Nevada State College chief faces tough sales job

Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005 | 9:07 a.m.

Newly appointed Nevada State College President Fred Maryanski will have a lot of selling to do when he officially takes charge of the Henderson school Feb. 1, Interim Chancellor Jim Rogers says.

Maryanski has to sell the need for the college's first liberal arts building to Nevada lawmakers, some of whom still aren't sure the college should exist at all. He has to sell the college to private businesses who have been hesitant to give financially despite giving initial support for the college. And he has to sell the school to prospective students unsure if they should take a chance on a start-up college still in its infancy.

"He's got to sell the concept, and he's got to sell the concept of the private businesses putting money into it," said Rogers, who lobbied for regent approval on Maryanski's $225,000-a-year contract.

Selling a school is a full-time job for any president, Rogers said, but it is "especially a full-time job with the Nevada State College because people have taken shots at it for so long."

For his part, Maryanski is already working on selling the college and articulating his vision for its future. He's new to the position of president, but as interim provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of Connecticut, he has experience both in running the academic side of the house and dealing with budgets, capital construction and fundraising needs.

Over the course of a few years, Maryanski helped educators in the university's College of Business develop a partnership with General Electric that eventually led GE to donate $11 million and helped the College of Engineering partner with United Technologies to raise $4 million.

On the Legislative side, Maryanski was heavily involved in working with the Connecticut Legislature to secure and implement $2.3 billion in state capital construction money for the University of Connecticut.

Still house shopping and wrapping up his duties in Connecticut, Maryanski said one of the long-term issues he's already grappling with is how to maintain the quality of education at the college while enrollment numbers are surging beyond the college's resources.

Such quality control is the biggest challenge Maryanski said he will face, now and in the future, as he develops his vision for the start-up college and as its 1,000-plus students turn into several thousand.

The college, in its third year, has already made a name for itself for the exeptional quality of its teachers, its personalized student advising and its emphasis on student assessment and civic responsibility, Maryanski said. The challenge will be maintaining and building that reputation as the college grows.

"We need to proceed in a measured way," Maryanski said. "We can't get out ahead where we are overenrolled and underfunded."

Controlling growth, Maryanski acknowledged, will be easier said than done at the Henderson college, which Nevada higher education officials and state lawmakers developed to help ease the enrollment growth at the state's universities and to produce teachers and nurses for the burgeoning population.

The challenge will be making sure student services grow with the population, that the focus on teaching is maintained, and that the college remains dedicated to its mission of providing those professional degrees, Maryanski said.

Maryanski said the college's focus on professional education -- providing bachelor's degrees that give its graduates an immediate job opportunity in the community -- was one of the main things that attracted him to the college. He said he also couldn't pass up the opportunity to develop an institution from scratch that would serve as the model for future state colleges.

"This is a fantastic opportunity and the best job in higher education, building the right institution at the right time," Maryanski told regents after they appointed him to the position.

Maryanski is currently searching for a home in Henderson with his wife, Karen, but he said housing here is more expensive than in Storrs, Conn. The couple have a beagle named Reginald and three grown children: 31-year-old Kristi Maryanski of Los Angeles; 28-year-old David Maryanski of Charlotte, N.C.; and 25-year-old Peter Maryanski of Storrs.