UNLV president discusses recent accolades, the medical school’s progress and sports teams’ future

By Ric Anderson

Sunday, April 2, 2017 | 2 a.m.

The budget has grown significantly, there are building projects from one end of campus to the other, enrollment is up, the most-watched presidential debate in history was carried out, partnerships with local businesses are flowering and the first class of medical students in the school’s history is about strap on their stethoscopes.

Approaching the midpoint of his five-year contract, UNLV President Len Jessup says he feels like he’s witnessing a renaissance.

“It’s amazing all that’s happened just in the past two or three years,” he said. “I frequently say that I believe there’s something about this university at this time in this place, and I really believe that. It’s really an amazing growth period again for the state and for the university.”

When Jessup arrived on campus in January 2015, the university was just beginning a strategic plan to join the nation’s most prestigious research institutions by achieving Tier 1 status — the most elite rating in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning.

But after meeting with administrative staff, faculty and members of the community, Jessup broadened the plan to include “pathway goals” in five core areas, including research.

In a recent interview, Jessup offered a progress report on those goals and discussed some of the challenges in store for UNLV. He outlined successes, such as the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration being ranked the No. 1 school of its type in the world and the Boyd School of Law earning its highest mark ever in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings. He also addressed the struggles of the football team and the implosion of the men’s basketball team, which finished last this season in the Mountain West Conference.

Here are excerpts from the interview:

Why did the university change its focus from Tier 1 to the broader goals?

It was mainly to send a message around campus that it wasn’t just about the Carnegie measure, which would affect engineering and sciences and maybe a few other areas of campus but not much else. It doesn’t directly affect the lives of undergraduates, for example. And so it got expanded to the five pathway goals that we’re working on now: research, the student experience, all the stuff around the medical school and health sciences, community engagement and infrastructure. We're now well under way toward that 10-year strategic plan. We're a little more than a year in on that.

Let’s start with the student experience. What are some accomplishments?

The most visible, whether you’re on campus or not, is that we’re growing like crazy. We’re now well north of 29,000 students … (and) there’s demand to continue that kind of growth through the rest of the strategic plan to get to around 40,000. And the interesting thing is we’re growing, but the average GPA of the students coming in keeps getting better. I think because of all the things we're doing to make the experience great — like encouraging students to take a full load, doing block scheduling so freshmen come in now and their schedule is set for them, and pushing our academic success center — stuff like that is helping the retention rate. So we just jumped this year about 3 percent, which is huge. For a university this big to make a jump that big, it's a big deal. And we'll probably jump another 2 to 3 percent as we go into next year. So I think we've made a lot of headway.

What’s driving that growth, recruitment or retention?

It’s a little bit of both. As we get better at doing things — like the jump in the law school ranking or Harrah Hotel College getting the No. 1 ranking in the world — and as we tell the world that we’re getting better — people hear that, and it causes things to happen. When I got here, we invited the deans that if they had a program that they thought would be high-demand, and if they think they could grow it with quality, I wanted them to pitch me on that. We called it the Growth Program Initiative, and we've had a bunch of them that we've acted on. And we made a deal with the deans that on any net new tuition revenue they would generate, we would let them capture up to two-thirds and just keep it with the students, keep it with that unit, so the overhead would be relatively low on what we would need to fund other operations around the university. It could be a program on campus, could be online, could be undergraduate, could be masters, and that sparked new programs that I think have also contributed.

Are you happy with community engagement?

In the past two years, we were at $75 million a year in new gifts and new pledges. That’s $150 million in the past two years, and we’ll have another good year this year. It’s a virtuous cycle. Corporate partnerships have grown tenfold since I’ve been here. The public policy institute with MGM (Resorts) is probably the most recent example — the $1 million gift to create that and have (retired) Sen. Harry Reid and (former House) Speaker John Boehner be the co-chairs.

How are things going with governmental relations, legislative relations?

I came in just as the session was starting in 2015, and we came out of that session in pretty good shape. It was about $60 million in funding additional to the university. This session, based on the governor’s budget, if you include the cost-of-living adjustment, there’s about $40 million-plus of new state funding that’s proposed. I think the Legislature will approve (that) and maybe even add to (it). The overall budget of the university since I’ve been here has grown well over $100 million. We're now about at $650 million in our overall, annual operating budget. It's been significantly enhanced since when I first got here.

So I feel that the relationships with the governor and the Legislature, as well as the local city and county folks has gone really well. They've been really stepping up and helping us out.

When you arrived, the board of regents had recently approved the medical school. Where are you on launching the school?

It's remarkable what's happened in just 24 months or however long it's been. As I was coming in the door, it had just been approved by the regents and then we were just going into the legislative session to go for the funding, which we got thanks to the governor and the Legislature.

