UNLV Struggles for Academic Respect
Carol C. Harter, president of the University of Nevada campus here, beams as she rattles off facts about her school’s new Lied Library: workstations for 2,500 laptop computers, a robotic system for retrieving books, shelf space for 2 million volumes.
The kicker: “And 301,000 square feet of floor space,” Harter says, pausing for effect. “That’s 1,000 square feet more than the basketball arena.”
Harter drives the point home a moment later: “We’re a university. We just happen to have an outstanding basketball team.”
That hasn’t been the perception of UNLV, a school put on the map, and then wiped right back off, by its Runnin’ Rebels. The team’s slam-dunk fests and 30-win seasons left an indelible impression on sports fans in the early 1990s, as did some players’ penchant for bending NCAA rules and consorting with a point-fixer.
Harter’s pride in a library to rival the adjacent Thomas & Mack Center--home to the team and formerly to controversial coach Jerry Tarkanian--is just one manifestation of the uphill struggle by this university, and Las Vegas itself, to assert themselves as something more than cynosures for high-flying fun.
Most of the town’s establishment agrees that Las Vegas can’t become a great city until its university is acclaimed for something more than its athletics or its College of Hotel Administration. “Economic diversification” is on everyone’s lips in a town of decidedly one-trick commerce.
“In order for me to accomplish my goals, I need Carol Harter, and for her to accomplish her goals she needs me,” says Mayor Oscar Goodman, the onetime mob lawyer whose election last year seemed to confirm that this town still cherishes its notorious roots. “We need UNLV to be a top-flight university.”
But there is much to do. The 43-year-old institution once known as “Tumbleweed Tech” still lets anyone with a C+ average in the front door. Standardized tests like the SAT are not required, but UNLV’s incoming freshmen are asked to submit their results anyway, and their 1015 average score for math and verbal skills combined lags a point behind the national average.
The university’s virtual open-door policy is one of the factors that relegates it to the lower rungs of American higher education. In last year’s widely watched U.S. News & World Report rankings, UNLV could not be found anywhere in the list of 200-plus “national” universities.
Of more immediate and practical concern to administrators is shucking a 6-year-old designation by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a “master university.” UNLV is likely to be dubbed a “doctoral-research university” in this year’s classifications--an important boost when applying for federal funds.
But the school won’t become a cloistered intellectual sanctuary any time soon. With just 38% of Nevada’s high school seniors currently going on to college--the lowest rate in the nation--officials are loath to make college admission more difficult.
Attracting more students would be a tall order in this job-rich state. But the Legislature and leaders in southern Nevada want the university to do much more. Goals include training hundreds of new teachers for the bursting public schools; opening a dental college; creating satellite campuses to accommodate the spiraling population; invigorating the arts; and founding a technology center to create jobs outside the gambling industry.
In short, to make Las Vegas a whole city.
“It may help us eventually to move into a niche as a research university,” says Harter, a Faulkner scholar who came to the desert 4 1/2 years ago from the State University of New York, where she headed the Geneseo campus. “Right now we are trying to be all things to all people.”
That means that UNLV offers an unusual educational smorgasbord, where gray-bearded grandfathers sample courses beside former high school honor students and waitresses from hotels on the Strip.
In one of the university’s ubiquitous concrete-block buildings, a Harvard-trained biologist searches for compounds to slow the migration of cancer cells while across campus students learn the finer points of “eye-in-the-sky” surveillance in “Protection of Casino Games.”
Casino security instructor George L. Lewis Jr. runs his own consulting company and was once director of surveillance at the Aladdin Hotel.
In the first class of a new semester this winter, the longhaired teacher with the flat Boston accent quickly endeared himself to his students by promising to reveal closely held trade secrets. “I don’t hide nothin’ about casino surveillance,” Lewis promised his students, adding, “I hate tests and I hate reading, so I think we’ll get along real well.”
Senior Christopher Norton says he appreciates the chance to learn real-life skills while he works toward his bachelor’s degree in the William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration. “I think you just have a better chance of getting a good job that way,” says the 22-year-old, who tends slot machines at the Barbary Coast.
In his laboratory across campus, George Plopper ventures into a much more theoretical realm. “In the field of cell biology, this place is not even on the map,” says Plopper, a 35-year-old assistant biology professor. “But I hope to help put it there.”
Plopper says some of his students are “superb,” but added bluntly that others “shouldn’t be in college”--one of the challenges of being at a young university.
But while he still might be in the shadows of more senior faculty members elsewhere, at UNLV Plopper has won $450,000 in grants for cancer research, and directs three graduate students, a postdoctoral fellow and eight undergraduate researchers.
