Two regents may face censure by board

Jennifer Knight

Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2002 | 11:08 a.m.

Two members of the Board of Regents will go before their colleagues in December to find out if they will be publicly censured for abuse of power, officials said.

In a memo written Tuesday, Regent Doug Hill asked that fellow board members Linda Howard and Howard Rosenberg be considered for censure, a public reprimand.

Hill cited Howard's accessing of students' records, in particular those of two UNLV students -- an action Hill said likely violated federal law. Rosenberg was named because he "tried to affect a settlement and influence negotiations" on an employee who was terminated, Hill wrote.

"If Regents Howard and Rosenberg do not justify or explain their conduct we can at least send a message that nine of 11 regents do not find this conduct acceptable," Hill wrote.

Rosenberg called Hill's request "sanctimonious and self-righteous."

"At no time did I ever interfere with any type of settlement or anything like that," Rosenberg said. "This is crazy. I was asked by somebody to help them. I brought someone a memo. It was sealed in an envelope. That's all."

Howard could not be reached for comment.

Hill's memo is one in a succession of many written recently by regents to address the accessing of personnel and student records -- and to trade barbs in the process.

The memos have been called "nasty-grams" by one political observer.

The memos stem from a chancellor's report made public by the Sun on Nov. 13. The report named Howard and Rosenberg as regents who had accessed records, and also mentioned Regent Tom Kirkpatrick as another who had overstepped his bounds as regent.

Kirkpatrick answered those claims in yet another memo written Tuesday. In it, Kirkpatrick called for the resignation of the Community College of Southern Nevada president, Ron Remington. Remington had included Kirkpatrick in his report to the chancellor.

Remington's report noted that Kirkpatrick had intervened during a CCSN job search by trying to "discredit" and "cast aspersions" on the character of Patricia Charlton, who was a candidate for vice president of finance and administration after serving as interim for more than a year.

One faculty member who sat on Charlton's search committee said she had never seen a regent get this involved in a search.

"(Kirkpatrick) was bullying me on the phone," said Mitzi Ware, CCSN's faculty senate chair-elect. "He intervened in a process that we felt very strongly about and we felt he undermined the search process. It was the first time I had ever had any interaction with a regent."

When contacted by the Sun Tuesday, Kirkpatrick would not comment.

Kirkpatrick defended his participation in that search in his memo by saying, "My only comments to the committee members were response to a question or casual greetings/niceties."

He said he Charlton lacked the "credentials that most comparable institutions would deem necessary." Others disagreed and the board approved Charlton for the permanent job.

Kirkpatrick said that Remington's comments had no place in the report.

"It would appear that Dr. Remington is unhappy with me and apparently thought this would be a good opportunity to take a jab at me and/or sully my character and record," Kirkpatrick wrote.

Kirkpatrick ended by saying that if Remington were unhappy with him, "it may serve him best if he were to seek employment in an environment that is more in tune with his objectives/desires."

Hill did not place Kirkpatrick on his list of those to be censured.

Regent Chairman Doug Seastrand said there was strong support by board members to put Hill's request on the agenda for the Dec. 12 and 13 meeting in Las Vegas.

The 11-member board has not tried to censure one of its members since 1995, when Nancy Price was a regent.

Price had spoken out against her colleagues on an issue and then-Board Chairman James Eardley attempted to poll regents by fax or telephone to gain support for censuring Price. The poll caused more controversy than the attempted censure. The attorney general's office charged the board with violation of the open-meeting law.