Five years in, Nevada State College out to find itself

Monday, Sept. 24, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

As it celebrates its fifth anniversary, it's about time for Nevada State College to start divining what it wants to be when it grows up. Not just a place that trains teachers and nurses, but what kind of flavor it wants to have, what kind of distinctions, to maybe even show a soul, a love, for something special.

The college president, founding faculty members, students , too, are wondering what will make the place distinctive.

Why, besides paying relatively cheap tuition for a four-year degree, would someone other than a teaching or nursing candidate feel driven to a few structures scattered across an expanse of dirt and rock on the far side of Henderson?

Nevada State has yet to establish a firm identity. The college is unique in Nevada, a state school whose academic goals fall somewhere between those of UNLV and the two-year College of Southern Nevada, while serving 2,200 students - about the size of an urban high school.

The college is too young to be known for any programs or to be ranked in what school spokesman Spencer Stewart jokingly calls U.S. News & World Report's annual "college swimsuit addition." Some Henderson residents don't even know Nevada State exists.

But as it searches for its identity and looks across the country for other fledgling colleges to serve as role models, Nevada State College is, it seems, discovering something about itself.

It is fashioning a model of engagement - of students engaged with faculty, and a college engaged with community, that suggests this college might stretch beyond the conventional template of a state school.

Though it's still too early to know in which areas Nevada State will excel, the campus is committing to "community-based learning," with students required to take a course in which they work with libraries, senior centers, schools and similar agencies. The college has hired a full-time coordinator to oversee its community-based learning efforts.

By their senior year, 38 percent of Nevada State students reported doing community service often or very often as part of a class, according to the student engagement survey. Student government leaders say they encourage student groups to work with the outside community in planning activities.

Nevada State's progress in finding its niche mirrors that at California's newest public schools.

Innovative programs, not specialized fields, seem to be the center of attention.

At Cal State Channel Islands, where classes began in 2002, interdisciplinary teaching is an emerging focus, and students must take three classes that incorporate information from varied fields. A class about zoos, for example, discusses biology, business, politics and ethics.

Cal State Monterey Bay, established in 1994, was honored for the fourth straight year by U.S. News & World Report as one of the nation's top schools for service learning.

Whatever programs distinguish Nevada State, its primary focus will remain on teaching versus research, said President Fred Maryanski, who left the University of Connecticut as executive vice president for academic affairs to head the school.

A student-centered campus was one of the founders' first goals, said Connie Carpenter, dean and founding director of the nursing program, which earned accreditation in 2005 and has graduated more than 270 students.

Of building the program and Nevada State, Carpenter said : "We were all pioneers. We all had the same vision, we all knew where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do.

"We didn't want to have big classes with 300 or 400 in classroom size," she said. "We wanted to be responsive to students."

The National Survey of Student Engagement released this summer found Nevada State students were more likely than peers to contribute to class discussions and to be otherwise involved in many aspects of their education.

An intimate environment in which professors know students by name resonates with Nevada State's mission of prioritizing teaching. This fall's average class size is 14. On Fridays, students and math professors face off over ping pong.

Preserving that sense of intimacy will be difficult as the campus grows to a goal of as many as 25,000 students by 2030.

To help ease the pains of growth, Nevada State hopes to identify schools with similar attributes, which could help it gauge how to be competitive.

Finding peer schools is difficult , however, given how few new public institutions exist, Maryanski said.

A list of recognizable peers could help community members and potential students understand what Nevada State is - and is trying to become, Maryanski said.

Looking to the future involves looking inward as much as outward. People on campus, from students to the provost, are pondering how they can play a part .

Shirli Brautbar, an assistant professor of history, said at some institutions with longer histories, faculty members stake out territory, teaching the same classes term after term. A new recruit such as Brautbar would have been "put into some kind of slot," taking on courses nobody else wanted, she said.

At Nevada State, Brautbar, starting her second year at the college, can weigh in on how the college will develop its most fundamental curriculum.

Students also feel they have a stake in creating their campus. New groups on campus include those focused on music and dance.

"You feel like a pioneer kind of," said Krystal-Lynn Martinez, student government vice president.

A couple of years ago you would have found assistant professor of history Peter La Chapelle at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Penn., where residence halls were named after 19th-century campus notables.

Founded a few years after the Civil War, Wilson "had institutional rules that were very old and you felt like it was difficult to change things," La Chapelle said.

When La Chapelle came to Nevada State last summer, he discovered that "here, you can sort of create things."

The exuberance among faculty members reminded him of stories old colleagues at Cal State Dominguez Hills used to tell about how they founded that campus in the 1960s.

"They had a lot of pride in the fact that they had been there at the beginning when there wasn't much but a couple of buildings," La Chapelle said.

Now La Chapelle, a former journalist, is serving as adviser to Nevada State's fledging student newspaper. And just maybe in 20 years it will be one of the country's best.