Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

At UNR, budget cuts help sharpen university’s focus

Milton Glick

Steve Marcus

Milton Glick, president of UNR, says his school needs more students from Southern Nevada to meet his goal of a diverse student body that reflects the population of the state as a whole.

Beyond the Sun

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 School of Medicine, which has facilities in Las Vegas and Reno.

The university 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 about the school’s relationship with the business community and key university programs on the eve of its 120th commencement in May:

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

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. We’ve also created a similar thing in the area of renewable energy. 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 come where the best scientists are. It’s not accidental that Silicon Valley grew up around Stanford and Berkeley, because that’s where they had all these bright people.

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. 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.

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 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.

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

We’ve met with the various leadership groups in the business community. 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. 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.

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?”

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. 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 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.

We also worry that we’ve raised tuition 28 percent in two years. For many students, that’s a burden. 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.

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.

How can a university improve its rapport with a community?

I think part of it is my responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fact that we have such a low college-going rate tells us that we have, for some reason 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. 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.

A version of this story appears in this week’s In Business Las Vegas, a sister publication of the Sun.

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