Q&A: Milton Glick

By Richard N. Velotta (contact)

Fri, Jul 9, 2010 (3 a.m.)

Richard N. Velotta

UNR President Milton Glick congratulates a student as she accepts her degree in May. Glick says he thinks Nevada must do more to prepare its students for higher education.

Las Vegas residents see the links between UNLV and the business community every day, but few have tuned in to the business relationship with UNR.

The university operates Cooperative Extension programs and office, agricultural experiment stations and small-business development centers. It also operates the University of Nevada Medical Schools, which has facilities in Las Vegas and Reno.

Las Vegas’ neighbor to the north has been wrestling with the same budget problems UNLV has confronted and leading the administration at UNR is its 15th president, Milton Glick.

Glick became the university’s top executive in August 2006 after a 15-year career as executive vice president and provost at Arizona State University, Tempe.

Glick talked with In Business Las Vegas about the school’s relationship with the business community and key university programs on the eve of its 120th commencement in May:

IBLV: For those unfamiliar with the programs at UNR, what programs put the school on the map in the business community?

Glick: One of them is the Mackay School, which includes our mining, engineering and geological sciences. One of the things we’ve done is gone out to the major mining companies and taken the deans of science, business, engineering and agriculture with us and said we’d like to be one-stop shopping for the mining community, not just for the state, but nationally and internationally. That’s a very different approach than what was taken in the past when mining, engineering and Mackay were like towers sitting there isolated. We’ve also created a similar thing in the area of renewable energy where we brought the same four colleges together and said “we’re going to present to the business community an integrated framework for renewable energy and the environment.” That includes all four of the colleges plus the school of journalism since a lot of the issues about renewable energy and the environment are not really technological issues, but public policy issues and business issues. I think the real breakthroughs on renewable energy are not going to come where there are the most renewable energy sources. They’re going to come where the best scientists are. To me, that’s a critical element. It’s not accidental that Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford and Berkeley, because that’s where they had all these bright people. The biotech community grew up around San Diego because of the University of California, San Diego.

But Nevada also has been identified as a potential source of renewable energy. Is part of the strategy developing education programs to exploit the presence of those resources?

We’ll need education and research and discovery, because the real power is going to be when you can make renewable energy pencil without subsidies. That’s going to take some breakthroughs on the technological side.

What other programs do you have?

Our medical school is small, but very good. Our students place at the best residencies available, and they pretty much all match. We also are doing some things that have been reported by the Harvard Business Review: We have some new facilities coming on line in which we train doctors and nurses as teams instead of separate empires. We think that is very important because that’s how they’re going to function in real life. You wouldn’t train a first baseman in one place and a shortstop somewhere else and then all of a sudden put them on a field together. If we’re going to have cost-effective health care in this country, it’s going to have to be by using doctors who do the job with nurse practitioners, physicians’ assistants and public health people to do all those other important parts. We also have a journalism program of some repute and we’re in the middle of a complete reconfiguration of the building to make everything digital and focus on curriculum that is media independent. So we’re going to train news people, but they’re going to be using the Web or radio or television or print or something we haven’t even heard of yet. Our preveterinary program has very good numbers on our students going on to vet school. One of the features of this university is that it’s small compared with most research universities and has the advantage of more personal attention. On the other hand, it has the disadvantage of finding it hard to create critical mass in an area.

Tell us about the new Center for Molecular Medicine. How will it enhance the university’s medical school?

It’s going to be dramatic. Clearly, an important role any medical school has — and this, I should point out, is not a medical school building; it’s a university building funded entirely by indirect costs that our faculty earned through faculty research. Our limitation on expanding our research portfolio has been space. All of a sudden, we’ll have this wonderful new space that will be organized toward interdisciplinary molecular medicine. Initially, it will have all faculty from the medical school, but we’re going to have collaborations from across the campus, and I’m sure there will be people not from the medical school there. In addition, a fraction of the space is going to belong to the Whittemore Peterson Institute, which focuses on studying chronic fatigue syndrome and made a big breakthrough about a year ago to identify a retrovirus that appears to be correlated with chronic fatigue syndrome. This will give us the first state-of-the-art biomedical research space built in many years.

