Columnist Jeff German: Regents get it wrong, as usual

Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005 | 10:07 a.m.

Jeff German's column appears Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays in the Sun. Reach him at german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067.

There's a reason why the Legislature approved a 2006 ballot initiative to pare down the Board of Regents from 13 to nine members.

You put these 13 overseers of higher education in the same room, and more often than not they're going to make the wrong decision.

That's what they did last Friday when they voted 9-4 to delay action on a proposal to create a one-year cooling-off period banning themselves from applying for jobs within the university system.

What was there really to debate here?

"This would have been the first step," says Regent Steve Sisolak, who voted in the minority Friday. "It would have showed the public that we're not really ethically challenged."

Sisolak first proposed the cooling-off period in May after fellow Regent Doug Seastrand resigned and accepted a research job at UNLV.

Craig Walton, president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics, says he's surprised that the board failed to act in a timely manner to put a rule in place to prevent a repeat of Seastrand's stunning departure.

Cooling-off periods, Walton says, are standard procedure for public bodies across the country. Nevada's Gaming Control Board has one, and so does the County Commission.

But Walton is even more astounded that two regents who voted to table the matter on Friday brazenly told their colleagues that they were interested in jobs within the university after their terms ended.

Those regents might as well have passed out their resumes to the university presidents sitting in the audience.

"It's strange to think that one of the perks of serving on the Board of Regents is that later you can get a job," Walton says. "That's a corruption of the whole system."

And yet the majority of regents don't seem to grasp that fundamental issue.

Having a chance to change the sorry image of the board -- known more in recent years for conducting business behind closed doors than for improving higher education -- is why Regent James Dean Leavitt ran for the job last year.

But like the others in the minority Friday, the Las Vegas criminal defense attorney says he finds the vote disconcerting.

"I don't think some regents fully appreciate the perception of the board that's out there," Leavitt says. "We've got to recognize that we have certain powers and we need to be careful about how they're used."

Leavitt chairs the development committee, which was given the task of bringing the measure back to the board in December.

But he says he was so disheartened by the lack of support for the policy change that he's now considering a recommendation that would simply prohibit regents from applying for a job within the university system while they're on the board.

Leavitt believes there would be support for such a watered-down rule.

This is not what Leavitt wants, because he knows that without a cooling-off period, the rule would be too easy to circumvent.

But this is the political reality of sitting on a board that doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong.