Oral History Project
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Joseph Buckley Wing Fong Pat Goodall Harold Boyer Ty Hilbrecht Jim Jones |
Bert Purdue J.A. Tiberti David Welles Kenneth Miller Donald Aikin |
Dr. LeonardE. Goodall, has been a resident of Las Vegas since 1979. Dr. Goodall is a former President of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He joined the Las Vegas Rotary Club in 1980 and served as Director from 1988-92. He is a Paul Harris Fellow.
Today is April the 18th, 2002. I’m interviewing Dr. Leonard F. “Pat” Goodall, Rotarian and former president of University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We’re at the Lied Library on the UNLV campus, and this is Patrick Carlton, Interviewer.
Dr. Goodall, I wonder,if you would please start by telling us about your birthplace and how it was you came to be in Las Vegas.
Okay. Well, I was born in Warrensburg, Missouri, which is a little college town about 60 miles east of Kansas City. Home of Central Missouri State University. And I have literally lived all of my life in or around university campuses. I had faculty as neighbors when I was a child, and grew up in Warrensburg. Had the uniqueexperience of attending all 12 years of school in one building. The elementary school was in one wing of the building, and the junior/senior high school was in the other wing. So I started in first grade, graduated from that building 12 years later, from high school, then moved about three blocks down the street to Central Missouri State College. Got my degree there. I graduated from Central Missouri State in 1958. Went to the University of Missouri, took a master’s in 1960. University of Illinois and took a doctorate in 1962.
And then my first teaching job was at Arizona State University. I had never been west of the Rocky Mountains, and in those days, universities had no money to recruit or to bring you out, so I was hired on a telephone call and literally had never seen Arizona State when I arrived to be a faculty member. We arrived there in August of 1962, and saw a thermometer on a bank that said 117 degrees, and we thought we’d come to the end of the world. Actually, we liked it very much. Arizona State was a very good experience. I was on the faculty there five years, and then spent four years at the University of Illinois-Chicago. And while I was on the faculty at the University of Illinois-Chicago, I was asked to become vice-chancellor. So I became vice-chancellor there, and then in 1971, became chancellor of the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus. Spent eight years in that job, and then in 1979, was asked to come here as president. So I came to UNLV as president in 1979, and that’s how we arrived in Las Vegas. And I must say, the original experience in Phoenix at Arizona State made us fall in love with the southwest, and so when this opportunity came to come back to the southwest, that was one of the reasons we did. We like it very much here.
Your academic field is what?
Political Science/Public Administration. My department here is Public Administration.
As a young person, we’ll slip back for just a second here –
Sure.
Please talk a little bit about your childhood. You reflected on the fact that you had been in one building for 12 years, so you probably knew the neighbors well. Could you talk about who your neighbors were, and who your playmates were, and how you spent your time, that sort of thing?
Sure. I lived within walking distance of the school, and so would walk back and forth. I had other kids my age that lived nearby. We sometimes would play touch football after school, or baseball. One family that lived across the street ran a greenhouse, and that same family still has that greenhouse in the same location in Warrensburg. Third generation, I guess, own the greenhouse now. My father was in business, actually had a building behind where we lived. So when I would come home, my parents would be there. That is, my father would be out in back working, and my mother was his secretary, and so they were not very far away, although they were both working. We’d come home, and they would be around. And so I again, lived all of my life in one house. From the time I was born until I graduated from college, and went to the University of Missouri as a graduate student. And so I had a very stable kind of childhood and education at that time.
What was the business your father was in?
My father manufactured lawnmowers. He originally had been a mechanic in a Ford garage, and my mother was a waitress, and they actually met when he would go take his meals at the restaurant where she worked, and then later, he developed a lawnmower business, and she came to work for him.
So when you went to college, did you do all your degrees in political science, or was that something you moved into?
No. Central Missouri State did not have a political science major, per se. I had what was called a social science major. And that included political science, history, economics, sociology. Then at the University of Missouri, where I took my master’s, I had both political science and a minor in economics on my master’s. And then the same was true at the University of Illinois. I had a political science first field, economics second field at Illinois. So that was pretty much my background at that time.
How large a school was it at the time you went through your undergraduate years?
Probably about three or four thousand. It was a small institution. Actually, it was Central Missouri State College when I went there, and I literally gave the last commencement address ever given at Central Missouri State College, because the following year they named it Central Missouri State University. So that must have been about ’70 or ’71, I’m not sure.
When did you meet your wife and marry and what is her name?
Her name is Lois, and we met in college. We met at Central Missouri State. She grew up in Odessa, Missouri, which is a town about 30 miles from Warrensburg, and she came there as a student. She was a year behind me, but we met in college, and were married then right after she graduated and after I had finished six months in the military.