Like UNLV, UNR is being forced to cut programs to help balance the state’s budget. What career field cuts are on the horizon?

I don’t like to think of them as career field cuts because we believe that most of the things that we eliminate will have alternative paths to the same careers. We will be focusing and streamlining the school of agriculture so we will no longer have an animal biotechnology major. We also won’t have a resource economics major. But we believe that most students will be able to take a different major. We will graduate students from those majors, but the goal is that there will be many paths to a major. In education, we will focus the College of Education on those things that we think are most important: the training of the best teachers, the training of good school administrators and of counselors. We are going to stop doing some other things that are important and valuable, but are less important than preparing teachers and administrators. We’re going to go from a college of four departments and multiple doctorate programs to a college that’s going to have a single unit and a single doctorate program that has emphasis areas. It’s my hope that eventually we’ll be in a position that every teacher who graduates from here also has a disciplinary major such as math, English or chemistry. The faculty just voted to change the rules on double degrees so that we can make it more accessible to have a disciplinary degree and an education degree. We will be eliminating our program in interior design and there probably won’t be an alternative degree for those students. We’ll be eliminating our degrees in German, but again, our students have voted with their feet. There were many factors in what programs that we cut, but an important factor was how many degrees they give. Our first priority has always been to protect our students and protect their ability to get a degree. This year, we had the highest graduation rate in our history and that’s been a top priority for me since I arrived and a top priority for our students and faculty and staff.

How will the business community be affected by the planned cuts?

We’ve met with the various leadership groups in the business community, whether it’s the Reno Chamber of Commerce, the Sparks chamber, close to a dozen different business groups. They haven’t agreed with every decision we’ve made, but they have all agreed that making vertical strategic cuts so that you protect the quality of the remaining programs was absolutely the right thing to do. So they bought into that concept. They might argue about which degrees, but they haven’t. They haven’t endorsed the cuts, but they’ve endorsed the concept. In the case of agriculture where our initial proposal was to completely eliminate the college, retaining some of the programs in the College of Science, we spent many long hours with the stakeholders — the farm bureau, the cattlemen’s association, etc. — and they were with us to maintain a much narrower, more focused college and to save that money, so we were very pleased with that. In the case of education, which I think is a critical program, we proposed something somewhat different when we began and the faculty of education came back to us with what they thought was a better alternative. Before we proposed it, I called the superintendent of the Washoe County (School District), told him what we were going to do and asked him to be supportive. After he told me that his wife was in one of the programs we were eliminating, he said he would be supportive. So we’ve tried to reach out to the business community and protect it.

As we look at the future of Nevada, I think it’s generally agreed that gaming will never support by itself the quality of life that it’s historically done. It will always be an important part of our economy. So what are the things that will either draw new businesses to Nevada or create new businesses? I think Neal Smatresk, the president of UNLV, and I agree that having an educated population and workforce and having the kind of discovery that only happens at research universities that create these new businesses — high-value businesses that pay people good wages and create the kind of spinoff businesses. We’re not doing that in Nevada.

Are there cuts planned at UNR on gaming research programs?

No. We have a very strong gaming program, the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming. Bill Eadington, the director, is recognized internationally as one of the top scholars in this area. He is not being affected by this. The only thing he’s being affected by is that like all universities, endowments are down and there is some endowed money in his program, which is not paying out. But we would not reduce that program deliberately. Also, in our computer science and engineering department, we have funding from International Game Technology for innovative and creative things in gaming. One of the things I hope is that they expand their focus on Nevada-style gaming to gaming in the broader sense — computer gaming, the kind of thing your daughter may play that you and I don’t understand. John Seely Brown, who was the chief scientist for many years for the Xerox research department, argues that the future of learning is in gaming. When these young people play those games and they don’t learn something during the game, it’s not satisfactory. So the question is, “how do we learn to take the technology and the software and the thinking that goes into these computer games and turn them into new learning mechanisms?”

