Banners displayed across the UNLV campus celebrate its 60th birthday, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2017.
Monday, July 13, 2020 | 3:44 p.m.
A high-ranking UNLV administrator is among four candidates identified as finalists today in the search for a new president for the Southern Nevada university.
Chris Heavey, UNLV’s interim executive vice president and provost, is the lone internal candidate on the list of finalists, which was released today. Joining Heavey on the list are Kenneth Furton, the provost, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Florida International University in Miami; Karla Leeper, executive vice president for operations at Augusta (Ga.) University; and Keith Whitfield, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Heavey has been part of the UNLV community for more than 25 years, serving as senior vice provost, dean, vice provost for undergraduate education, director of general education and associate dean, according to his staff page on the university website.
Here’s a brief look at the other three finalists:
•Fulton joined Florida International University in 1988 as a chemistry instructor before becoming chair of the chemistry and biochemistry department, then founding director of the university’s Forensic Research Institute. He later became dean of the FIU college of arts and sciences.
•Leeper has been at Augusta University for five years, and before that served for a little more than a year as president and CEO of Georgia Regents University/Georgia Regents Health System. She previously served on the communications studies faculty at Baylor University, where she later joined the administrative staff on her way to becoming vice president of executive affairs and chief of staff to the president.
•Whitfield has been provost since 2016 at Wayne State, where he’s also a member of the psychology faculty. He is a former professor in behavioral health at Penn State and Duke, spending five years as Duke’s vice president of academic affairs. Also at Duke, Whitfield directed the Center on Biobehavioral Health Disparities Research and the developmental psychology program.
The finalists were identified after a national search that began this year, but then was delayed for several weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic. Under a timetable posted on UNLV’s website, daylong candidate forums will be held for each finalist on campus on Monday and Tuesday of next week, followed by meetings of the presidential search committee and then a vote by the Nevada Board of Regents on July 23.
Participants are encouraged to take part in the forums virtually due to state-mandated social distancing protocols. Here's the schedule and links to live streaming.
The next UNLV president will be the university’s seventh leader in the last 14 years, including temporary presidents. Acting President Marta Meana has overseen UNLV since July 2018 after the tumultuous departure of former President Len Jessup, who resigned in the spring of 2018 citing pressure from Chancellor Thom Reilly and the Nevada Board of Regents.
The resignation prompted several UNLV supporters to either withdraw or reconsider a number of multimillion-dollar gifts to the university, saying they didn’t trust Reilly and the regents to steward their money. Jessup’s critics accused him of mismanagement and self-dealing, including approving a nonbinding agreement in which the university would accept a donation for the UNLV School of Medicine contingent on him and the then-dean of the medical school retaining their jobs through 2022.
But Jessup’s supporters said those and other claims were trumped-up, and that Jessup was unfairly hounded out of the job. Jessup, who was not found to be in violation of state ethics rules, is now president of Claremont Graduate University in Southern California, where he was hired just weeks after announcing he was leaving UNLV.
