Regents seek a plan of action

Friday, Aug. 4, 2006 | 7:22 a.m.

The troubles at UNLV's Institute for Security Studies won't be resolved at today's special regents meeting, but several board members and the university system's chancellor hope to set a course of action that will quickly result in a long-term solution.

"I don't want to keep this thing hanging out there," said Regent Steve Sisolak, who has been an outspoken critic of the counterterrorism institute. "We need to take swift, firm action once we get all the facts."

The regents know that they won't get all of the facts today.

Two separate financial audits, one by UNLV and the other by the regents, are still far from being completed, and the Energy Department is investigating why the institute failed to keep it abreast of the department's changing objectives even as it sought federal grants.

The three-year-old institute, which has received $8.9 million, mostly in federal grants, has been criticized for coming up short on several of its key promises, including its failure to establish a strong homeland security academic program.

Even a "performance assessment" commissioned by the UNLV Research Foundation to portray the institute in a favorable light conceded that the institute has failed to achieve its academic goals.

"This program is not what we originally envisioned or what was sold to us," Sisolak said. "I want to know why this happened and who's responsible."

Sisolak said he does not want to hear "feel-good assessments" from the institute today.

"We need to get this all on the table, admit where the mistakes are, fix them and move on," he said.

Those words were echoed by Chancellor Jim Rogers.

"I want to get this resolved as soon as we can," he said. "We've got to move on."

One of the bigger questions expected to surface today is the secretive nature of the institute, which last month cited proprietary reasons for heavily censoring a copy of a federal grant application requested by the Sun. It was impossible to tell from the 26-page document what the institute wanted to do with the $2.5 million Energy Department grant being sought.

Sisolak and several fellow regents - Mark Alden, James Dean Leavitt and Michael Wixom - all said they have serious concerns about the board's ability to keep the institute, as it is currently set up, in check. "They're operating under cloak-and-dagger methods," Alden said. "They don't want to be held accountable to the public."

Leavitt shared a view expressed earlier by Sisolak, saying that the regents need to discuss whether the university system should be associated with an institute that asserts proprietary or national security reasons for withholding information from the public.

"I hope we raise the larger policy question of do we want to be in that business, recognizing that we can't have a foolproof checks-and-balances system," he said.

Wixom said one of his goals for today's meeting is "making sure that we, as the Nevada System of Higher Education, can properly and adequately control what's going on at the institute." Rogers said he is troubled that UNLV lost control of the institute.

"What happened here is that the university really abandoned its oversight role," he said. "They turned it over too much to people who aren't experts in this.

"If you get into this business, you cannot delegate the responsibility to anybody who's outside the top administrative people of the university."

The regents approved the institute three years ago after being told that it would answer directly to UNLV. Instead, the institute was placed under the control of the UNLV Research Foundation, a private nonprofit fundraising arm of the university.