It's now up to 55 or 60 employees, and we've now got offers out to the 60 students that will comprise the first cohort. Their start date is in July.

The county has essentially given us 9 or 10 acres right down by UMC and our dental school, so that will be the home of the medical school — at least the teaching, where all the students and faculty will spend the bulk of their time.

We got through the preliminary accreditation. That was a big step. They look over everything — your curriculum and your team and your financing — and then they give you the thumbs-up to start and be able to bring students in. So we got that in the fall and then we began the admissions process.

The community has stepped up with the scholarships, so that's helped a lot: full-ride, four-year scholarships for all 60 students in that first cohort, and then we got enough for about half of the students in the second cohort and then the third and fourth cohort.

I think that's why we had over 900 applicants to the medical school. We finally had to turn off the switch. We want students that not only really want to be doctors and actually practicing clinicians but who are also going to stay in the state.

So out of the 900 applicants, we looked closely and interviewed students who were either from Nevada or had a direct tie to Nevada so it would increase the chance they would stay here as doctors. That was about 400 of the applicants or so. And then within that set, we were able to look at the best and brightest and bring them in for interviews. Like I said, 60 offers are out. We'll know in another month or so, which is the date that students have to say I'm going to this medical school or that medical school. Out of the 60, about 40 of them are locked in to us and they're going to come. There are about 20 or 22 who have multiple offers around the country, and so there's a chance some of them may end up going somewhere else. But we've got a backlog of really qualified students to fill in, so I'm feeling really good about this first cohort. I think the scholarships did it. And that's just a credit to the community. The community stepped up in funding those; they knew it was important.

But the pathway goal also includes everything we're doing around human health. And so we envision ultimately that the dental school is already down there, the medical school will be next to it, and we'd like to move physical therapy and nursing and the other programs down there, too, to create a true medical campus in what the city and county are calling the medical district.

So it's a whole set of activities and subgoals and metrics around that, and I think we're making good progress there.

How much are the scholarships?

It ended up being about $25,000 a year, and so a donor would then make a commitment of $100,000 to fund a student for four years. It was $13.5 million that was pledged for all of those.

What else have you done with community engagement?

That's another one where, when we began the strategic planning process, things were going well and I liked what we were seeing but I thought it'd be great if we could go visit some other campuses. So that's when we looked at benchmark schools across the country. Who are research universities that are in metropolitan areas that are diverse like we are and have already made the jump up to Carnegie's next level and have done it in the last 10 to 15 years?

That's where we zeroed in on Arizona State University, the University of Central Florida and University of Houston. They fit that bill, and they then became the perfect aspirant schools for us. That was the case with the University of Central Florida maybe more than anything was because it's in Orlando, so it's embedded in a community and an economy that's a lot like ours. So we visited all three of those campuses and have learned a lot from them. One of the things we've learned is they've all become incredible partners in the communities they're in, and that's why we added the pathway goal around community engagement. It was the recognition that we're going to need the help of the community here to get the university to the next level, but the community also needs a great university to help the community get to the next level. So that spawned all the activities that are going on around partnerships.

Part of that is the giving, so we've spent a lot of time and effort and money investing in the fundraising operation of the Foundation, adding staff, becoming more disciplined about what we're doing there, reaching out a lot more to build a broader net of relationships around the state and with our alumni around the country, and I think that's all helping to contribute to the increase in giving.

But there's a lot more to that community engagement role as well. We created an Office of Community Engagement. What we've heard from the community that we're so big it's kind of hard to tell where to go to get an intern or get into a research project on campus, to make a gift or buy a seat for a game or a lot of things. So we've got now an interim director, Sue DiBella, and that office is up and running to provide that one-stop shop for people.

One of the most visible signs of progress is all the construction on campus.

There are probably 30 or 40 construction projects going on if you count renovations, but probably a half-dozen new buildings going on or big renovations. We finished the $72 million renovation on the Thomas & Mack Center. There was significant renovation to the Beverly Rogers Literature and Law Building, where the Honors College and the Black Mountain Institute are now. The Harrah Hotel College will be done in the fall, and it’s going to be a beautiful state-of-the-art building for what’s arguably our best program on campus in external rankings. On the northern end, the Cottage Grove Apartments (were) needed because of the changing dynamics of the campus and enrollment.

We’re now at three-quarters full-time students. Think about that: 29,000-plus, and three-quarters are full-time — that’s a big residential campus. We’re actually technically a bigger residential campus than UNR at this point, while our dormitories only house about 1,800 students.