One of the problems that we all realize is that there are roughly half a dozen styles of learning. Some of us learn visually, some of us learn audio, some of us need hands-on learning. How can we allow students in a learning environment to learn their way? One of the unmet goals of using computer learning technology is to do what I call mass customization where you can address a large enough number of students that each student can be taught in the way he or she best learn. I talked about this 20 years ago and I said we’d be there in a decade and we’re not there. Learning combining the technology that we use in the gaming industry and in the computer gaming industry and figuring out how we can use that to enhance learning: That would be a great achievement. Too much of what we do in computerized learning right now is simply using technology to teach the way we have always taught. It turns out if that’s what you’re doing, they’re not learning as well and it’s more expensive. Unless we can find a way to actually change how we do business in a way that responds to how people learn, that’s a huge challenge ahead of us.

How else has the recession affected the university? Enrollment? Philanthropy? The loss of professors finding opportunity elsewhere?

We are seeing that. We lost two of our top young scientists in the past month, one to Delaware, one to North Texas. In the case of the latter, it is putting $25 million in new money into its biotechnology program and we don’t have those kinds of resources. It’s hard to tell him he’s making a bad decision and we know that other universities are seeing us a good recruiting grounds and raiding grounds. We’re hurting in a number of ways. When you lose $44 million, if you’re not hurting, then you are as bad as our critics say and we aren’t. Our ability to support our faculty at maximized value has been affected. Our faculty maximized value because we never did across-the-boards. We always were strategic in our cuts. In the first $33 million of those cuts, we largely were able to protect the core academic departments. But that means we’ve stripped all the support structure away. I was at a meeting at the University of Washington and it also has lost a lot of state money, although it is more robust in its funding portfolio. It was commenting about the same thing we have a problem with. Some of our top researchers spend their time as they write their grants to write budgets and boilerplate. They may spend 40 percent of their time doing this when in fact what we like is to have the kind of staff support and infrastructure that they spend their time writing the substance of the grants and doing their research, not filling out the paperwork.

How about the enrollment and the philanthropy?

On enrollment, we believe we will have the largest enrollment in history. We believe that because we know students are multiple applying. We won’t know until we start school, but it looks like we’re really strong in the rural counties, Washoe County and Clark County. The reason we think we can handle this is that our faculty and staff are picking up more of the load. By narrowing the university, we can be more efficient. We’ve gone from 62 percent of our credit hours being delivered by full-time faculty to 80 percent. So our full-time faculty is teaching a lot more students because we’ve been up in enrollment each year. The problem is you can do that for awhile, but it takes its toll in our ability to do the kind of research and discovery that Nevada needs. I think the place we’ve really hurt is going to be visible five years from now as opposed to today because we’ve put so much attention on making sure students can get their classes. We’ve created the mechanism of course concierge to make sure a student can get a class that they really need if they’ve done the right things.

We also worry that we’ve raised tuition 28 percent in two years. For many students, that’s a burden. We’re trying to protect support services, but we eliminated our career development center two years ago. That means that students who don’t quite know what they want to do have more trouble. Students won’t have as many job fair opportunities. We eliminated our writing and math center, which broke my heart. But our students stepped up and went to the Board of Regents this year and asked the board to approve a fee to tax themselves so that they could have a different kind of support structure for math and writing. They’re trying to replace it. I worry a lot that everybody is doing more. You can do that in the short term, but it catches up to you and it makes it harder to keep our staff. We know that’s a problem. We’ve always been thinly infrastructured, but we’re even thinner now. So we have faculty doing things that are not the best use of their time.

What percentage of your students come from Southern Nevada?

I believe about 20 percent to 25 percent of our incoming freshmen will be from Southern Nevada. We’d actually like that to be larger because we’re capturing in Northern Nevada half of the college-eligible graduates. We also need greater diversity. The diversity of our student body has gone up every year, but it’s still not what the state looks like. And we know that to turn that, we need more students from Southern Nevada because there is so much diversity there. We’ve had alumni hosting events in Southern Nevada and we have a program called Nevada Bound where a student, for $50, can get a plane ride up here and spend the day. About 80 percent of those students end up coming to the university. I would like, for the good of the state, for the good of the university, for political reasons, for diversity reasons — whatever name you want — the future of this university to be in being a statewide university, not a Northern Nevada university. This doesn’t take anything away from Northern Nevada, but I think for everyone’s well-being we need to attract more of those students here.

