Panel trimming list of CCSN president hopefuls

Jeffrey Libby

Thursday, July 13, 2000 | 10:57 a.m.

The list of candidates to run the Community College of Southern Nevada is narrowing.

The CCSN presidential search committee expects to trim a field of 61 hopefuls to at least 10 by Friday morning.

"We all picked our top 10 candidates," said Regent Douglas Seastrand, chairman of the ad-hoc committee. "We'll see the report ... of votes and find a natural breaking point."

The search committee, composed of five members of the Board of Regents and an advisory board of 13 CCSN students, employees and faculty representatives, took a little more than a month to review the applications.

The regents first advertised the position, which has a salary of between $117,000 and $200,000 a year, in mid-April in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

From the 10 semifinalists, Seastrand said the search committee plans to designate four to six finalists "for a very rigorous interview process."

The committee hopes to present the full Board of Regents with a nominee at the regular October meeting.

Regent Steve Sisolak, also a search committee member, attributed the relatively low applicant pool to the challenge as president of balancing three campuses of a rapidly growing school. A spring 1999 presidential search at Western Nevada Community College in Carson City netted approximately 140 applications, Sisolak said.

"The presidency of CCSN will be a highly sought after position," Sisolak said. "But the sheer magnitude of the job limits the number of qualified people."

CCSN has gone through a period of tremendous growth, Regent Jill Derby said.

"People who've been in Las Vegas for the last five years have seen CCSN go from a moderate-sized community college to one that has grabbed the imagination of the community," Derby said.

During the presidency of Richard Moore, from October 1995 to January 2000, CCSN more than doubled its student population, growing from 16,700 students to 35,400 students. That trend is expected to continue.

Moore, who had a base salary of $145,000 when he left, received glowing reports from both Seastrand and Derby despite a recent audit detailing spendings over budget, shoddy record-keeping and evasions of state protocol. Moore was named in January as president of the proposed state college at Henderson.

That same month regents boosted Moore's righthand man, Robert Silverman, former vice president of academic affairs, to the position of interim president at CCSN.

Silverman is one of two internal candidates vying for the appointment for the CCSN presidency.

Faculty member Betty Scott also has applied.

Derby said Jane Nichols, interim chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada, "has taken the responsibility" of reviewing records from the Moore administration and "may recommend changes, as the audit already has."

The audit, released in June, found that a program providing students with free classes was overspent by $600,000; that CCSN failed to notify or receive regents' approval for seven projects totaling more than $75,000; and that the college paid $239,000 in salaries out of capital improvements funds.

The annual operating budget of CCSN is $62 million, according to the college website.