Life of learning: Regent Howard earns degree at UNLV

Jennifer Knight

Friday, May 17, 2002 | 10:53 a.m.

Education will put distance between you and a life of picking cotton or cleaning houses, her mother taught her.

She just wished she had listened sooner.

Saturday, 46-year-old Linda Howard, a university regent, will walk across UNLV's commencement stage and continue a new legacy by becoming the second person in her family -- after her daughter -- to get a college degree.

"My mother always stressed education," Howard said. "I guess she didn't want us to work as hard as she did."

It took Howard some time, though, to fulfill her mother's wishes.

At first, marriage, work and three kids kept Howard busy. After her children went on to college, Howard was left to pursue the dream that was planted like a cotton seed in the rich Arkansas soil her mother used to work as the daughter of a sharecropper.

"I made sure my kids matriculated (in college) first," Howard said. "Now, I'm picking up my dream. It is my time now."

Having attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas since 1993, Howard will receive her bachelor's degree in workforce education, which will allow her to teach.

The lessons of diversity she learned growing up in Arizona are just as relevant today for Howard.

"The regents on the board have no idea what's going on on campus," she said. "A lot of students don't feel like they are a part of the university they attend."

Howard is unapologetically forthright about what she sees as the failings of the 11-member board she sits on. As the only black regent, Howard is known as the plucky and often stubborn board member who hammers the diversity issue at each meeting.

She has asked each institutional president for diversity reports -- and if she doesn't get them, she demands to know why.

When university system officials proposed to raise college admissions standards, Howard held her own town hall meeting in a black community to the chagrin of some officials in the university system.

After gathering community input, Howard met with minority leaders to sculpt a list of things the system could do to mitigate negative effects the new standards could have on disadvantaged students. Regents signed off on the list last month, which included stepping up aid to disadvantaged students and establishing outreach programs.

And in her freshman year as regent -- a time when most officials are seen and not heard -- Howard flew to Carson City to lobby legislators to keep her largely black district intact after redistricting.

"My whole reason for being up there was so they wouldn't water down my district and lessen the chance of a minority being elected," Howard said.

Some say Howard has a way of bringing things up that make people uncomfortable.

"What she's saying are things that people don't want to hear," State Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas, said. "She can be very intense at times on things she believes in. I kind of like that about her. You always know where she's coming from."

Neal first met Howard in the 1980s while they were both working on Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign. Neal said Howard was just cutting her teeth in the political arena but impressed everyone with her commitment.

"She made T-shirts and other things and went out on the street corners and sold them," Neal said. "She actually made a lot of money for us."

Since then, Howard has worked for former Nevada Gov. Bob Miller and helped with former President Clinton's Nevada campaign in 1992. She has served on numerous boards and is former vice president of the local NAACP chapter. In short, she has made a name for herself in the black community and continues to do so in the state, said friend and mentor Florozeen Gray.

"This is a young lady to watch," Gray said. "She has the tenacity to do anything she wants to do. She's going to be a senator or the next congresswoman."

Howard attributes her resolve and drive to her mother, a woman who grew up picking cotton in the South.

Howard watched her mother, who was divorced, raise six kids alone while making a living cleaning houses. Howard believes the back-breaking work led to her mother's death in 1987.

But her family helped her develop a penchant for politics, Howard said, as the topic was often discussed at the dinner table.

Howard also became aware of diversity at an early age, growing up near an Apache reservation in Arizona.

And the importance of education seemed to underscore everything else.

All of those lessons have been incorporated into her life, Howard said.

"I don't intend to stop going to college," Howard said, adding that she intends to pursue a master's degree. "I will probably be a customer of higher education from now on. I'll never stop improving myself and that's the best example I think I can set for young people."