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THE PRESIDENT FIGHTS BACK Genuinely angry and despondent over Governor Sandoval’s draconian budget cuts, UNLV President Neal Smatresk is just starting to fi ght. Game on. by Steve Green photography by Christopher DeVargas THE BACK STORY With unemployment in Las Vegas running at 13.7 percent, even college graduates are fi nding it tough to fi nd jobs. The recession has decimated state general fund revenue, which is projected at $5.8 billion for the coming biennium. That’s down from $6.2 billion in the current two-year period ending in June. With that kind of math, and lit le appetite for tax increases in Carson City, UNLV and the rest of Nevada’s higher education system is preparing for Gov. Brian Sandoval’s proposed 22 percent cut to already trimmed-down college and university budgets. With spending reduced $742 million, this will result in faculty layoff s and elimination of entire programs. At UNLV, President Neal Smatresk last month reacted by proposing cuts of $32.6 million and the loss of 315 faculty and staff positions. If these cuts go through, UNLV will have seen cuts totaling $97 million and 855 positions over a fi ve-year period. | 4 APRIL 2011 | to for VEGAS INC a compelling argument that would make sense to CEOs: State funding for UNLV is not spending, but an inves tment in the Southern Nevada economy. And as a CEO of any corporation would surely understand, reductions in investments by their very nature usually result in reductions in revenue. In other words, as Carson City cuts UNLV, fewer N UNLV faculty and staff will be spending money locally. Fewer nonresident students will move here, rent apartments and buy groceries. Fewer federal dollars in the form of grants to UNLV will be multiplying through the economy. eal Smatresk looks fi t and rested. You wouldn’t know that UNLV’s president is enduring despair, anger and genuine frustration. Through a window in his seventh-fl oor offi ce, Smatresk can see a portion of the Maryland Parkway campus that’s about to be decimated by faculty layoffs—a campus that soon will be turning away some students for a lack of resources. Smatresk has the unenviable task of explaining why UNLV should be spared from further cuts—unenviable because he knows the big tourism and construction industries in Las Vegas have themselves shed 75,000 jobs since 2008 . But, dressed like a CEO, Smatresk matter-of-factly lays out What follows are highlights of our conversation: EXCLUSIVE “If you’re GM you might cut your losers, but you’re going to keep your profi t centers. We’re a profi t center for the state, but the state seems to view us as a cost. We need to change that thinking,’’ Smatresk said during our interview, which he called his most extensive to date on the coming cuts. Should the higher education community take some of the blame for the current predicament for not bet er communicating your story about the value of UNLV when times were good? Yes. But I think our state has never placed high value in higher education. We’ve always been the budget balancer. As other parts of the budget mandatorily grew, the mantra was “They can always charge more tuition.” So we get squeezed because K-12 can’t charge tuition. I don’t want it to seem like I’m pitted against K-12 because they’re our sister educational limb. But every year it’s the same thing, we get the biggest cuts. This is just the same, except the cuts are bigger. Should we have done a better job of explaining it? We tried and there was a mixed bag of strategies used. A lot of folks thought that when we took the $50 million in cuts we’ve already taken that we were crying wolf and it wouldn’t really hurt us. 31