Regents should revisit refusal to modify CSN campus names

Monday, Dec. 14, 2015 | 2 a.m.

It’s possible you missed the news, but UNLV is being renamed the University of Nevada, Maryland Parkway. And UNR is being renamed University of Nevada, Virginia Street.

The decisions were reached after the Board of Regents concluded that identifying campuses by the street they are on is more important for branding than the community they are in and serve. So UNLV students can start saying they attend UNMP.

Of course, we’re joking. But not about the frustration that community leaders have with a committee of regents for blowing off a simple request that signs and other promotional material for three College of Southern Nevada campuses bear the name of the city where the college is located.

Identifying the CSN Cheyenne Campus, for example, doesn’t help locate it, given that Cheyenne Avenue stretches from near Nellis Air Force Base through North Las Vegas and Las Vegas, all the way to the base of Lone Mountain.

Why not nurture the town-and-gown relationship that North Las Vegas has with CSN? Oh, promoting a partnership like that would be too obvious.

So while North Las Vegas civic leaders had hoped the CSN campus on Cheyenne could be identified as the “North Las Vegas campus” — a nice perk when selling the city to businesses and residents, and conversely for the community to rally more around “their” campus — regents said it’s not important, leave us alone, go away. It was almost insulting, as if the regents don’t want the community college to dare be associated with North Las Vegas.

And the CSN Charleston campus? Charleston Boulevard runs from the far east side of the valley to the Red Rock National Recreation Area. So let’s call the campus what it is: CSN Las Vegas, for its location close to the center of the valley. But no, said the regents. We must mark it by a street name.

It’s not like the folks making the decisions are trying to be consistent. CSN’s other campus is identified, rightly, as CSN Henderson.

How did Henderson work that deal? It just makes too much sense. What were they thinking? It must have been a mistake.

If regents wonder how they can get more respect from the community, they might ask themselves how much respect they show their communities.

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More about names — such as the Rebels

Speaking of colleges and names, we applaud the decision by UNLV President Len Jessup to keep the nickname Rebels, which the community overwhelmingly supports, after his staff conducted an in-depth review of the history and meaning of the name in context to the university.

The country — as it should — turned its attention to lingering racism after the massacre in June of nine churchgoers at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Displays of the Confederate flag and other confederate trappings from the Civil War have been removed throughout the South, raising the question of the use of the name “Rebels” in our community.

Rainier Spencer, the university’s chief diversity officer, dug deep into history to show that the name Rebels was taken to reflect not only the campus’ independence and spirit but also its disdain for Northern Nevada politicians, who in the 1950s controlled the state’s purse strings and decidedly were stingy with what was then Nevada Southern, a satellite campus of UNR before UNLV was created.

An outgrowth of that rebel attitude was the adoption of the confederate wolf, Beauregard, as the campus mascot. But to the university’s credit, Beauregard was dispatched in the 1970s because of its Confederate symbolism, decades before the latest national cleansing of racist icons and images.