Friday, June 1, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Speculation over who will be the next UNLV president has officially ensued, with Nevada Chancellor Thom Reilly recently musing about Gov. Brian Sandoval being a potential candidate.
Reilly, in an appearance on the Reno-based talk show Nevada Newsmakers, said that while it was too early to consider whether Sandoval might be a prospect, the governor would be a strong candidate.
“With that kind of individual,” Reilly said, “you would have a great ability from an operational standpoint, from a fundraising standpoint and with a lot of those other issues.”
True. But with that kind of individual, you’d also have someone who’d likely be highly reluctant to step into the situation at UNLV as-is.
Someone at Sandoval’s level — or any upwardly mobile administrator in higher education — is savvy enough to know quicksand when they see it, which is exactly what UNLV’s presidency has become due to mismanagement of the university by the Nevada Board of Regents and the Nevada System of Higher Education.
This is a university that has burned through four presidents in the past 12 years, not counting an interim who served for a year, amid meddling and micromanagement by some regents. It’s a place where the leadership can help stage a presidential debate that is celebrated by the region’s community and business leaders but then be harshly criticized by NSHE and the regents because of unforeseeable cost overruns.
And it’s a university that is routinely criticized for shortcomings — both real and imagined — while the state’s flagship institution, UNR, is fawned over despite comparing poorly to its counterparts in other states.
Case in point: A problem in UNLV’s School of Dental Medicine led to former President Len Jessup’s pressured departure, while an audit that revealed alarming concerns over UNR’s School of Medicine elicited a “nothing to see here, folks” response from the regents and NSHE. In fact, in the same interview in which he discussed Sandoval, Reilly made a point of saying UNR had a “wonderful president” in Marc Johnson.
So short of hypnotizing an elite prospect into believing an alternate version of reality, it’s difficult to see how Reilly or the regents could convince such a person to take the job.
If Reilly and the regents are serious about bringing the best to UNLV, here’s what they should do:
First, they should revert the chancellor’s position to the way it was structured before 2005, when the chancellor was given the authority to fire presidents. Right now, it’s too easy for presidents to be ousted — it’s been done several times by subsets of regents and the chancellor working together behind the scenes. In contrast, it would be much more difficult for regents to build majority support to launch a public termination process.
For the record, Reilly and NSHE will dispute that the chancellor has firing power, pointing out that the board’s bylaws say firings can only be done with the approval of the regents. Duly noted, but the reality is that the NSHE leader has the de facto power to fire. Here’s why: As was the case with Jessup, any president who wants to keep advancing in his or her career will seek another position as opposed to going through a public termination process. That being the case, regents can work informally with the chancellor to effectively fire a president by simply threatening to hold a public process.
In addition to restructuring, the regents also need to make a formal commitment to support legislation to reduce the size of the 13-member board and make some or all of the positions appointed by the governor as opposed to being filled by election.
No question, it would be a day to celebrate if UNLV landed someone on the level of a two-term governor to become its president.
But to make it happen, NSHE and the regents need to create an oversight structure that would allow a person with that level of leadership ability put it to full use.
