UNLV presidents’ jobs haven’t been easy

Wednesday, March 8, 2006 | 7:23 a.m.

Departing UNLV President Carol Harter isn't the first university leader to step down because of management conflicts with higher-ups.

All but one of her predecessors at the 48 1/2-year-old university left under some kind of duress, Eugene Moehring, UNLV history department chairman, said. Moehring has written a book on UNLV history's in honor of its 50th anniversary. The book is coming out next year as part of the yearlong celebration.

Presidents Don Moyer, Roman Jay Zorn, Leonard Goodall and Bob Maxson each had issues with the Board of Regents, and ultimately decided to move on, Moehring said.

Moyer's main conflict was with Northern Nevada regents' intent on funding UNR over UNLV. Zorn's "rocky relationship" with regents was magnified by his disagreement with UNLV's focus on athletics over academics as a way to improve the university's national reputation. Goodall got stuck between the regents and UNLV's faculty over code issues. And Maxson was run out of town after firing basketball coaching legend Jerry Tarkanian in the early 1990s.

Only one UNLV president, Donald Baepler, left the presidency because of a better job offer, Moehring said. Baepler became chancellor of Nevada's university system in 1978 - only to be pushed out by regents a few years later.

UNLV officials are looking to increase their profit margins on summer school classes this year by $1 million by adding $50 per credit for out-of-state students.

Summer school already is a moneymaker for the university, with registration fees covering the cost of instruction and bringing in $1.2 million, said Gerry Bomotti, UNLV's vice president of finance.

UNLV charges all students $6 more per credit for summer school to offset costs. Summer school is not supported by state money.

"The idea is to take those resources and reinvest them back into faculty professional development," Bomotti said.

The $50 increase for out-of-state students will bring summer school tuition in line with the state policy that nonresidents should pay for the full cost of their tuition. Currently, both in-state and out-of-state students are charged the same summer registration fee.

Some faculty, however, believe the fee will discourage nonresident students from enrolling in summer school, hurting students and subsequently lowering total proceeds.

"Increasing the summer tuition is like adding a tax on an already very successful program," Vicki Holmes, director of UNLV's English Language Center, wrote in a letter sent to regents this week.

Regents will vote on the increase, along with other proposed fee increases, March 16 and 17 in Reno.

One of the first things that President Richard Carpenter did when he took the helm at the Community College of Southern Nevada in August 2004 was to do away with the "everyone" option on the college's e-mail system.

The communication tool had degenerated into a gossip column and a way for professors to attack administrators or each other and involve the entire college in the dispute, Carpenter said.

The problem, however, is that Carpenter has not been able to find an alternative way to distribute information accurately and quickly to the campus, he and professors said. His intentions repeatedly get distorted as professors play a collegiate version of "telephone" - a children's game in which information typically becomes increasingly skewed as it is passed along a line of people - in forwarding his messages.

An Internet bulletin board established last semester proved too burdensome to use, so Carpenter had television sets installed on campus that could display messages to faculty and students. But the college information technology people have not figured out how to set up the closed-circuit system so that messages can be easily typed in on it.

"You'd have to be a computer programmer to use it now," Carpenter said.

While SunGard Collegis, CCSN's outside information technology company, works on getting the TVs up and running, Carpenter has established a task force to address the communication issue and find an alternative to the "everyone" e-mail.

"Part of what makes a college a college is the freedom to debate and argue," Carpenter said. "We need to do a better job of facilitating that."

Several professors and other system officials found themselves axed last week from the regents mailing list to receive agenda copies.

The five-pound packets for the Reno meeting went only to presidents, faculty senate chairmen and student body presidents.

Dan Klaich, executive vice chancellor and chief counsel for the system, said he could not justify the mailing and production costs when the materials are available online.

On the recent mailing alone, system officials saved $636 in postage, 680 pounds of paper and about 80 percent in staff time by mailing out 42 fewer agenda packets.

In postage alone, the curtailed mailing list is expected to save $5,000 to $7,500 a year, Klaich said.

Klaich hopes to prune the list further by asking people in the private sector who receive the agendas to voluntarily take their name off the list.