So you were on active duty somewhere and had to go away?
I went away, but I wasn’t very far. I was at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, which is not very far away.
And you have children, and could you talk about them?
I have three children. Our oldest daughter lives in Iowa. They have four children, including two twins. All girls. And we have a son here in Las Vegas, and they have three children, all girls. And then we have a daughter and son-in-law in Phoenix, and they have two children, a girl and a boy. So of the nine grandchildren, we have one grandson and eight granddaughters.
I know things have evolved a little since we were younger. I wonder if you could talk about what you might call the courting practices at the time when you met your wife. How did one go about wooing or dating and becoming friends with a young woman?
Well, it was very common I think, at that time, that you met at college. And that was the case. She happened to live in a rooming house next door to where a good friend of mine lived. So I would go to see him, and she was in the rooming house next door. She lived just across the street from campus, and most of our dating involved university programs. We’d go to university activities, and that kind of thing. So very much the university campus was where we would date and where we first became acquainted, and then throughout our dating was around the university campus. And then married just a few weeks after she graduated. I had graduated a year earlier and had gone into the military. But the university campus was very much a part of that process.
I wonder if you could talk about what hobbies or extracurricular activities were of interest to you as a younger person, and maybe still are now.
I’ve always enjoyed traveling. I enjoy reading. I have a stamp collection, and have a political items collection of pins, buttons, things of that type. I have campaign buttons going back to campaigns even earlier than Lincoln, and right up to the present time. Some of them very valuable, most of them not very valuable, probably. My wife and I both enjoy traveling quite a bit, and we do a lot of that.
Now in the early years, were you active in civic clubs, and if so, which ones?
Well, I first joined the Rotary Club in Dearborn, Michigan in 1971. We moved there in the summer of ’71 when I took the chancellorship, and then I joined the [Las Vegas] Rotary Club that fall. And I’ve been active in Rotary all the time. Since my wife and I are both active in church activities, we have our activities there. I’ve been on a number of civic boards and programs of that type. But I’ve been a Rotarian since ’71 up to the present, over 30 years now.
And I believe the record suggests that you joined this club here, the Las Vegas club, in 1980, and of course have been a continuous member since that time.
That’s right. That’s right.
So that you were a member during your presidency of this university.
Yes, that’s right, yes.
Do you have any perfect attendance years, and if so, how many?
I do not, no.
What types of offices at the local club level have you held in Dearborn and in Las Vegas?
I was on the board of directors here. Served on the scholarship committee. Served on various committees that involved the university and the support of university programs. Have often been on committees to help choose students who were receiving awards of some kind. Our club here has the annual Rotary Medallion that we give to the top graduate at UNLV, and that’s an interesting program in that at the time of the Nevada centennial celebration, [1964] exactly 100 of those were prepared. And each year, a student gets one, and about the year 2060 or something, they’ll have to decide whether to continue that project, and make a hundred more, because they’re going one by one. (They laugh.)
I believe they’re made of silver, are they not?
Yes they are. Nevada silver.
I haven’t seen one.
They’re very nice. They’re in the shape of the state of Nevada, and then embedded in the middle is the silver coin, a silver medallion that is made of Nevada silver.
Very nice. You’ve observed the Rotary Club of Las Vegas since 1980, so that’s well over twenty years. I wonder if you would describe the club in terms of its organization and sort of the general interest and philosophy of that particular club.
The Las Vegas club is the oldest club in town, and when I first moved here, there were a couple of other clubs, but it was by far the largest. It probably had more of the older, established leadership of the community than the other clubs. Today we must have sixteen, seventeen clubs. Something like that. So that has changed over time. But certainly, it was viewed as the club that had a lot of the leadership of the community in it. A lot of the established, familiar family names like Tiberti were in that club, and so it was very much that kind of institution. I remember that Liberace, the famous musician, his brother was in the club when I first joined, and always had the same table, always sat at the same place every week, and was very friendly, very outgoing, of course had a lot of history because he had played as a musician supporting his brother.
There’ve been different people in the club who were close to Howard Hughes when Hughes was having his years in Las Vegas, so it’s an interesting club with a lot of different kinds of people and backgrounds.
And who was the club president when you joined, and who was the club secretary?
I can’t remember who the club secretary was. Mike Hoover was the president. Mike was the local scout executive. He was the head of the Boy Scouts here, and I was on his board of directors. I was on the Boy Scout Council. And Mike was head of the Boy Scouts, later I think became scout executive in the northwest. I think he did Portland or Seattle, and I believe continues to be in scouting even today. But he was my first club president, and of course, because of his own professional background, he had a lot of interest in youth and young people’s programs, and so he had good connection with the university.