As an outsider looking in, it appears the Reno business community has close ties with the university. What’s your assessment of that relationship?

I think it’s very good, but not as good as we want it to be. The Reno business community, like the rest of the business community in the state, is hurting now. It is looking for help, but it is less able to partner with us, but we think it wants to. One of the things at every university I’ve been at is I hear the same complaint: “We don’t know how to get to the right people in the university. Your front door isn’t clear to us.” This is not a UNR or UNLV problem. This is everywhere. I have to say I don’t quite understand because I find universities to be easy places to negotiate. So we have redesigned our office of the vice president for research to be more facilitating and to make it the front door to the university. In the area of philanthropy, in our last calendar year, we raised $9 million more than in any year in our history. I’m just blown away by that, given the horrible economy. I think it shows the depth of commitment that many of our friends have to this university. Our ability to reproduce that again is stretched, but I was very impressed with the support.

Was the additional $9 million in donations a result of one large gift or several smaller gifts?

We had one very large gift, a $10 million gift, for the William N. Pennington Health Sciences Building and we raised another $5 million for that building, so we raised $15 million there, which matched about $35 million of state funding. In addition, we finished off the funding of several other buildings. But we also had a number of small gifts and legacy gifts, so it was a combination. We could not have shown that kind of number without a major gift of $15 million that we raised for the Pennington Building. The $10 million came from the William N. Pennington Foundation. He was a very successful co-owner of Circus Circus. There was $2 million from the Nell J. Redfield Foundation, which has always been there when we’ve needed it. There was $1 million from the Heart Foundation and a number of smaller gifts to make that possible. We’ve opened a new Bob and Jan Davidson Math and Science Center where they contributed, depending on how you count, $14 million to $16 million, to give us a state-of-the-art undergraduate teaching facility for math and science. We had not built a new science teaching facility on this campus since 1970 when we had 6,000 students and when the technology was totally different. We’re also opening our first 400-seat state-of-the-art teaching auditorium, which was funded largely by the Redfield Foundation.

How can a university improve its rapport with a community?

I think part of it is my responsibility. As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time out in the community, whether they are social events or my two TV appearances a month on Channel 4. I have a radio show once a week on the NPR station. Our business school does a weekly column in the local newspaper as does our cooperative extension, so we reach out. But I think we’ve got to somehow make ourselves more transparent. That’s why we’ve tried to reconfigure our research office to facilitate not as a filter to the business community, but rather to be a funnel for the business community so we can get them to the right people. We have a very small research office, especially compared with the $100 million in research we do annually. So they’re stretched, but we think it’s critical because we know that we can’t be any healthier than the community is and we believe that the community can’t be any healthier than we are.

One of the things that is of great importance to us is how our medical school can better serve the Las Vegas community. Obviously, we have two visible presences in Las Vegas. We have a very large cooperative extension office there that does about $10 million of operation in Clark County, and we have most of our clinical training and research in Las Vegas. I think last year we provided $16 million worth of free services from our medical school, the majority of which was in Las Vegas. But we’ve never created the partnership with the Southern Nevada community that our medical school ought to be facilitating and creating. As we’re looking for a new dean and vice president of health sciences, one of the top priorities of that person will be to build those partnerships, not just with University Medical Center — which is a strange name, because it’s the county hospital; we don’t control it, we don’t govern it, we just provide services there — but with the other hospitals and the broader Las Vegas community.

I would like the Southern Nevada community to see that as one of the great assets that the university brings to them and for whatever historic reasons there are, that has not been as robust a relationship as the university needs, the medical school needs and, I believe, that Southern Nevada needs. If we disappeared from Southern Nevada, the level of health care, particularly to indigents but even beyond that, clearly would be seriously damaged. To me, that’s one of our highest priorities. In my evaluation with the board last year, that was one of the things we talked about a lot. How do we strengthen the services our medical school provides in Southern Nevada and the recognition and reciprocal relationships that should be created by Southern Nevada? That’s a priority for us, and both the provost and I are committed to that.