Junior business major Lesley Pena, who was the valedictorian of her Las Vegas high school, says she had to steel herself against friends’ barbs for attending UNLV. She says her Honors College courses are challenging and she has few regrets about not attending UC Berkeley, where she was also admitted.
“People need to work on their attitude,” Pena says, “and not submit to the idea this place is second rate.”
State leaders talk about commitment to the university, but they have yet to back up their words with much cash. The older Reno campus receives $3,024 more per student than UNLV; at least $400 of that gap is not justified by the older campus’ higher operating costs.
An elected board of regents hasn’t wholeheartedly committed to an academic focus, either. In the last major distribution of slot machine taxes, UNLV spent $27 million three years ago to refurbish the basketball arena and football stadium, rather than build laboratories or classrooms.
UNLV is just creating its first professional schools, which are often the hallmark of great universities. But funding shortages have the university resorting to unusual schemes to start up professional schools.
State Sen. Ray Rawson (R-Las Vegas), a dentist when he isn’t serving in the part-time Legislature, cooked up the idea for creating a dental school. He persuaded fellow lawmakers to let UNLV open several clinics around the city where dentists fix the teeth of the poor. Payments for the work go to the university, which will use the eventual income for construction of the new dental school--effectively financing the facility one cavity at a time.
A college administrator familiar with UNLV chuckled at the idea, suggesting, “It’s a little like saying I’m going to start a business school . . . so I’ll open a couple of 7-Elevens, just to get things going.”
Harter concedes that the plan is unorthodox, but she heralds her school, and her adopted state, for their can-do spirit. “This is a place where people don’t set up obstacles to doing creative things,” Harter says as she zips around campus in a golf cart. “Something is always percolating.”
The 335-acre campus of low buildings surrounded by palm and olive trees sounds, of late, a lot like the famed Strip, whose mammoth casinos block the horizon a couple miles to the north and west. Jackhammers chatter and pneumatic nail guns pop.
Besides the $53-million library, an International Gaming Institute is nearly complete. The foundation for a music center, complete with recording studios, is rising. The school of education is expanding with the help of the owner of the Sahara Hotel, and the law school, crammed into an elementary school in its first two years, will soon relocate into quarters on campus. In the last three years, 307 new faculty members have been hired.
Another Campus Is Planned
The student population has more than doubled in 15 years to 23,300, and is likely to jump again in the fall, when every high school graduate in Nevada with a B average or better will be eligible for a $2,500-a-year “Millennium” scholarship. Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn hopes the money will lift the state’s woeful share of high school seniors who go on to college. The national average is 58%.
Some relief for UNLV may be in sight, in the form of a state university campus that the Legislature tentatively has scheduled to open as early as next year. Similar to the Cal State system, the new college may assume some of the responsibility for training teachers and educating those below the top academic tier.
Many Nevadans still need to be persuaded that big investments in higher education pay off. Casino jobs have given many entree to the middle class without significant schooling.
“This city has been sort of a last Detroit, where working people have pulled themselves into the middle class” without college, says history professor Hal Rothman. “But many parents now are starting to tell their kids, ‘I worked all my life in the casinos and I don’t want you going back, unless it’s in the executive suite.’ ”
At least Harter has the mayor on board now. As a plain-spoken candidate last year, Goodman suggested that UNLV was such an academic weakling that it couldn’t help the town. Harter responded with a curt letter. When the two met, she handed Goodman a long list of recent hires, many of them with Ivy League resumes.
“She made me a believer that we were on the same page and that we could work together,” says Goodman, who is now helping the university find a satellite property north of town. “So maybe my big mouth did some good this time.”
Harter is not about to slacken her frantic pace, however. So many others are left to be converted.
“If there is anything else like this going on in the country, I have not seen it,” she says. “You can’t name a first-class city in America that doesn’t have a top university at its heart. And that is what we have to be.”
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UNLV vs. UCLA
University of Nevada, Las Vegas President Carol C. Harter says she would like her school to someday be recognized in many fields, like UCLA. How the upstart compares with the older institution:
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UNLV UCLA Founded 1957 1919 Enrollment 23,300 34,675 Annual in-state tuition $2,145 $3,683 Avg. freshman SAT score 1,015 1,275 Faculty Nobel prizes 0 5 Campus acreage 335 419 Federal research $18.9 million $314 million grants (fiscal 1998-99) Library volumes 1 million 7.2 million NCAA men’s basketball titles 1 11
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Sources: UNLV and UCLA
