Passing the test

Friday, June 24, 2005 | 5:36 a.m.

Title: President of UNLV

Salary: $280,000, including $50,000 in supplemental pay from the UNLV Foundation

Age: 64

Native of: New York City

Education: Bachelor's, master's and doctorate in English from State University of New York-Binghamton, with a focus on William Faulkner.

Experience: Nearly 19 years at Ohio University as an English professor, ombudsman, dean and vice president; president of State University of New York-Geneseo, 1989-1995; president of UNLV, 1995-current.

Family: Married 44 years to Michael Harter, vice president for administration at Touro University in Henderson. The couple have two sons, Michael, a social studies teacher at Sierra Vista High School in Las Vegas, and Sean, a lawyer in Charleston, W.Va.

There's no doubt UNLV President Carol Harter dreams big.

Three years from now, she says she sees herself sitting outside a cafe at what then should be the newly constructed Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, sipping a decaf cappucino and watching the hustle and bustle of her university and the changing face of UNLV along Maryland Parkway.

What's not bustling anymore in Harter's dream is Maryland Parkway -- at least not with cars that give little heed to the 30 mph limit. The roadway has been reduced and the sidewalks expanded, making it easier for students to dash across to other cafes and shops.

Matching landscaping lines either side of the street, and the entrance to the university at Harmon Avenue has been revitalized to give the institution more "curb appeal," Harter said.

It's what's been dubbed Midtown UNLV, a university district and new face of the campus. Along with the Greenspun building, by 2008 several other new structures will be built at the front of campus, including a new Moyer Student Union, a new recreation center and a new student services building.

Carol Harter dreams big. But as she celebrates her 10-year anniversary as the university's president July 1, she isn't just daydreaming.

Her latest dream, which she hopes will take shape before the end of her current contract in 2008, is just the most recent part of the transformation that has happened at UNLV during her decade there.

She has pushed the idea of making UNLV a research institution as well as a top-notch teaching university. She has overseen the expansion of not only the campus' skyline but also of the school's academic offerings with more than 100 new programs created in her tenure.

Having survived a rocky introduction to Nevada politics and higher education in the state, Harter has left her mark on the campus. Both critics and supporters agree on this: Like her or not, she is a person who gets results and who fights for what she believes in.

And what she believes in is the future of UNLV.

"If you go, say, 10 rounds in a boxing match (for UNLV), she'd get in the ring," Jim Rogers, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, said.

Since Harter took the helm of the university in July 1995, Rogers and other education officials say UNLV has transformed from a basketball school that dabbled in academics to a major university earning increasing national recognition for several of its academic programs. UNLV is not yet the major metropolitan research university Harter wants it to be, fans and critics say, but she has put it on the cusp.

"I've been one of her toughest critics but she's taken us a long way," Regent Mark Alden said. "And I don't think anybody could have done anything better."

In her tenure, Harter has overseen the development of 103 new academic programs, half of those at the graduate level. Higher education officials credit her most with the development of several professional schools, including the now nationally ranked Boyd School of Law, the School of Architecture, the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, and, most recently, the School of Public Health.

The number of UNLV doctoral students has grown by 200 percent in the last decade.

In 2004, UNLV brought in $46.7 million in research grants, compared with $9.8 million in 1994. Graduation rates are also up. Only 33 percent of UNLV's students were graduating within six years in 1995. Today the rate is 42 percent.

In just the past few years, the university has launched several new programs for advanced study, including the Institute for Security Studies, the UNLV Public Lands Initiative, and the Institute of Modern Letters. The latter helped make Las Vegas a City of Asylum for persecuted foreign writers and brought Nobel Laureate and Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka to campus.

Over the last decade, the university has grown from 20,000 students to 27,000 students, and Harter has overseen the construction of 17 new buildings to accommodate that growth, including the Lied Library. With new funding from the 2005 Legislature, at least five more buildings will be built in the next several years.

UNLV has also added three new campuses during Harter's tenure: the Shadow Lane campus with the dental school and biotechnology center; 640 acres in North Las Vegas that is slated for a regional campus to be shared by UNLV, the Community College of Southern Nevada, Nevada State College and Desert Research Institute, and the still-to-be-developed Harry Reid Research and Technology Park in the southwest.

Harter's success has been in her ability to push and plan for the future, said Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn, who served as interim president of UNLV in the 1994-1995 school year.

"Visions don't come about from one day of thinking to the next. It's a long protracted planning process," Guinn said.

"There's a lot of work in between dreaming of a vision and bringing it to fruition."

Planning for the future

One of Harter's first acts as university president was to commission a year-long, campus-wide process to develop a new strategic plan for the university. The university had been growing wherever growth allowed without any clear direction, Harter and others said.

