Columnist Dean Juipe: Harter insists next AD be an outsider

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, June 10, 2003 | 9:11 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

School presidents are no different than any other executive or person in a position of authority: They have their detractors.

As they say, it comes with the territory.

Carol Harter at UNLV is no exception. In her almost eight full years at the university she has made a number of friends and alienated more than a few constituents as well.

Some see her as competent, others as pompous. Some appreciate her decisions, others habitually deride them.

But Harter plugs on as one in absolute control is able to do. She sets the criteria for any number of decisions made at the school, and she has to live with the real or perceived results of that decision-making process.

No one can be sure how it will play out, but Harter has already made a decision concerning the school's next athletic director. As it stands today, the man or woman who replaces John Robinson and is apt to be hired by the end of the summer will not be a Las Vegas resident.

Harter has insisted that Robinson's successor be an outsider.

I have written that I think Harter's best course of action would be to hire one of the qualified candidates who are already here among us, and I'm sure others have told Harter the same thing. Yet those are but voices in the wilderness as far as she is concerned.

When the next AD is introduced, he will be as unfamiliar to us as we are to him.

He will run the risk of being a Charlie Cavagnaro or a Jim Weaver ... men who came here on a lark and never were able to ingratiate themselves with the local community. He will face difficulties that an AD with local ties would not have had to face.

Harter's stubbornness on this issue is believed to be ironclad. Her determination to bring in someone from beyond the state lines is said to be so well known that the potentially strong local candidates who were ready to apply have, instead, receded into the background.

Jerry Koloskie, for instance, is currently a senior associate AD at UNLV and when Robinson stepped down he immediately expressed an interest in becoming AD. But when word reached him that Harter would summarily reject any and all local applicants, Koloskie withdrew his name from consideration.

Likewise, it's said that Las Vegas 51s president Don Logan might have thrown his hat in the ring had anyone but Harter been the UNLV president.

And a third potential AD with local ties and credibility, Doug Sanderson, was inching toward applying for the job until he was informed that Harter was obstinately opposed to anyone with a Nevada driver's license. Once the director of athletic development under AD Brad Rothermel, Sanderson might very well have been an excellent choice to replace Robinson.

Harter has put herself in an odd position. Without publicly saying so, her actions imply not only a lack of confidence in the local candidates but a belief that the city is unable to produce a worthy athletic director.

She's not the first administrator to insist on new blood. But to do so in the face of logic, reason and at the risk of ill will is a curious road to choose.

It might even be foolish.