Regent will face tough opposition in election

Tuesday, April 25, 2006 | 7:05 a.m.

University system Regent Mark Alden apparently will have tough competition for re-election this fall.

Troy Wade, former manager of the Nevada Test Site, has announced that he is running for Alden's seat.

Wade retired in 1989 as the assistant secretary of energy for defense programs in Washington and currently is the chairman of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a technology trade group.

Wade also helped found the Atomic Test Site Museum, to which Nevada System of Higher Education Chancellor Jim Rogers donated $3 million. Rogers' father also worked at the Test Site, and he and Wade have known each other for more than 30 years.

Rogers said he knew others had been encouraging Wade to run for the position and he encouraged him to go for it at a lunch meeting last week. Wade would make a "damn good regent," Rogers said.

Rogers said he did not encourage Cedric Crear, a longtime friend of his and of his son Perry, to run for Regent Linda Howard's district. But Crear would make a good regent too, Rogers said.

Howard has not decided whether she will seek another term. Also challenging her is Nathanial Waugh, a student at Community College of Southern Nevada.

Rogers said he saw no conflict in encouraging others to run for regent seats, even though he reports to the board. He said he is not selecting the regents, just encouraging people who he thinks would do a good job.

After regents insisted on being involved in the searches for the next UNR and UNLV presidents, the board could not muster a quorum (seven of the 13 members) on time to meet the first of three finalists in the UNR search.

Just five regents were on hand at 8:30 a.m. Monday to meet with candidate Marlene Strathe, provost and senior vice president of Oklahoma State University. The two regents who pushed hardest for involvement in the search, Steve Sisolak and James Dean Leavitt, both showed up late.

Sisolak and Leavitt have argued that they wanted to do more than rubber-stamp the candidate selected by the regents on the UNR search committee. They pressed to expand the search committee and for a meeting in which all regents could meet the candidates.

Nevada State College at Henderson officials are on pins and needles this week as they await input from an accreditation team on campus.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities arrived Monday to evaluate whether Nevada State is ready to pursue accreditation, President Fred Maryanski said. Right now, the state college is accredited through UNR, which means its financial aid also must go through UNR.

The accreditation team will give feedback to the campus Wednesday morning, but will not officially vote on the college's candidacy until July. If the team decides the college is a candidate for accreditation, officials will have two to five years to apply.

Speaking of the state college, officials there are also squeezing $220,000 out of the college's operations budget to be able to hire more full-time faculty, Maryanski said.

Right now, the college has 33 full-time professors and close to 120 part timers teaching one to two courses a semester.

More full-time professors are needed to develop the college's programs and to advise students, Maryanski said.