The big vision, both then and now, is to be a premier, metropolitan research university, the Nevada version of UCLA, Harter said. It's an idea that energizes her.

In pursuit of the UCLA model, the top three goals from the original strategic plan have remained the same: become more student-focused; hire, motivate and reward superior faculty and staff; and establish the infrastructure needed to pursue research avenues, Harter said.

"There is no reason we can't be right up there with them," Harter said. "And so if you start with that kind of dream and say that every decision we are going to make will reinforce that dream, advance that dream, you are really on your way."

The strategic plan, updated in 2002, has been the deciding factor in all administrative decisions down to departmental budgets, campus officials said.

Don Snyder, former Boyd Gaming executive and co-chairman of UNLV's soon-to-be-announced capital campaign, said that plan was a key.

"You can track most of what has been accomplished back to that first strategic plan," Synder said. "The direction was very much laid in those early efforts."

Not everyone at the university, however, buys into Harter's vision. A common grumble among professors is that in trying to be both a teaching institution and a research institution the university is losing sight of both goals.

"UNLV needs to decide what its mission is going to be," Bill Robinson, an economics professor at the university for 25 years, said. "It doesn't have the budget to be both a top-level, research-focused institution and a top-level student-focused institution."

Harter agrees with Robinson that doing both good teaching and good research simultaneously is a tough task few universities have accomplished. But she still thinks its the right model for the university to strive for.

"A great researcher who is a good teacher brings to the classroom the fruits of that research," Harter said. "They are on top of their discipline, they are at the cutting edge of their discipline, in a way that informs and enlivens the teaching."

With the professional schools in place and the new buildings to come, such as the science, engineering and technology building, Harter said she believes the "framework for making a great university is now in place." Now the university just needs to make everything "really, really good."

One key to that will be making UNLV more selective as Nevada State College in Henderson continues to become a viable option for bachelor's degrees, Harter said. The Board of Regents has already approved a jump in the minimum GPA required for admission to UNLV. It is currently 2.5 but is set to bump up to 2.75 in 2006 and rise to 3.0 in 2010. Harter said, however, that the university may need to go to a 3.0 requirement sooner or find another way to limit enrollment.

"What makes great universities is partly selectivity of their entering class and that is probably the one area where we lag behind the most," Harter said.

Bumps in the road

All of that planning has taken UNLV a long way, but there have still been a lot of "bumps in the road," which have been noted by regents and officials in higher education. Many of the bumps were likely caused by the same assertive personality, intensity and drive that have made Harter a success.

"Carol is a very polarizing kind of person," Rogers said. "You either like her or you don't like her. And the people who don't like her really don't like her."

Harter has "ticked off" her share of donors, both Rogers and Snyder said. But she's also raised more money than any other president before her, $233 million in actual gifts and another $213 million in pledges, according to foundation reports. Annual giving will likely surpass $50 million in fiscal year 2005, compared with about $10 million a year 10 years ago.

The early perception of Harter was that she was standoffish, not visible enough on campus or in the community, and not politically savvy enough to handle Nevada politics, several regents and community members said. Some of those criticisms still remain. The UNLV student paper, the Rebel Yell, said in May that most students didn't have a clue who Carol Harter was.

Part of the problem, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., a former university regent, said, was that Harter was being compared too much to her predecessor, Bob Maxson. The "ultimate schmoozer," Maxson charmed his way through the job, Berkley said.

But more than that, Harter took over a university in turmoil. UNLV was still dealing with the fallout of the battle between Maxson and Jerry Tarkanian, which split the regents and the community.

Harter said she was so embroiled in "the bowels of the operation" trying to fix some of the management issues that she didn't have time to be more present externally. She also admitted that she was slow to learn Nevada politics, which she found intensely local and personal compared with what she had known on the East Coast.

It was tough for Harter to adjust to the "fish bowl" of the highly public UNLV presidency, where everything she did or said was judged in the media, Juanita Fain, vice president for planning, said,

"If she sneezes somebody will say she didn't sneeze the right way," said Fain, who first worked under Harter as director of financial aid when Harter was a vice president at Ohio University in the 1980s.

Harter said she learned to survive the media storms by reinforcing her own personal sense of integrity.

"That sometimes means being in a controversial situation where you don't simply go for the easy solution, where you don't simply compromise because that is the politically correct thing to do," Harter said. "My belief is that I need to do the right thing, not just do things right."

The "most visible and painful" example of that was her defense of former athletic director Charlie Cavagnaro when he was anonymously accused of using racial epithets, Harter said.

The athletic department was embroiled in the controversy, but Harter said she believed him when he told her he didn't say anything.

