Forces joined to fight terror

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

Six months after being brought under the direct oversight of UNLV, the Institute for Security Studies is doing what it rarely did in the past - incorporate the university's resources into its mission to educate the public about counterterrorism.

Executive Director Scott Smith, a retired Army major general who took over the troubled institute in October, is hosting the first of a series of security forums Friday that not only will include top government homeland security officials as participants, but also an array of university department heads and professors.

The forum, which starts at 2 p.m. at UNLV's Richard Tam Alumni Center, will focus on "mitigating security risks and threats " to Southern Nevada.

UNLV President David Ashley, who has played a role in reshaping the institute - was once criticized in a university audit for lacking focus and leadership under the private UNLV Research Foundation - also is to be on hand to kick off the series.

Friday's forum will be moderated by Ron Smith, the university's new vice president for research and dean of the Graduate College.

"We have a lot of resources at UNLV that can be valuable in this kind of an effort," Smith said. "We're trying to bring everybody together."

The new approach is drawing praise from former Nevada Homeland Security Director Jerry Bussell, one of the institute's biggest critics.

"I think they're on the right track," Bussell said. "They weren't reaching out to professors and the body of knowledge present at UNLV in the past, but it looks like they've changed that."

The institute, which receives most of its funding from federal grants, was set up four years ago and approved by the university system's Board of Regents to turn UNLV into a leading academic authority on homeland security.

That never happened, prompting sweeping changes in the counterterrorism institute's leadership and operations.

Under Smith, the institute is making strides toward its initial goals. An aborted master's degree program in emergency management is again part of the university's curriculum, and Smith is close to completing the institute's first strategic plan, a five-year projection of how the organization hopes to carve a niche for itself in the nation's homeland security effort.

Meanwhile, changes in the institute's top management continue. This month, James Sudderth, the No. 2 man in the office and highest - ranking holdover from the embattled administration of former executive director Tom Williams, left to take a job in private industry.

Williams was reassigned at UNLV in September after the audit which, like an earlier Sun report, found that the institute had not lived up to its mission.