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Opinion
Jul. 19, 2009
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

GLENN COOK: Look for more changes at UNLV

GLENN COOK
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Now that David Ashley is out as president of UNLV, it's just a question of time before his vice president of diversity and inclusion, Christine Clark, joins him in being demoted to faculty.

Clark's office personified the Ashley administration: unaccountable and dismissive of outside concerns and criticisms. Her enthusiastic pursuit of a politically correct dystopia included the development of an unconstitutional speech code that would have required campus police to investigate hurt feelings. Incredibly, she enjoyed Ashley's unconditional support.

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    • UNLV's Office of Diversity and Inclusion had a prominent role in the July 10 Board of Regents meeting that decided Ashley's fate. Clark's speech code -- and the threat it posed to academic freedom and free thought -- came up time and again.

    But it was an exchange between Regent Ron Knecht and Ashley that best illustrated why Ashley was removed from the administrative building.

    Knecht came to the meeting with a great deal of data about the Office of Diversity and Inclusion: information on how and why it was created, on how Ashley had allowed Clark to run amok, and how other institutions had managed to embrace and encourage diversity without creating new oppressive bureaucracies.

    As Knecht was asking Ashley about the office's budget, citing figures he had obtained from the university system, Ashley interrupted him to say that his numbers were culled from the media and were incorrect. It was a stunning display of ignorance and arrogance.

    "Ashley had taken an area of responsibility that could have been handled by an existing administrator or an assistant vice president at a salary of about $80,000, turned it into a tenured vice president and bucked up the cost to more than $400,000," Knecht said last week.

    And Ashley gave the impression that all the problems caused by Clark were media exaggerations.

    Fortunately, the rebuilding job at UNLV likely won't involve finding a replacement for Clark and her grossly high $160,000 salary. At some point in the next few months, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will be blown up, and the vice president position attached to it will disappear.

    It's not all good news for taxpayers, though. University system policy will let Clark get a semester-long paid vacation to ease her transition to a faculty position in the College of Education, where she will help indoctrinate future schoolteachers. Ugh.

    The elimination of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion might end up being one of the smallest post-Ashley changes at UNLV. There are rumblings of major moves coming in offices from one end of campus to another. That's good news for the campus and the public.

    -- -- --

    If legislative watchers thought Sen. Bill Raggio threw his weight around at the end of the 2009 session, they haven't seen anything yet. The Reno Republican's 2011 swan song is shaping up as his piece de resistance.

    As minority leader, Raggio had all the leverage in Carson City at the close of this year's session because Democrats lacked the two-thirds supermajority needed to raise taxes. Raggio ultimately gave the Democrats the votes they needed to raise taxes (and to override Gov. Jim Gibbons' veto), but in return got Democrats to vote for public employee retirement reforms and, most importantly, the expiration of the tax hikes in two years.

    Few people think Democrats can pick up two more seats in the state Senate in next year's election to get to that two-thirds threshold. In fact, Democrats might lose one seat. Tax-hiking Sen. Joyce Woodhouse has an even bigger bull's-eye on her back, thanks to the revelation that she got a $10,500 consulting contract from the Clark County School District. Her conservative Henderson district might not react favorably to the perception of political patronage.

    If Woodhouse loses next year and the Democrats' margin is 11-10, they'll need the term-limited Raggio to deliver three Republican votes to pass an all-new batch of tax increases. And Raggio will gladly comply -- at a steep price.

    Redistricting and reapportionment will be a dominant issue in 2011. Not only will Democrats seek to draw themselves permanent majorities in both houses, but Southern Nevada is in line to shift a couple of Senate seats and three or four Assembly seats from the north and the rurals into Clark County. Heck, they might even make Raggio's district disappear altogether.

