Monday, Nov. 20, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.
Local businessmen got up before dawn and paid $35 a plate Friday to hear university system Chancellor Jim Rogers' thoughts on the state of higher education in Nevada. But instead of a live, interactive speech, they were treated to a version he had taped the week before.
It was the same version that they could have watched on KVBC Channel 3 at 7:30 Friday evening.
The more than 400 people who turned out for the Nevada Development Authority breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel sat stoically through the speech without the normal applause one might expect had Rogers been speaking live. Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes' live address subsequently elicited laughs and applause .
Regent Howard Rosenberg, who flew down from Reno , said sticking to the video kept Rogers within his 25-minute time limit.
"If he did it live, it would go about a week and a half," Rosenberg said.
Private money makes things happen.
When the incredible shrinking building disease - a terrible virus caused by skyrocketing construction costs - hit Nevada State College's liberal arts building, officials had to redesign the building. The delay led to further cost increases and further shrinkage, and two years later officials still haven't broken ground.
When the same rising construction costs threatened to infect UNLV's Greenspun College of Urban Affairs building, university officials were able to ward off the virus because they had private funding behind the building.
As costs more than doubled over the last 18 months, UNLV officials repeatedly went back to the Greenspun family, which owns the Las Vegas Sun, to increase its donation so the university wouldn't have to shrink the building. The contribution rose from $16 million to more than $37 million.
Rogers and other UNLV officials were then able to get more money from the state.
The Legislature's Interim Finance Committee voted Thursday to allow UNLV to use money designated for equipment to cover construction costs on the now $93.7 million project, and it was the Greenspun dollars that led to the approval of the increased funding, said Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, and Minority Leader Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas.
"The more you can leverage state dollars with private investment, the better off we all are," said Titus, a political science professor at UNLV.
UNLV officials will ask the 2007 Legislature for nearly $20 million for fixtures, furniture and equipment to complete the building.
Too bad Nevada State College doesn't have a similar benefactor for its liberal arts building.
One of the most widely regarded scholars in the nation on black culture, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, will be speaking about his new documentary Monday night at UNLV.
The PBS documentary, "African Lives," uses genealogy and science to analyze black history.
Gates' visit is the third lecture this fall put on by UNLV's Black Mountain Institute, a think tank for writers and artists founded by former UNLV President Carol Harter.
The speech starts at 7 p.m. in Doc Rando Hall in the Beam Music Center.
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