Editorial: Taken for granted

Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2006 | 7:02 a.m.

Revelations that the UNLV Institute for Security Studies farmed out a $500,000 state grant to a contractor may be part of a larger problem regarding how publicly funded research grants are - or rather, aren't - being spent at UNLV.

The private nonprofit UNLV Research Foundation is charged with securing money for scientific and technological research. The foundation also oversees the beleaguered Institute for Security Studies, which has received nearly $9 million in public money but has failed to meet its objectives, one of which included a master's program in homeland security that has never materialized.

The Las Vegas Sun reported last week that the institute is under investigation for, among other things, giving $465,000 of a $500,000 Nevada Department of Public Safety grant to a New Mexico security firm to study the state's vulnerability to terrorist activity. State officials told the Sun that the grant was awarded to the institute under the assumption that UNLV would actually do the research, rather than hire an out-of-state company to do it.

A bigger issue, however, seems to lie within the research foundation, which has received $48.3 million in public money for research over the past three years, only to spend $10 million on administrative overhead such as salaries. Another $19 million was paid to private firms, federal laboratories and even other universities to perform research that the grantors assumed was to be done by UNLV. The remaining $19 million was earmarked for research to be done by UNLV, the Sun reports, but a third of that also was used to pay administrative costs.

Of the more than $57 million in taxpayer money given to the UNLV Research Foundation and its security studies institute over the past three years, it appears that less than half has been used to fund research generated by UNLV.

Bankrolling generous administrative salaries and paying other universities to do research falls woefully short of meeting the foundation's goal of turning UNLV into a major research institution.