Board approves blanket apology

Jennifer Knight

Friday, Dec. 13, 2002 | 11:08 a.m.

In an effort to put the issue to rest, the Board of Regents agreed Thursday to issue a sweeping apology regarding the conduct of three of its members.

Meeting at UNLV, the board had planned to address the actions of Linda Howard, Mark Alden and Howard Rosenberg.

But before discussion among the board began Thursday, Regent Steve Sisolak made a motion to have the board simply issue a statement that "student and/or employee files might have been inappropriately accessed, that inappropriate or overzealous behavior might have occurred and that offensive name-calling might have occurred."

The board voted unanimously to approve the motion and be done with the issue.

Howard was under fire for viewing personnel files and private student records; Alden for calling Howard an orangutan on a radio show; and Rosenberg for intervening in an employee matter.

Howard, who had been at odds with Sisolak throughout the controversy, ended up hugging him after the vote.

Howard said she believed the sweeping statement was not an admission of guilt, but rather a way for the board -- which oversees higher education in the state -- to move on.

"Well, since they lumped everything together, I went along with it," Howard said. "I prepared a five-page statement to answer the questions that had been raised and I spent about four days preparing my statement. But, after this vote, it made my statement moot."

Howard, the board's only black member, previously accused her colleagues of racism after one of her proposed projects was not approved.

And Alden's orangutan comment was seen as racist by Howard and her supporters.

In fact, some black community leaders were on hand Thursday to show support for Howard. They were critical of the state's university system, calling it unfair to blacks.

"For you to think that there is not institutional racism right here in our system, then you're either dead or you're in denial," said Lonnie Wright, an associate vice president at the Community College of Southern Nevada's hospitality institute. "All you have are condescending attitudes. All you have are elitist attitudes. It shows you, that they had a design to trash (Howard) with issues that are not even real."

But Hubert Hensen, a UNLV student whose personal information was viewed by Howard, urged the board to stick to the issue of student privacy.

"I'm disappointed that this has all been blown out of proportion into a race issue to distract from the original wrong of accessing student records," Hensen said. "It has never been about race. In fact, I'm half-Arab and a minority student at UNLV."

An American Civil Liberties Union official reminded the board of its earlier problem with university institutions giving the private information of students to credit card companies, and urged regents to take further action.

"There needs to be a set of rules that shows the proper respect for those privacy interests," said Gary Peck, executive director of the Nevada ACLU. "The problem is these issues are much broader and deeper and don't just have to do with regent access of information, but with access by faculty staff and student groups to the very same private protected information."

Before the vote on the sweeping apology, the 11-member board unanimously agreed to adopt a policy that would spell how out how much power regents have in gathering information on students and school personnel.

Under the new policy, any board member wanting information on a student must make a written request to the president of the college or university involved. Any viewing of information would be supervised, and any student or employee whose file is accessed would be notified first.

Assemblyman Wendell Williams, D-Las Vegas, who had expressed doubt earlier this week about the board's ability to move beyond its problems, said he was satisfied with Thursday's outcome.

"This vote gives them a clean slate," Williams said. "I think it shows that they are willing to acknowledge that they can't take punitive action against Howard for something that they really didn't even have a policy on in the first place."

The regents were scheduled to conclude their two-day meeting today.