I believe you said that Don Aiken followed Mr. Hoover as president.
That’s right. Don was a good president. And I also knew Don because he was a referee in the athletic conference of which UNLV was a member. So I remember Don in that capacity. Don then went on to serve at the district level.
I believe he was the district governor at one time.
Yes.
It says here that during Don’s term a barbeque pit was erected by eight members of the Twenty-Five Club. Have you heard anything about that and what it was that caused that to occur?
You know, I do not. I don’t even know where it was. Twenty-Five Club consists of the 25 newest members of the Rotary Club, although they’re very loose in defining that. At any given time, there may be 20 members or 30 members, but it’s essentially the newest members of the club. It’s because the club is a large club – it was even larger then – it was a way to give them – instead of trying to just be dropped into a huge organization where you’d kind of be like a fish out of water and not knowing anybody – this gave you a chance to get to know 25 other people fairly well. That was the philosophy of the Twenty-Five Club.
That makes sense. It also says here that The Wheel was changed during Don Aiken’s year, and received a trophy for excellence in formatting. I wondered if that made any kind of an impression.
The Wheel is the weekly publication of the club. It’s always been a very good publication. I’ve attended a lot of Rotary Clubs, and I don’t know of any that have had a better weekly publication than we have. We’ve been fortunate often to have people in the club who were in the printing business, and things of that type. So we’ve been able to have just a very good weekly publication. It’s been The Wheel for as long as I remember, and it’s been a strong part of the club.
I’m wondering if you can recall the different places the club has held its meetings since 1980 when you joined.
Actually, they sort of moved up the strip. Before I joined, they were meeting at the Tropicana, I understand. I never met at the Tropicana with them, but they met at the Tropicana. Then when I joined, they were meeting at the Flamingo Hilton. In fact, when I was sworn in as a member, it was at the Flamingo Hilton. Then they moved north again to what was then called the Holiday Casino, now Harrah’s. And we met at Harrah’s, or the Holiday Casino. Each of these places, in the showrooms, so you were in where the big shows took place at night. We met at the Holiday Casino for a number of years, and then next moved to the Desert Inn.
Actually, we had decided to move. What happened was, hotels do not like to tie up a room every Thursday noon week after week, because it crimps them in terms of having conventions or whatever that comes. So we would often get bumped. They’d say, “Well you can’t meet this week, we’ll have a smaller room over here.” And so often we’d find ourselves in less than satisfactory facilities. So we had decided we were going to look around and try to find a place to meet. To leave the Desert Inn.
Well just about that time, we found we had no choice, because just about the time we made the decision to move, Steve Wynn bought it, and it was going to be closed down. So we in effect made a decision sooner than they made a decision. That’s when we moved to Lawry’s. Lawry’s has worked out very well for us. It’s off the strip and has easier parking. The one thing that I think that perhaps is not quite as good are the acoustics. It’s sometimes a little harder to hear, because they have the low ceiling, whereas we were always before in a showroom, which was actually built to have good acoustics and good sound and what have you. But other than that, Lawry’s has worked out very nicely, and we get good food there.
I remember seeing a picture which had a large curtain or backdrop with hundreds of [Rotary] banners.
Yes! That is one of the things that we no longer can do. In each of the hotels, when we were in a showroom, we would have a curtain as big as the curtains that closed before the end of the shows. And that whole huge curtain would have flags on it from around the world, where people would come and bring us a flag from their local club, and that would be sewn on that curtain. And so again, we had that in each of the hotels where we met. And of course, the only time it’d ever be closed would be when we were meeting. They wouldn’t have it for use for anything else. But it’d hang there, and as long as we were in the showrooms, we could have that. Obviously at Lawry’s, we can’t, and that’s a major loss, because we were always very proud of that, and it was something that probably no other club in the world has quite the same as that huge curtain. Someplace, we still have all of the flags that came off of the curtains. But that’s a major project that we no longer have.
I suspect it would take a committee just to keep that thing up to speed.
Oh goodness, yes.
Please talk a little about the kinds of projects that the Rotary Club has been pursuing during your years of membership. Things that seemed important to you.
