LOOKING IN ON: HIGHER EDUCATION

Friday, Dec. 22, 2006 | 7:08 a.m.

The former Community College of Southern Nevada diversity director who is alleging college officials kept her from doing her job is now modifying her equal opportunity complaint to include Chancellor Jim Rogers.

Debra K. Lopez worked under Rogers as a joint Nevada System of Higher Education and community college official for most of her 15 months on the job before being fired Sept. 1. She alleges that Rogers, while seeming to care about diversity, used the issue to try to embarrass then-UNLV President Carol Harter at a roundtable discussion on diversity by inviting criticism of her for her supposed failure to promote diversity.

Lopez also complains that Rogers used double standards when it came to diversity, by requiring Harter to hire a vice president of diversity that reported directly to the president, without making that same requirement of CCSN President Richard Carpenter or others in the system.

Within weeks, Harter resigned - and Rogers' emphasis on diversity then waned, Lopez said.

Rogers called the allegation "absurd."

"That's a creation of her imagination," Rogers said of Lopez's claims.

Speaking of diversity, Nevada State College in Henderson is expanding its diversity efforts by offering fellowships to professors who have made concerted efforts to promote their personal "heritage" or that of the college community.

While not specifically intended for minority faculty, the Heritage Faculty Fellowships are designed to help retain and recruit minority scholars or scholars who promote multiculturalism, President Fred Maryanski said. The fellowships help nontenure track professors finish their doctorates by either taking $2,500 in scholarship money or a one-course reduction of their teaching load to allow more time for their studies.

Education professor Clairin DeMartini, nursing professors Wally J. Henkelman and Michelle Ingram, and business professor Grace Thomson will use the fellowships this spring to pursue their degrees from Nevada schools.

Once they earn their doctorates, the professors can apply for tenure-track positions.

Nevada State College also signed off this week on its first international partnership with CETYS Universidad. The Mexican university will be working with the state college and the local Latin Chamber of Commerce to offer, in Spanish, noncredit business classes to local small-business owners.

"We are trying to provide educational opportunities to the Latin community," Maryanski said. "This is one way to reach out to small-business owners who are more confident in Spanish than in English."

The partnership will also allow teaching and nursing students at the state college to study at CETYS. The students will spend a summer-school session in Ensenada, Mexico, taking a Spanish-immersion class and participating in service-learning projects. Future teachers will volunteer with local school children and future nurses will work in health clinics.

The state college has made service-learning part of most of its degree programs.