Kevin Page, then-chairman of the Nevada Board of Regents, speaks with the Sun editorial board, Tuesday, Aug. 20, 2013.
Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Nevada Regent Kevin Page has liberally shared emails from his official account with a relative outside of the higher education system, including confidential materials involving the regents’ official business and a coarse joke containing the terms “queer” and “Muslim camel humper.”
Those messages were among well over 100 the Sun obtained through an open-records request for Page’s emails to his brother, Paul, in 2015 and 2016. The Sun made the request last summer after sources reported that Regent Page abused his authority in 2015 by demanding special treatment for a close relative of Paul Page, who was attending UNLV at the time and threatening university officials if they failed to appease him.
The emails, which NSHE released to the Sun late last month, shed little new light on Kevin Page’s 2015 actions but did show that he routinely used his official account to share sensitive materials and other communications with his brother. Paul Page is not employed by NSHE, but rather is a former Metro Police lieutenant who left the department after being accused of misappropriating money from a police union he headed. The Sun was unable to determine Paul Page’s current occupation, as attempts to reach him were unsuccessful.
Among the messages Regent Page forwarded was the off-color joke, which came from a person who appears to be outside the system and who warned it was “maybe too aggressive to put on the forum” but shared it regardless. In the message, a girl who frequently goes on car rides with her grandfather goes with her grandmother instead, and afterward is asked by the grandfather if she enjoyed the experience. Her answer indicates that the grandfather has taught her a number of profane and hateful terms that she has come to embrace.
“”Not really, PaPa; it was boring. We didn’t see a single a**hole, queer, piece of s**t, horse’s ass, socialist left wing Obama lover, blind b**tard, dip s**t, Muslim camel humper, p*****head or son of a b***h anywhere we went. We just drove around and Grandma smiled at everyone she saw,” reads the email, which the Sun received in unredacted form but edited for publication.
Ibrahim Hooper, national communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the message indicated “bias on a number of levels” by Page. Hooper, who in his capacity for CAIR speaks for the nation’s leading civil-rights organization for Muslims, called for Page’s resignation.
“Everybody has a First Amendment right even to be a bigot, but a person in a position of authority that impacts other people should be held to a higher standard,” Hooper said in a telephone interview.
NSHE’s code of conduct for regents does not specifically address obscene or discriminatory language, but includes such standards as “treating all employees and students of the NSHE with respect,” “representing the entire NSHE at all times” and “upholding the public trust in the office of Regent.”
As part of the 13-member elected Board of Regents, Page is responsible for making decisions that affect diverse campus communities including Muslims and members of the LGBT communities. He serves District 3, which covers parts of central and southern Las Vegas, including the UNLV campus. UNLV for several years has ranked as one of the most diverse universities in the nation.
Meanwhile, NSHE guidelines for students, faculty and staff specifically bar discrimination and the use of obscene or abusive language that is “not significantly related to the teaching” of coursework, with violations carrying penalties that include termination. Regents are not covered under those guidelines by the letter of the law, but violations among the board members arguably violate the spirit of NSHE’s codes.
Local Muslim and LGBT organizations didn’t respond by deadline to inquiries from the Sun seeking comment about the email.
Regent Page also did not respond by deadline to requests for comment on the offensive email.
He did send a statement on the other messages, which included several labeled “confidential” and “confidential -- attorney client privilege” by NSHE’s staff attorneys, who also represent the regents.
The versions of the messages provided to the Sun were heavily redacted, but their subject lines included personnel matters in which individual staff members were named, and concerns involving the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. NSHE staff said the messages were not redacted when Regent Page forwarded them.
In one example, Regent Page forwarded a contract for a head men’s basketball coach to his brother on March 25, 2016. The next day, the regents approved the contract for then-UNR men’s basketball coach Eric Musselman, who has since moved on to the University of Arkansas.
Another example came when the staff of former U.S. Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., reached out to Page to help address concerns from constituents. The nature of the concerns was redacted, but the message was accompanied by privacy consent forms in which the constituents agreed that information could be provided to Heck’s office. The forms implied that the exchange of private information would be limited to Heck’s office, but Page forwarded the materials to Paul Page.
In his statement to the Sun, Regent Page said Paul Page had occasionally served as an “unpaid assistant” to him during his years on the board. He said Paul Page played a role that was “not unlike other members of our board who utilize help from their respective business staff and assistants to answer and help coordinate the overwhelming volume of correspondence and calls we receive.
“In that capacity, he sometimes sorts mail for me, organizes emails, returns calls if I am traveling, and more,” Page wrote.
