Keeping university secrets

Monday, April 13, 2009 | 2:08 a.m.

Many faculty members in Nevada’s higher education system also hold down jobs away from campus, often with employers that can use their expertise to help develop a product or provide a service.

There is plenty of merit in allowing professors to keep those jobs. A university whose faculty is in high demand off campus can gain added prestige by having professors who participate in breakthrough technologies or other achievements that make the community a better place in which to live or have broader applications.

But the state Senate Government Affairs Committee did a disservice Wednesday by voting 4-3 to kill legislation that would have required faculty members to disclose outside employment to the public.

Senate Bill 279, sponsored by Sen. Terry Care, D-Las Vegas, was prompted by a 2007 Las Vegas Sun investigation that found that UNLV officials had no idea how many professors were earning money off campus. As reported last week by Cy Ryan and Jeff German in the Las Vegas Sun, the university also had no system in place to monitor potential conflicts of interest.

The Board of Regents, which oversees the Nevada System of Higher Education, subsequently approved a policy that compelled the campuses to enforce a policy to require disclosure of outside employment. The flaw in that policy is that the records are placed in the faculty members’ personnel files and aren’t available to the public.

Barry Smith, director of the Nevada Press Association, was right when he told the legislators that there is no provision for the public to find out whether a conflict exists.

There is no reason why the public, which pays the salaries of university system employees, should be prohibited from finding out who else is paying for a professor’s talent.

Universities are supposed to be institutions that promote the free flow of information. They are not supposed to be shrouded in secrecy.

But the committee’s failure to pass SB279 has the effect of promoting campus secrecy and sends a message to the public that the institutions have something to hide.