Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Looking in on: Higher Education

Chancellor Jim Rogers' public evaluation on Thursday before the Board of Regents was more noteworthy for what it left out than what it included.

Regents discussed whether they needed to limit the chancellor's power to fire presidents but did not discuss Rogers' role in pressuring UNLV President Carol Harter to step down and UNR President John Lilley to take a job in Texas.

Chairman Bret Whipple said regents didn't discuss it because it did not come up in the evaluation done by outside consultant Pat Goodall.

The only hint of it came from Rogers, who writes in his self-evaluation that as an "outcome" of his philosophy that academia should be results-driven, "UNLV and UNR will be hiring two new presidents."

Rogers had said previously that personality conflicts over management style had caused problems between him and Harter, who steps down June 30 to take a job with the UNLV Foundation.

The harshest language against Rogers in the report is his own: "I am not a patient man, and I can be abrupt and very demanding."

Regents were mostly positive in their discussion Thursday and voted to extend Rogers' contract through 2009. They will decide whether to restrict his power at a future meeting.

After serving as the board's vice chairwoman to Whipple, Regent Dorothy Gallagher didn't vote to re-elect Whipple to his position.

Gallagher instead voted for Regent Howard Rosenberg, who was running in protest because he said he didn't like how Whipple handled the position and because he believed the system needed many changes.

Gallagher said she believed Whipple could be a good chairman but said he couldn't make the time commitment. Other regents said she felt she had done most of the work for him.

Regent Doug Hill seconded those concerns. Hill said that Whipple needed to either give 100 percent or nothing. He was doing the job haphazardly, often making decisions in areas where he was "not up to speed," Hill said.

Hill, however, still voted with the majority to re-elect Whipple. Rosenberg received only two votes besides his own - from Gallagher and Regent Thalia Dondero.

Regents then elected Linda Howard, whose term is up in December, as vice chairwoman. Howard, incidentally, had challenged Whipple for the chair position last year.

Regent Steve Sisolak hates it when the board is asked to approve professors' tenure because he doesn't think regents have the expertise to make that decision. He is so adamant on the issue that he has managed to remove most tenure decisions from the agenda.

But regents must still approve tenure when someone is offered tenure at the time they are hired, and so a UNLV staff member was taking bets on whether Sisolak would pull two such requests from the regents' agenda for discussion last week. He did, but quickly backtracked and moved to approve the items when he saw one of the hires was Clarence Gilyard, who played Chuck Norris' partner on the television series "Walker, Texas Ranger."

Gilyard recently completed his master of fine arts degree at Southern Methodist University, the highest degree in his field, and will be teaching in the film department at UNLV. He will earn $95,000.

So far, the increased GPA requirements for admission at UNLV haven't been the big stumbling block some suggested. UNLV officials are finding that another new requirement is tripping many students up.

Beginning this fall, students seeking admission to UNLV not only have to have a higher GPA (a 2.75 instead of a 2.5), but they have to have that higher GPA in 13 core courses: four English, three math, three science and three social science classes.

Many of the students being admitted through alternative criteria have sufficient GPAs, but they are just missing one or two core classes, said Rebecca Mills, vice president for student life.

About 250 students, who otherwise would have been denied, have been admitted for summer school to complete coursework.

To date, 548 students have been denied admission for the fall, with 1,467 applications still pending because of missing documentation.

On Thursday regents approved a measure increasing the GPA requirement to 3.0 by 2008, two years earlier than originally planned. The vote allows regents to delay implementation of the requirement if data from this fall shows minority students are disproportionately affected.

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