Besides the economy, what other big issues lie ahead for the university?

Other than the economy, I think seeing improvement in the public schools. Depending on whose calculation you use, about half the ninth-graders in this state don’t graduate from high school. That’s just a terrible number. We need for more of them to graduate and to graduate college-ready. There was a report in the ’70s, “A Nation at Risk,” in which they said about our public schools had a foreign nation done to us what we had done to ourselves, we would have considered it an act of war. I think that if we don’t see higher graduation rates and college-ready students, that’s a huge mountain to climb. The university can’t substitute for that. We want to work very closely with them (public schools).

The other thing relates to budgets — the state deciding very clearly what’s important to it and how we’re going to rebuild this economy. Most people believe the economy has to be restructured. It’s how do you get there? Right now, we are 50th in the nation in the likelihood that a 19-year-old will go to college. That’s a serious challenge at a time when the competition has grown. The competition isn’t between Las Vegas and Reno. It’s between this state and California, New York, Arizona, China and India. In my lifetime, historically, we have always been the best educated nation in the world. Now we’re down to about 10th. China is building 400 research universities, and we need to compete at that level.

I said at my inaugural address that the future of Nevada would not be determined by the mines of Nevada, but by the minds of Nevada. I really believe that. The winners will be places that have high innovation, high-quality education, creativity and that’s kind of what we do. It’s why we start as early as second and third grade talking to kids. Too many of our kids don’t know that they can go to college.

By the time they’re ready to go to college, they’ve kind of lost the kind of preparation they need. Right now in this country, if you come from the top quartile of family income, you have a 75 percent chance of getting a bachelor’s degree. If you come from the lowest quartile of family income, you have a 10 percent chance. And statistics are worse in this state.

What we’re creating among our poorest citizens is multigenerational failure. The great thing about this country — it’s not perfect, but it’s greater than in any other place in the world — is that it didn’t matter who your family was. It mattered what your talent was and how hard you worked at it. When we see this failure falling out of the system of lower-income families, it is not a good sign for the future. We have a program for that reason called Pack Advantage where we guarantee any qualified student doing a good job in his or her courses who started as a freshman and is financially needy, we will cover tuition, fees and his or her books. Of every tuition increase we’ve had in recent years, the money we’ve gotten to keep — which is only a fraction of the tuition — we put half of that in financial aid because we and our students believe it is so critical that we level the playing ground for people whose families are economically disadvantaged. It’s not out of some sympathy or anything, but because it’s good for the state and the nation. If every person achieves their full potential, we will all be winners.

But the fact that we have such a low college-going rate tells us that we have, for some reason — and you and I know what some of those reasons are, but not all of them — we don’t have the culture of going to college. If you believe as I do that the key to the continued prosperity and high quality of life Nevada has always had is going to be strong education, that’s a challenge this university faces. That relates to money, but it isn’t just about money.

Are you optimistic?

I think there’s great potential at this university. I believe that the kinds of decisions we’re making are decisions we don’t want to make. We’re not only taking away people’s jobs, but we’re taking away, for good people who are doing good jobs, something they have worked all their life to build. That’s not anything anybody signs up to do. But I believe it’s better to do that than to go across the board and weaken everything we do. I do believe that at the end of the last special session (of the Legislature) everybody stepped up and tried to minimize the damage. I won’t say that for the first round, but this time I really do believe state leadership from all quarters stepped up to do as little damage as they could do. There was still a lot of damage. Seven percent on top of 15 percent (cuts) for us was $11 million on top of $33 million. But I think they were trying to do their best and that gives me some hope. I think the next governor, whoever that is, and the next Legislature have a huge mountain to climb. Actually, I wish it were a mountain to climb — it’s a hole to climb out of. I believe that a part of climbing out is investing in education. There are some states that are in as deep as we are that are making those investments. And there are some that aren’t. I’d like to be among those that stretch to do that.