When it’s about education, let’s not cut corners

Sunday, Dec. 7, 2014 | 2 a.m.

When UNLV needed a new president, a $150,000 nationwide search was launched. Candidates were identified by a headhunter, and the list was whittled down. Finalists visited the campus and met administrators, faculty, staff and students. Then the Board of Regents, the elected body that oversees the Nevada System of Higher Education, with great confidence hired Len Jessup away from the University of Arizona to run UNLV. He’s a business and management expert and a firecracker fundraiser.

But other key jobs in our higher ed system are filled with no effort to identify the best possible candidates nationwide, and as a matter of principle, that causes us concern.

Last year, Chancellor Dan Klaich, CEO of the Nevada System of Higher Education, decided to hire an executive vice chancellor — his second in command. The person would be based in Las Vegas and specifically pay attention to UNLV, Nevada State College, the College of Southern Nevada and the Desert Research Institute, freeing Klaich to deal with higher ed in the North while also focusing on systemwide issues such as budgeting, lobbying and interacting with campus presidents statewide.

There is no dispute that Klaich had the right to hire an executive vice chancellor; in fact, he held that post previously, under then-Chancellor Jim Rogers.

In Klaich’s initial search for an executive vice chancellor, announcements were posted in two Nevada newspapers, on the NSHE website and online job-posting sites. There was no headhunter.

Fifteen candidates surfaced. Klaich didn’t like any of them. Then, still without the help of a national recruiting firm, he asked Catherine Cortez Masto to be his No. 2. Cortez Masto’s name will sound familiar: She will be leaving her job in January as our termed-out attorney general.

Klaich’s decision was news to most of the 13 members of the Board of Regents. With a couple of exceptions, the regents learned with the rest of us that he hired Cortez Masto. Some of them got their noses out of joint. (Kevin Page, the chair of the Board of Regents, said afterward that Klaich shared with him the intention to hire Masto, but “there may be an appetite that the regents should be involved in all chancellor and vice chancellor hires. We haven’t been. I think we should.”)

At the least, the regents will be asked in January to approve Cortez Masto’s annual $215,000 salary.

Cortez Masto might be a perfect No. 2 for Klaich. She has been an outstanding attorney general and served as an assistant Clark County manager and chief of staff to then-Gov. Bob Miller. And before she was tapped by Klaich for the job, Cortez Masto was awarded a national fellowship to explore education reforms.

But for a role this important, why didn’t Klaich post the opening more aggressively across the country? Klaich says he would have looked beyond the state had Cortez Masto, whom he described as a perfect fit, not accepted the offer.

Did Nevada get the best possible person for the job? Maybe, but we don’t know.

Nevada can’t afford to give short shrift in recruiting the best possible people for executive posts that may influence the direction of higher education.

“If I were doing the hiring, I would have cast a wider net,” Page said. “The wider you look, the more options you have.”

We agree: For jobs of this importance, look far and wide.

For now, Page said he is comfortable with Cortez Masto as Klaich’s No. 2. We are too, but we are uncomfortable with the process that put her there.