 100 list of most influential people in the world, she is the longest-serving president of a U.S. major public research university with two “bold” goals she is proud to have achieved.
