Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Jon Ralston calls out two regents trying to have it both ways on Jim Rogers’ war with Gov. Jim Gibbons

“(Gov. Jim Gibbons) is simply a greedy, uninterested, unengaged human being whose only, and I mean only, goal is to see what Gibbons can do for himself and his greedy friends.”

— Chancellor Jim Rogers, Nevada Appeal op-ed, Feb. 22

“The governor claims that higher education didn’t cooperate in the budget process. That is not true ... The governor’s budget would, for all practical purposes, eliminate higher education in Nevada. We can only hope that the Legislature has a more sensible vision of our state’s future.”

— Regents Chairman Michael Wixom and Vice Chairman Jason Geddes, Reno Gazette-Journal, Feb. 25

So on the same day they publicly called the governor an insensate liar who wants to destroy higher education, Wixom and Geddes publicly reprimanded Rogers for labeling Gibbons an avaricious, disengaged narcissist.

And they reprimand him?

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Just because their language is less emotionally charged, less personal (oh boo hoo), even though they are conveying the same message (the governor is irrelevant and we hope lawmakers will save us), the regents think they can avoid charges of hypocrisy?

Not here. And it’s not just hypocritical for them to prostrate themselves before the governor, feign disciplinary action against Rogers and invest Vice Chancellor Dan Klaich with the power to lobby Gibbons and lawmakers (that is, do his current job): It’s pointless.

Wixom said on “Face to Face” on Thursday that the regents still have to deal with the governor’s authority to apportion stimulus money. But the premise — that pushing Rogers to the background will result in Gibbons suddenly becoming reasonable — presumes that the governor acted with personal malice when he first gutted the system in his budget.

Can they really believe that? Can it be so?

The Wixom-Geddes letter of reprimand issued Wednesday was a marvelous concoction defying physical laws: Who knew invertebrates could spin so well?

The reprimand managed to catch them bowing down before Gibbons, all but begging for forbearance, while pretending they had stood tall and disciplined their rogue employee. In the missive, they called Rogers’ comments “unauthorized and inappropriate” and went on to write:

“You have indicated to us that in making the statements you were acting inappropriately, that you did not intend to speak for the Board of Regents or the System in making such comments, and have expressed your regret for the public impression you were doing so.”

Rogers is chastened? What about the regents?

Which, I wonder, is the worse accusation here — that Gibbons is an insensitive jerk or that he is an untruthful destroyer of the higher ed system?

The regents concluded the most tepid reprimand letter in history by declaring, “You have also agreed, during your service as Chancellor, to refrain from making personal public comments concerning the Governor.”

Get Jim Rogers to shut up? It’s more likely Jim Gibbons will become a visionary.

The regents created this situation by hiring a man with inherently more power — as a wealthy television station owner — than any of them and a person who is willing to do what they have for so long proved ineffective at doing: Fight for a quality higher ed system. Whom did they think they retained — Caspar Milquetoast?

Not surprisingly, Gibbons seized the opening Rogers gave him. The governor wrote to the regents, called the chancellor’s op-ed “vile and insulting” and demanded the board appoint a new interlocutor. Granted, he could have simply dismissed Rogers as a raving nut, but instead he essentially declared, “I won’t talk to him anymore and I am the governor, so you do what I say.”

I don’t know what’s more pathetic: Gibbons’ petulance or the regents’ genuflection.

I have no brief for Rogers. He clearly would make a bull in a china shop look like the picture of serenity. He has no patience, does not suffer fools (guess who?) and despite his obvious passion and substantive missives, has not elevated the dialogue.

But at least he is honest about how he feels and won’t sugarcoat it in namby pamby language so the governor doesn’t get mad. Oh no. Not that.

“When you go up to someone with power and call him a punk, there will be a retaliation,” Regent Ray Rawson said Thursday on “Face to Face.” “ That’s just what it brings. Jim Rogers is just passionate. That passion sometimes will take him into a course that maybe will lead to a fight.”

Yes. It will. But if the destruction of the higher education system, a budget that no member of the Legislature thinks makes sense, is not worth fighting about, then what, pray tell, is?

Certainly not who looks the bigger fool in the latest, entertaining-yet-empty chapter of the regents-Rogers-Gibbons soap opera.

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