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Nevada Chancellor Fires Off Parting Shots
By admin | June 30, 2009
Nevada Chancellor Fires Off Parting Shots
James E. Rogers, the obstreperous chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, is spending his last day on the job after a sometimes stormy five-year tenure.
By 2006, for example, the presidents of the state’s two major institutions, Carol C. Harter of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and John M. Lilley of the University of Nevada at Reno, had resigned. Mr. Rogers later acknowledged that he had played a role in urging both to leave.
In 2007, Mr. Rogers himself resigned with a letter to the regents that said, simply, “I quit.” He retracted his resignation two days later.
Since threatening to run for governor in 2008, Mr. Rogers, a wealthy media mogul, has engaged in a nearly nonstop political battle with Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican and a former member of Congress.
True to form, the outspoken chancellor fired off a final message to the state’s residents and lawmakers, taking aim at both for their lack of support for higher education.
“Unless there is a substantial change in the attitude of most Nevadans so that the public will support a Legislature that believes it has the green light to adequately fund higher education, the future of the system will remain embedded in mediocrity,” Mr. Rogers wrote in the last of his weekly memos.
“But Nevada has always thought that because its residents could feed, house, and clothe themselves with an eighth-grade education, an eighth-grade education was the only ‘dream’ of Nevadans,” he added.
While Mr. Rogers was sometimes criticized for his take-no-prisoners attitude, Nevada’s higher-education system may be able to measure his accomplishments with some basic math.
Facing a vast budget shortfall, Governor Gibbons recommended a 36-percent cut in higher-education funds. But Mr. Rogers lobbied lawmakers, who ended up cutting less than half of that amount for the fiscal year that begins tomorrow.
With a rise in tuition and the inclusion of federal stimulus money, the state’s higher-education system could lose less than 5 percent of its state aid next year. —Eric Kelderman
Topics: Education |