The traditional approach would have been you'd build a dorm on campus — and we might still do this — and because your enrollments are growing, you borrow against student fees, and you go out and bond and build the dorm. But the more progressive, more entrepreneurial universities are going out and using public-private partnerships now to do that. And that's why, instead of going into debt and building another dorm, it was a much better deal for us to go out and buy the Cottage Grove Apartments and then partner with the Midby Companies That first phase we hope will be done by the time the fall semester starts, with about 700 or so new beds for students. And depending on how that goes, if students subscribe and take advantage of that, we'll keep going all the way down the rest of the Cottage Grove complex and it could ultimately be about 3,000 new beds for students on campus.

One of the points of pride for UNLV is the diversity of the campus community. How do you maintain and nurture that, especially at a time of a lot of uncertainty among immigrant communities?

We continue to be ranked by U.S. News and World Report as a very diverse campus. They had us again as the second most diverse campus in the country. We're at almost 60 percent of the student body being students who are from underrepresented groups, which is remarkable when you think about it. I think as an aside, that's a reflection of the community here. We live in a very diverse community. Southern Nevada, I think, is a reflection of where the rest of the country is going, we just happen to be there now. I think that's one of the reasons why the presidential commission wanted to have the debate here — we're not only a swing state, but we're a reflection of where the country's going. And I think as they hoped, it turned out to be a great debate — the most-viewed debate in debate history.

But it's who we are, so it's a function of this community. We're a diverse community, and we're a diverse campus. We're going to continue to be that way.

It's why we changed the way we manage diversity on campus. So it's why we're out searching now for a chief diversity officer. That will now have a direct report in to me and to the provost. We're going to build staff around that position. Luis Valera had been doing it for us while also being our governmental affairs lobbyist, but now we'll have a full-time chief diversity officer who sits at Cabinet level.

We added the Intersection multicultural student services center on the first floor of the Student Union. The lease for that space was up, and rather than going out and finding someone else to lease it, we thought that might be a good place to put the multicultural student services center — in a place where students could see it and use it. So there are a number of things we're doing to make sure those students are successful. It's fundamental for this campus.

What's happening with research?

If you look at that pipeline — faculties submitting proposals to get grants, that's up; faculty being awarded grants, that's up. Then money comes in and they spend it — grant funded research expenditures — that's coming up. Faculty members disclose that they've got an invention, a discovery that's happened and want to apply for a patent around it — that activity's up.

So we think the front-end indicators of that, all the metrics we look at there, are up. And I think what you'll see more of downstream from that is not only grant-funded research expenditures to continue to climb — and that really is the core measure on the Carnegie measure -- but spin-out activity from this university as we go forward.

So what keeps you up at night?

The thing that not necessarily keeps me up at night but I think about down the road, is it takes fuel to continue to do what we’re doing. One of the greatest pleasant surprises is how much people have stepped up and are buying into what we’re doing and are investing in it, all these different stakeholder groups.

I talk to my counterparts around the country who are in states where the economy's just not recovering as quickly as they need it to, or their economy's improving but the state Legislature's just not investing in higher education or in education at all. That's happening in a lot of states around the nation.

And I talk with them and I realize how fortunate we are literally to be in this place at this time at this university. A lot of success is about timing.

That makes me feel more confident going forward that we're going to continue to have the partners and the fuel we need.

How are you feeling about the basketball and football programs?

Mostly what I hear is pretty optimistic about athletics. Just hold football and men's basketball to the side for a moment and think about all that's going on in athletics, with a lot of Mountain West championships in a lot of the other sports, and really good, healthy, brisk fundraising going on. We're doing well with the (academic) scores, and we have a lot of great facility upgrades going on.

So generally what I hear is people are happy with how we're doing on athletics.

In football and basketball, they're the marquee sports, they're the two revenue-generating sports that help to support everything else and they're clearly the most visible, so I know a lot of people are focused on them.

I'm really confident in those two sports. I'm bullish on where they're going. I'm really confident and excited about the two coaches we have. I think we have the right guys in those two jobs.

I think you'll see that with Coach (Tony) Sanchez this coming season. I think they're at a point where you'll see the flywheel starting to turn with his own recruits now starting to take the field, and I think they'll have a great season. I feel the same way about Marvin (Menzies) in basketball. I think we've got exactly the right guy we need right now. We put him in a tough spot, coming in at the end of the season. He had a couple weeks to recruit after everybody had already been recruited, and he had to do the best he could to put together the team. And while we didn't have the win-loss record that I think we all would have liked to see, they played with heart. There was a great connection between the players and the coaches. I like what he's doing both on the court and off the court with that program.

And now he's got more time to recruit, and there are some good signs of success with their recruits. I think they'll do better next season and the season after that.

Now, I need those two guys to do well, because of the revenue those two sports generate. And that really largely is what's influencing the budget in athletics right now. We were running good, balanced budgets until we got to this year. And I think those two sports doing well will solve that problem with budgets and athletics. I think we'll get there.