Nevada Chancellor Dan Klaich agrees with UNLV President Neal Smastrek – restoring faculty pay back to the pre-5% cut level is the top priority of UNLV.
Forget the four-year graduation rates hovering around 15%, ignore the fact that staff are utilizing the food pantry to make ends meet and disregard that UNLV’s student government, CSUN, has received a record number of scholarship applications, including those for the Emergency Aid Scholarship, with more students applying this semester than have applied in every previous year since its inception. To Klaich, all of those issues take a back seat to restoring faculty pay to the pre cut levels.
When asked why he agreed with President Smastrek and didn’t consider the aforementioned items more disconcerting, Klaich responded that well-paid faculty is the “backbone” of a “nationally competitive” university.
Klaich was told of the record number of students applying for emergency aid scholarships and then asked, “If UNLV needs more money for faculty pay, what should be cut so that the tuition burden on students isn’t increased?” Klaich said that he’s “not for raising fees to pay faculty salaries” but said, “A part of the burden will be borne by student fees.” He reassured the students in the journalism class that he was speaking to that the students that will pay for faculty will be future students, not current ones.
Although students have had tuition raised time and time again, Klaich said that he believes the tuition increases are fair and that all students should share the burden.
When students in the journalism class asked what he thought about students who drop out of UNLV to accept high paying, low skill jobs on the Las Vegas Strip, Klaich quipped, “It’s great if you (students) want nowhere to go” in their careers.
Klaich said that the university needs more students graduating, yet he couldn’t explain why UNLV doesn’t recruit students who take the ACT or SAT to attend the university. Instead, Klaich stressed a need to get rid of the high school proficiency exam in Nevada and that “we (UNLV) have to reach down to middle schools as to why college is important.”
Students at UNLV face uncertainty with tuition increases that outpace the rate of inflation, courses that have fewer classes available and more grad students teaching courses. To add to the red tape of the university, UNLV doesn’t accept the same CLEP credit as the University of Nevada at Reno or certain classes at CSN, posing more headaches for transfer students.
When asked why UNLV doesn’t accept CLEP credit for general education classes that UNR accepts, Chancellor Klaich stood up for students, saying, “We should do whatever we can do to get rid of that nonsense. There’s no excuse for that.”
With so many groups vying for preferential treatment from the Board of Regents and the Chancellor, time will tell if students’ educations and their financial burden will be a factor in the upcoming funding formula meeting.