"For right or wrong, I may be wrong, but for good or ill, I believed in this person that he was telling me the truth," Harter said. "And if a person works for me, who has told me the truth, I will go to the wall for that person. I will not sacrifice them. Now that can sometimes cost one a good deal, but it will never cost me a night's sleep."

Harter's stance on athletics was another major issue, several regents said, as her focus on academics was often at odds early on with a community that wanted to see the men's basketball team win another NCAA championship. Despite her own experience on the NCAA board, she was often accused of micromanaging the athletic department and interfering where she didn't belong, Rogers said, criticisms that have subsided in the last two years with the hiring of athletic director Mike Hamrick.

Harter was tarred as being anti-athletic.

She said her goal upon arriving at UNLV was just to bring balance to the university between academics and athletics. She said she wanted to "build a university the basketball team could be proud of."

"I think that (athletics) is a very powerful part of higher education but it just needs to be in proportion to the other things that count, like the academics, the fine arts," said Harter, a self-described fan from years of watching her athletic sons participate in sports.

The belief that Harter was anti-athletics, especially coming on the heels of the Tarkanian era and the Rebels' nationally ranked basketball program, took on a life of its own.

There's a story, often told during campus tours, that she made sure the Lied Library was bigger than where the basketball team plays, the Thomas & Mack Center, by exactly one square foot.

In reality, the library is bigger by 34,150 square feet. And Harter says it is bigger on purpose.

"To shift the focus of what kind of school UNLV was, we knew it was important for the symbol of learning and intellectual life to at least be the same size as the basketball arena," Harter said.

The view that Harter was anti-athletic also stemmed from the view that Nevada was not ready for a woman president, said Berkley, who helped convince her fellow regents to hire Harter after the board initially split.

"There were people who were convinced that Dr. Harter would not survive the year," Berkley said. "I suspect by the time she retires from her position that she will be the longest serving president UNLV has ever had."

Regent Howard Rosenberg said Harter's status as a woman is probably what continues to cause any problems that arise.

"She's very demanding and she knows what the wants," Rosenberg said.

"... For a lot of people, Dr. Harter being a man would be an aggressive and strong leader, but as a woman, I don't know how to say it any other way, but to too many people she's a bitch. And in this day of gender equity what is that?"

Harter said the frontier "cowboy country" culture of Nevada made being a woman especially hard, but she learned to use that pioneering spirit to her advantage.

"The most rewarding thing about my presidency has been being able to capitalize on that creative and entrepreneurial spirit in this community," Harter said.

Lack of her own plan

For someone so keen on planning for the university, Harter is considerably more laid back in her personal life. She and her husband, Mike, dropped out of State University of New York-Binghamton to get married at 19, and Harter soon found herself pregnant with their first son, Michael.

She went back to college with the goal of becoming a teacher, but she ended up pursuing a master's degree and then a doctorate in English at the urging of a faculty adviser who called her a "smart housewife," Harter said. The degrees were something to do when her children were small, and she never saw herself becoming a professor until right before she sent out applications.

Her entrance into administration at Ohio University was also a lark, Harter said. She and dozens of other professors had been laid off due to low enrollments and she took a position as ombudsman as a way to stay in Athens while her husband finished his doctorate.

The ombudsman job, however, led to a job as dean of student services, then vice president of administration at Ohio, and finally to the presidency at State University of New York, Geneseo, where she served for six years before coming to UNLV.

Harter showed early on that she had a "real flair for managing in difficult situations," said Charles Ping, the former president of Ohio University who hired her as dean of students.

"I think she showed over the years exceptional skill in getting people to work together to achieve goals and objectives," said Ping, now president emeritus at Ohio.

Harter brought the same consensus-building skills to Geneseo, Art Hatton, the school's vice president for advancement, said.

"She brought a great deal of energy and a great deal of vision to the college and put Geneseo on the path for greater recognition of its academic achievements," said Hatton, who worked for Harter.

Harter has similarly put UNLV on the map, several community leaders said. Don Moyer, UNLV's first president and a Henderson resident, said she embodies the same Rebel spirit the first generation of students did in fighting for UNLV's place in the state system.

"I think she's been able to stand up to them (the dominant Northern Nevada officials) and scrap," Moyer said. "Because you have to scrap to get what you want."

Retirement unlikely

As to her own future, Harter said she's still playing it loose. She sees herself finishing her career at UNLV, but she has no idea how many more years she'll stay at the helm. If and when she ever retires, she sees herself traveling with her husband and possibly writing a novel or two.

The first, Harter says, would be a satire on her experience at UNLV. In the meantime, she has too much work to get done as president.

Rogers is sure she'll continue to help UNLV succeed, bumps and all.

"There are days when she is the hero of my life and there are days when I'd like to strangle her, and she knows that," Rogers said, noting that Harter could also say the same about him.

"But she's the most driven president I've ever known."

archive