Saturday, July 8, 2006 | 7:41 a.m.
One-third of the staff at the UNLV Research Foundation and its troubled Institute for Security Studies will be terminated when the employees' contracts expire next year, officials said Friday.
The terminations come amid three separate internal audits and one Energy Department investigation, all prompted by a June 18 Sun story that found that the counterterrorism institute, which has received and spent millions of federal dollars with little accountability, has abandoned several key objectives and come up short on others, especially on the academic end.
University officials confirmed Friday that eight employees involved in the administration of federal research grants - seven from the nonprofit Research Foundation and one from the institute - were notified that their contracts will not be renewed beyond the current fiscal year, which ends June 30.
The move is part of a transition, expected to be completed by June, that will give UNLV control over all grant and contract activities of the Research Foundation and the institute.
Nevada System of Higher Education Regent Steve Sisolak, chairman of the regents' audit committee, said he hoped the transition will shine a light on the secretive institute, which has been criticized for not living up to its promise of turning UNLV into a leading academic authority on homeland security.
"Once the foundation and institute are under the auspices of UNLV and the Board of Regents, the institute won't be shrouded in this veil of secrecy that has existed since its inception," Sisolak said. "At least now we'll be able to look at it."
Mark Rudin, interim vice president for research and Graduate College dean at UNLV, said the transition will be "good for the university."
The employees being let go, he said, will not be needed after the transition is completed.
"It was an action that was necessary, and we're going to do everything in our power to find jobs for these people," he said.
Rudin said privacy guidelines prohibit the university from disclosing the names of the employees or the description of the jobs they hold.
UNLV officials insist the transition and resulting staff downsizing had been planned for months. The move was not, they contend, triggered by the Sun's June 18 story and follow-ups about the institute's operations.
The regents approved the creation of the institute three years ago with the understanding that it would be part of the Graduate College.
Instead the institute was housed under the Research Foundation, a private and wealthy offshoot of the UNLV Foundation, the university's chief fundraising arm.
A pilot master's degree program in crisis and emergency management, which graduated 17 students, is on hold amid questions about the quality of its curriculum, and the institute's leaders can cite no scholarly accomplishments or advances in anti-terrorism technology.
The regents have scheduled a special meeting Aug. 4 in Las Vegas to discuss how the institute has spent $8.9 million, mostly in Energy Department grants, that it has received since 2004.
In June, weeks after the Sun began inquiring about the institute and its relationship with the Research Foundation, Thomas Williams, the foundation's executive director, was replaced and given a new job as an associate UNLV vice president.
Williams, who still runs the institute as its interim director, now heads the university's just-created office of Governmental Relations, Federal Energy & National Security Programs. The new position answers directly to Rudin.
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