Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

where i stand:

Time for higher-ed presidents to get autonomy

Brian Greenspun is taking some time off and is turning over his Where I Stand column to others. Today’s guest columnist is Robert Lang, a professor of public affairs in the Greenspun College at UNLV and the executive director of The Lincy Institute and Brookings Mountain West, an outreach of the Brookings Institution.

The Nevada Board of Regents is planning a retreat this month where it will discuss the qualifications and duties of the next system chancellor. My suggestion is that the board make John White, the interim system head, the last “chancellor.” This is not to say Nevada does not need a system office or a person administering such an organization. Rather, the regents should rethink how the state higher education system office is organized and led. They also should reconsider its scope, scale and relationship to the state’s public colleges and universities. The regents should look to other states for examples of how to reform the Nevada System of Higher Education office, and with it the chancellor’s job.

Virginia could serve as a good model on how to remake NSHE. Virginia’s is widely viewed as one of the best higher education systems in the nation — something the Democratic vice-presidential nominee and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine proudly noted in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Before serving in my current academic positions at UNLV, I was the department chairman and a professor in urban planning at Virginia Tech, so I know the Virginia higher education system well.

Virginia has more than 40 public institutions managed by the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia. SCHEV is to Virginia what NSHE is to Nevada — but with some key differences. Despite managing a higher education system with five times as many schools as Nevada, SCHEV has only about one-fifth as many employees as NSHE (who number about 200). SCHEV maintains about one staff person per college, while NSHE has about 25 employees per institution.

SCHEV is led by a director who earns about half what NSHE’s chancellor is paid. In fact, the SCHEV director earns less than several NSHE vice chancellors. SCHEV is most often led by a professional manager who is not an academic. The SCHEV director runs only the 40-person system office, which focuses on statewide policy, coordination, regulation and compliance, and is decidedly not the “boss” of Virginia’s colleges and universities. Instead, the presidents independently run their own schools and report to their own college governing boards.

So who leads higher education in Virginia? The college presidents do — especially the presidents of flagship schools such as Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia. As in almost every other state, college presidents in Virginia can politically represent their schools to the Legislature and are typically not subject to gag orders and the threat of being fired by the system head.

I have seen how Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors works up close. The board is composed of several appointed industry CEOs, civic leaders and prominent alumni who provide broad strategic direction to the university. It does not micromanage Virginia Tech’s president, who is evaluated on his ability to achieve board-defined strategic goals. The board’s engagement with Virginia Tech administrators, faculty and students is constructive. There is even a faculty and undergraduate student representative on the board.

And where is the SCHEV staff during a Virginia Tech board meeting? In the state capital, Richmond, doing its job of running the system office.

So what SCHEV lessons apply to NSHE?

To begin, the title “chancellor,” which is often an academic designation, should be switched to the more appropriate label “executive director.” The staff below the executive director should likewise reflect the switch to associate and assistant directors.

Next, match the NSHE leader’s job description to the new title. The NSHE executive director should simply run the system office and report directly to the regents. That would end the 10-plus-year experiment in Nevada started under Jim Rogers to make the NSHE head the CEO over the college presidents.

The Board of Regents need not find an academic to staff this position. The best-qualified candidate would have executive experience in a state higher education system office. Given the abysmal performance by NSHE of late, that person should be recruited from another, more successful state higher education system.

Take another lesson from Virginia and let Nevada’s university and college presidents run their schools as CEOs governed only by the Board of Regents (which is how the Nevada system pretty much ran before 2005). It is also critical that the presidents are seen as the key leaders in higher education who can publicly advocate for their institutions.

Finally, consider that in 2014, when the board was looking to fill the last presidential opening at UNLV, they pitched the job to Michael Crow, Arizona State University’s dynamic leader. In just a decade, Crow turned ASU from a school with a party reputation into a research juggernaut that is now remaking Arizona’s tech economy. Crow rejected the UNLV offer, but the real issue was how another Crow-like, go-go presidential recruit would be treated by NSHE under the current structure. The answer is clear: with a gag order administered by a heavy-handed system boss. If Crow had taken the job at UNLV, his talents for building a powerhouse research institution would have been crushed by a system that put a far less-qualified, proxy president over him.

Let’s end that counterproductive system by remaking NSHE into a more typical director-led system office and freeing Nevada’s college presidents to independently run their schools.

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