LOOKING IN ON: HIGHER EDUCATION

Christina Littlefield

Sunday, Aug. 6, 2006 | 8:41 a.m.

University officials fish for plan

Nevada's two new university presidents locked themselves in a conference room last Friday while their boss and a bunch of others went fishing off Sonora Island in British Columbia.

UNLV President David Ashley and UNR President Milton Glick spent seven hours pounding out guiding principles for a new academic health science center that their universities will jointly operate. With them at the resort were the Nevada System of Higher Education's executive vice chancellor, Dan Klaich; the newly appointed vice chancellor for health sciences, Thom Reilly, and health sciences consultant Greg Hart.

The quintet talked about the center's organizational structure and how the two universities will coordinate their efforts to train future health professionals.

The participants in Chancellor Jim Rogers' $350,000 fishing getaway - intended as a kind of working vacation or bonding exercise on Rogers' nickel - agreed that the most pressing need facing the system was to raise private money to support construction and higher education programs in Reno and Las Vegas.

Ashley and Glick recommended that they form a joint fundraising foundation to address Nevada's health science needs. The nonprofit entity would tap the resources of both the UNLV and UNR Foundations, targeting the same donor pool as each university. The venture would not supersede the role of health science deans in securing their own donations for their colleges, according to a draft document released last week by Rogers.

Rogers plans to forward the idea to regents at their meeting Aug. 17-18 in Elko, and hopes to have the fundraising arm up and operating before the 2007 Legislature opens in February. He has been trying to nail down a $150 million donation for several months.

Glick is so new on the job that he doesn't have personalized stationery yet. On the memo to regents this week, a secretary had X'ed out interim President Joseph Crowley's name and e-mail address and typed in Glick's.

Regent Steve Sisolak offered to get him stationery at a meeting Friday.

The cheating scandal at the UNLV School of Dental Medicine bothered Rogers and regents because they believe if the 10 students involved cheated once, they would cheat again in their professional lives.

Thus the decision to only force those students to perform free dental work for falsified patient charts seemed inadequate to many regents.

Rogers and others concluded at a hearing on the issue Friday that they couldn't revoke those student's diplomas, but they needed to send a clear signal to students that cheating would not be tolerated.

"If someone robs a 7-Eleven once, they've probably robbed it another time," Sisolak said.

But Regent James Dean Leavitt, a private defense attorney, objected to that. "That's not true Regent Sisolak. When you are caught it is always the first time."

Quipped Sisolak, "That is what your clients tell you."

Professors and students in the dental school's orthodontics program came forward in force at a regents' meeting Friday to make sure that a failed business partnership with a Florida businessman wouldn't put their program in jeopardy.

The 32 students currently in the program went so far as to fax a letter to regents agreeing to a $15,000 tuition hike if it would keep their program financially solvent.