Voters should get another chance to fix state’s broken higher ed system

In trying to revive last year’s ballot question regarding governance of Nevada’s universities and colleges, state lawmakers are doing the right thing for higher education in the state. The question would remove the dysfunctional and disruptive Nevada Board of Regents from the state constitution, which would allow lawmakers to restructure the oversight of higher ed in the state.

But will voters have any different feeling about the ballot question than they did last year, when they narrowly voted it down?

That all depends on whether the resurrected version can be revised in a way to make it less confusing, and whether the proponents can properly educate voters on why it would bring about a change for the better.

State Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop, D-Las Vegas, and Assemblyman Tom Roberts, R-Las Vegas, are banking that the next time around will be different for the ballot question. Recently, the two teamed up to introduce a Senate joint resolution calling for it to return to the ballot.

Lawmakers should support the resolution. Despite the outcome of the 2020 vote, where the question failed by fewer than 4,000 votes, Nevada remains desperately in need of new and more accountable governance of its colleges.

As currently set up, the regents are an all-elected, 13-member board serving in a capacity much like a school board in a K-12 district. They direct the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) chancellor, whose position is akin to that of a superintendent in a school district.

It’s the only system of its type in the U.S., where most regents boards are a hybrid of elected members and members appointed by governors.

But in Nevada’s case, being unique isn’t a plus. Instead, the regents have become a de facto fourth branch of government whose members answer to no one beyond their own voters, who, in a busy world, often don’t pay much attention to the board’s goingson. Flying under the radar and nearly free of accountability, the regents and NSHE have engaged in all manner of bad behavior — abuses of power, misleading lawmakers, micromanaging schools, and much more.

If passed, the ballot question would leave lawmakers with several options to re-establishing accountability in the board and NSHE. One solution could be to follow the successful model of other states by adopting the hybrid model and reducing the size of the board.

UNLV in particular has suffered from this abysmal leadership. Examples abound, but one particularly damaging outcome of the regents’ dysfunction is that the university is on its seventh president since 2006 — an incredible string of discontinuity and disruption that has greatly hindered UNLV from making progress.

That’s created a deep, and possibly insurmountable, rift between UNLV supporters and the regents/NSHE. Those tensions boiled over in 2017 when, in the wake of the forced ouster of popular UNLV President Len Jessup over wildly overblown concerns about his management of the university, several donors either withdrew or reconsidered contributions for construction of a new building for the UNLV School of Medicine. The donors said they distrusted the regents to steward their money, and they still feel that way. They created a nonprofit development corporation to build the facility, which they’ll lease to UNLV for $1 a year, thus sidestepping the regents and NSHE.

There’s also a ridiculous amount of bloat and waste within the oversight system. Again, examples abound, but consider that for three months last year — during the teeth of an economic crisis that forced NSHE to make severe cutbacks and raise tuition — the system was paying the full salaries of both current chancellor Melody Rose ($437,750) and outgoing chancellor Thom Reilly ($425,000).

Because the regents are written into the constitution as a stand-alone body, however, lawmakers can do nothing to get their arms around problems like this until the board is removed from the document.

Doing that requires the Legislature to go through a constitutional amendment process, something it already approved in 2015 and 2017 but now is revisiting after the defeat of the 2020 question. Because the process requires lawmakers to vote twice on ballot questions before they go before voters, the soonest the new version would go on the ballot is 2024.

Exactly why that question failed is a matter of speculation. It had a strong supporter group and no formal opposition, although the self-interested regents blew back on it.

But one likely culprit is that voters may have found the language about removing the regents from the constitution to be foreboding. It certainly could be interpreted as negative — who wants to give up something in the constitution, after all?

But should the Senate resolution pass, it would be another change to explain to voters that they’re really not losing anything, but rather gaining a grip on an out-of-control governance system.

If passed, the ballot question would leave lawmakers with several options to re-establishing accountability in the board and NSHE. One solution could be to follow the successful model of other states by adopting the hybrid model and reducing the size of the board.

The first step, though, is to get the question back on the ballot, hopefully in a revised form that eases voters’ concerns about the language. The second step is to mount a massive education campaign to explain why passage of the question is important.

Maybe the question will fail again. But for the sake of our colleges, the students and their families, voters deserve a second bite at this apple.