The president of Dixie State University had a small operation to remove a small patch of sun-exposed skin on his head.
President Stephen D. Nadauld is back to his normal health and routine, and he has no additional problems.
He said the reason was from sun exposure as a youth.
“It was an outpatient thing,” Nadauld said. “When I was (college) age, growing up in Idaho, every summer we would just go out in the sun and get toasted. I was in the sun constantly as a lifeguard for three years.”
He said the operation was very small and nothing to worry about. The medical term for the patch removed is called an atypical fibroxanthoma.
“If you look up (atypical fibroxanthoma) on the internet, it says that it is typically found on the heads of white males over the age of 70,” Nadauld said as he laughed. “I said, ‘Well, I fit that description.’”
According to a medical dictionary, the definition of atypical fibroxanthoma is: “A solitary, often ulcerated, small, cutaneous, usually benign tumor composed of foamy histiocytes, spindle cells and bizarre giant cells.”
Nadauld has been DSU’s inaugurated president since March 27, 2010, but was the interim president before that since March 22, 2008.
He said he remembers the day he was asked to move to St. George very vividly.
“It was a February day, and I was sitting in my house in Bountiful, and there was 3 feet of snow in the yard,” Nadauld said. “The (Utah Board of) Regents called me and said, ‘Would you consider going down to St. George and being the interim president for a while? We have an issue down there.’”
He told them he needed to ask his wife Margaret.
After they discussed the proposition, they decided it would be a great opportunity for them and the school. In the end they agreed to go.
“When we came, we didn’t know how long the assignment would be,” Nadauld said. “As we got into it, we realized we could quickly solve the problems that were here.”
Nadauld didn’t elaborate on the problems that existed, but he and his wife came to do what they could.
“We just came to be helpful, not as a career move or to impress friends or anything,” Nadauld said. “I guess we came with the right approach.”
Nadauld said he reassesses himself every year to decide if he should return to Dixie State or not. He asks himself whether or not he is still the right person for the job, and then he signs up for another year.
He said the future of DSU isn’t downsizing or growing, but it is “rightsizing.” He said the right size for DSU right now is 12,000 students, and he believes we can get there by the year 2020.
“We need to try to marshal our resources and add three or four masters degrees that will service our community,” Nadauld said. “We need to get some strength in more of the technical areas. I’d like to build up our computer science, forensics and some of those things.”