But the emails offer no indication that Paul Page was acting as an assistant, at least in their redacted form. Regent Page offers no instructions about what to do with the materials he’s sharing, nor does Paul Page request any direction.
Regent Page said his brother “never breached confidence and does not share or discuss correspondence if it is marked confidential,” but did not respond by deadline to follow-up questions about his brother’s role. It was unknown whether Regent Page had a formal confidentiality agreement with Paul Page or whether he asked an attorney if it was acceptable for him to share the messages.
Several of Regent Page’s colleagues on the board said they did not share sensitive emails outside of the board and NSHE, and didn’t think it was appropriate to do so. Board Chairman Jason Geddes said that after learning about the situation, he took action.
“I was not aware that regents use third parties as personal assistants, and I have advised regents who may be using personal assistants outside of NSHE staff to refrain from sharing confidential information with third parties,” Geddes wrote in an email.
Peter A. Joy, an expert in legal ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, said sharing such sensitive information with outside parties can be extremely problematic for a variety of reasons. One, it makes the information legally obtainable by adversarial parties involved in lawsuits or legal claims, which can use it to strengthen their cases. Two, it can lead to claims of privacy violations by those whose information is shared. Three, it can result in the disclosure of embarrassing or inappropriate materials.
And although Page said the materials were shared in confidentiality, Joy said any release creates a risk that information can become public or be accessed by other parties through accidental forwarding, hacking, a family member stumbling across it while using a shared computer, and so on.
Joy said not all confidential material is potentially harmful. But he said the release of such materials ranks “right at the top” of attorneys’ causes for concern.
“That’s a 10 out of 10, even if it’s irrelevant information,” he said. “Because it may be irrelevant this time, but next time it may be very important.”
Page’s role as a regent gave him access to an array of protected materials regarding operations of Nevada’s universities and colleges. The regents oversee those institutions in a structure similar to that of a school board in a public K-12 district. In this analogy, Chancellor Thom Reilly would play the role of the superintendent, with the regents having the ability to hire and fire the chancellor.
It’s unclear whether Page violated any laws or NSHE codes in sharing the confidential material, although guidelines for faculty, staff and students call for punishment up to dismissal or expulsion for similar actions.
NSHE maintains a detailed and strict set of rules regarding the release of such documents, but the codes do not expressly state that they apply to regents — just to faculty and staff.
NSHE does bar regents from divulging personnel matters that “if disclosed, would needlessly injure individuals or educational programs.” Because of the redactions in the emails obtained by the Sun, it’s unclear whether any of them met that standard.
Attorneys did say that however ill-advised it might have been for Page to share documents marked “attorney-client privilege,” Page technically had the prerogative to do so because he and the regents are clients of NSHE’s counsel and therefore can waive the privilege.
Releasing material simply marked “confidential” is different, attorneys said, because the attorney-client privilege isn’t expressly in play.
Page came under scrutiny last summer after sources shared emails with the Sun about the 2015 matter involving his student relative. In those emails, he pressured UNLV officials to allow the relative to take a course in the Lee Business School without completing a prerequisite.
When officials resisted, saying the school could lose its accreditation by allowing the student to skip the prerequisite, Page responded by saying that he was a “nice guy” but could “change gears.” That comment led to speculation that he retaliated by helping push out popular former UNLV President Len Jessup, who left UNLV under pressure by the regents and Chancellor Thom Reilly.
After the Sun reported about the matter, sources at UNLV further claimed that Regent Page abused his authority by routinely demanding tickets for large entourages of family members and friends to athletic events and other special occasions. In doing so, sources said, he ran counter to regents’ standard practice of generally seeking entry only for themselves and their spouses.
In the emails to his brother, Regent Page sent along notifications of a number of special events.
In May 2015, he also forwarded a message from a UNLV administrator notifying Regent Page that a parking ticket he had received on campus had been sent to the parking director for “forgiving.” The administrator informed Regent Page he had parked in a reserved resident lot, and offered to set up a reserved spot for him.
In late 2010, Paul Page was accused of misappropriating nearly $40,000 in funds for the Metro Police Managers and Supervisors association when an audit uncovered $22,387 in “intentional discrepancies” and another $16,134 in “inappropriate charges.”
Page had been the head of the union organization, which at the time represented about 450 sergeants, lieutenants and captains.
Among the allegations, Page was accused of buying computers and high-end office equipment annually, then using it at his home for an extended period of time before giving them to the union.
He reached a settlement with the union and did not face criminal charges.