    Raggio has made a career of screwing Southern Nevada, forcing Las Vegas Valley taxpayers to subsidize UNR at the expense of UNLV and the College of Southern Nevada and pay for his glorious superhighway between Reno and Carson City. If given the chance to forestall reapportionment for another decade -- or even expand the Legislature to preserve rural and Washoe County representation -- he'll grab it in a second. And he'll keep his beloved higher education funding formulas, which disproportionately favor the north, to boot.

    Bank on it.

     

    Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.

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    Peter J wrote on July 21, 2009 10:48 AM: abc
    You hit the nail right on the head and drove it clean through the plank. This is exactly whats planned for USA and the rest of the western world. The destruction of the "evil white oppressive male" and replacement with the poor souls who have been tortured and hurt by whites for centuries


    abc wrote on July 20, 2009 04:02 PM: Glenn continues the good fight, while so many local reporters try to ignore this outrageous story. Diversity (a code word for depriving white males of equal opportunity) is a creeping danger to our country. This UNLV department needs to be dismantled.

    "...Coming to America to feast on this cornucopia of freebies is the world. One million to 2 million immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive every year. They come with fewer skills and less education than Americans, and consume more tax dollars than they contribute by three to one.
    Wise Latina women have more babies north of the border than they do in Mexico and twice as many here as American women.
    As almost all immigrants are now Third World people of color, they qualify for ethnic preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to college over the children of Americans.
    All of this would have astounded and appalled the Founding Fathers, who after all, created America — as they declared loud and clear in the Constitution — “for ourselves and our posterity.” ...“The United States is declining as a nation and a world power with mostly sighs and shrugs to mark this seismic event,” writes Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine. “Astonishingly, some people do not appear to realize that the situation is all that serious.”
    http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-socialist-america-sinking-1600



    Jpe Soap wrote on July 19, 2009 11:23 PM: Another great review by Glenn. Yes hopefully they will demote Clark. Its unfortunate they cannot fire her outright. She spreads her vicious and vile far left agenda just like the KKK, there is no difference. And there is a reason why whites are afraid of blacks. Blacks are 17-22 time more likely to commit violent crimes. This is a fact Clark and is not racism. I am a UNLV faculty member and everyine who meets her hates her, she thinks she is on some mission. But even the "minorities" she supposedly champions thinks she is freak. She has single handley destroyed UNLV and made Ashley into a laughing stock. Apparently her father told her if she thought she was right then she was right, what a pathetic excuse for a father


    dwchem wrote on July 19, 2009 01:04 PM: Glenn,

    Please take a look at the office of Research on campus and the ~800K that was taken from overhead generated by research grants that came into UNLV based on the hard work of research professors. The money can be added to the 400K that Diversity was given at a time of severe budget constraints. The VPR has appointed himself czar of this project in the event that he steps down. How convienient.


    sheilacatherine wrote on July 19, 2009 09:30 AM: Perhaps Helen is hard of hearing?


    Anthony Wright wrote on July 19, 2009 09:24 AM: A good article with good insight.
    Thanks


    Dear Helen wrote on July 19, 2009 09:15 AM: John if Helen didn't do it in all upper case it would all be in lower case. It's kind of hard to use the shift key when you only use one finger to type.


    John wrote on July 19, 2009 09:04 AM: I'm glad Glenn continues to report on this stuff. No one else is.

    And Helen, do you understand how a modern keyboard works? There's a shift key for capitalizing the beginning of each sentence as well as proper nouns.

    This is DIFFERENT than the shift-lock key! Get it? Is yours stuck down? There's usually a little indicator light telling you this. Try it. You'll be amazed at the readability it creates!


    Sylvia wrote on July 19, 2009 08:49 AM: Also, check out what's happening at the law school:

    http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/17/law-students-lost-in-vegas/


    HELEN WEILS wrote on July 19, 2009 07:55 AM: IF WE'RE LUCKY RAT RAGGIO WILL KICK THE BUCKET BEFORE THE NEXT ELECTION.
    WHAT A LYING CROOK. SINATRA'S ATTORNEY
    AKA MAFIA AKA UNION DUMMYCRAT RHINO.


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