Okay. Well, I remember early on -- There’s always been an interest in youth projects, and early on there was helping to build a park over on the east side of town, and I may mispronounce it, the Joe Shoong Park, or the Joe Chung park, something of that type, where we helped provide playground equipment, went out and installed it, kept in maintained, and things of that type. I believe that that was probably started early, either under Mike Hoover or Don Aiken. Irvin Kishner has had a long interest in that, and through the year, Irv would help us each year or so, organize a work day to go out and either install new equipment or be sure the equipment we had was in good shape. Again, that was a youth project. We have had highway cleanup projects. We have had a lot of programs where we provide financial support to different organizations. Today, we have adopted an elementary school, and provide money for each of the – It’s a school in an at-needs area of the city. We take the kids to basketball and football games, and then provide additional money to every teacher in that school so that they can do things that they wouldn’t be able to do just on the school budget. A couple of months ago, I had a woman come up to me at church, and I didn’t know what her background was, and she said, “You’re in the Rotary Club, aren’t you?” And I said yes, and she said, “I’m a teacher at the school.” And she knew about it, and she said, “I just want to thank you for what your club does for those of us who are teachers, because the money that you provide is very important to us in terms of being able to do things for these kids that we wouldn’t have money to do otherwise.”
The name of the school, please?
I’m trying to think of it, and I… it begins with a B and I want to Brinkley, but anyway, it’s a local elementary school.
Any other projects? It seems that you mentioned a while ago ambassadorial scholarships.
Yes, we’ve had a variety of scholarship programs. Of course, we participate in the Rotary [4 Way] Speech Contest, and one of the things I’ve done a lot of times is judge that speech contest. We also have in the district a music contest, and we’ve had club members that were active participants in helping identify students to participate in that and go on to district [level].
To what extent has this club been, and is this club involved in the Paul Harris Fellows program that RI runs?
Well, there’s a strong emphasis on the Paul Harris Fellowship program. I would say that probably a great majority of our members are Paul Harris Fellows, and we have some that are Paul Harris Fellows many times over. So there’s a strong support of that program in the club.
Has there been much opportunity for student exchange, incoming students from other countries to stay with Rotarians?
Yes, there have been some of those, and they’ve stayed with Rotarians, they’ve come to the club and have often given speeches about their own background or their own clubs, and then we’ve had people that we’ve supported who’ve gone abroad, too, and then have come back and spoken about their projects back with us.
To your recollection, which club members have served at the district or national level in Rotary, that is, have gone beyond the club level?
Two that I remember, of course, have been District Governor: Don Aiken and Ken Miller. They’re not the only District Governors that we’ve had from the club. I’m trying to think.
Joe Buckley.
Joe Buckley’s another one. That’s right. Joe’s the one I was trying to think of. Joe was at the meeting today. So those three have gone on. I believe also that Ken Miller has served on – I don’t think he was the National Director, but he served in a number of positions in the international organization, on committees and that kind of thing.
I’ve heard people comment that because of our peculiar location, being so far away from district headquarters in California, that it has not always been possible to have the fullest interaction. What has your impression been of the relationship between the Nevada clubs and the California clubs?
Well that was probably true, again, when there were fewer clubs, and there were only two or three here, and so they seemed to be kind of isolated. Today, where you have 15, 16, 17 clubs here, I think there’s a lot of interaction with each other. Easy to make up. You could probably make up any breakfast or any lunch any day of the week now. You can find a place here in the Vegas area. So there are a lot more people and probably a lot more interaction than there used to be simply because there’s more people involved, and you don’t have to drive to Barstow or something to make up a meeting. (They laugh.)
It would be helpful if you could give an overall assessment of Rotary’s contributions to the development of Las Vegas and of course, more particularly, to the development of the university.
I think through the years, many of the leading people in the community had been Rotarians, and the Rotarians had provided a lot of leadership for the city. For many years, the Las Vegas Rotary Club had three honorary members. The mayor of Las Vegas, the president of UNLV, and the commanding general of Nellis Air Force Base were honorary members. That meant they could come when they wanted to, if they had time. They didn’t have to, but they were always welcome, and there was an interaction among them. And then of course I was actually an active member as well as being University President. And I think that we’ve had mayors that have been active members as well as being in their position at City Hall. But there has been a real effort to have that kind of tie, and a lot of old time leadership. Guild Gray, who was for many years superintendent of schools. There’s a school named for Guild Gray today. Guild was a longtime member of the Rotary Club as well as being longtime superintendent here. There was the Von Tobel family, members of the Tiberti family. People like this who have simply been the names you associate with old Las Vegas.
I think I saw a Cashman in there.
Yes, indeed. I believe that we had three generations of Cashmans in the club, and perhaps all of them served as president. I’m not sure about that. Strong tie with the Cashman family.
And you’ve already talked about the medals and so forth. Are there other projects that you’re aware of that the club has sponsored or carried out on behalf of the university.
Well of course here in this building, we have the Harold Boyer reading room, which is not far away. Hal Boyer was a longtime member of our club, passed away just a few months ago. But there are many ties like that in terms of people from here who have been members. Our vice-president John Gallagher, a member of the club, former athletic director, was a member of the club. Our provost was a member of the club. I’m trying to think – One of early ones, actually before I came. The first dean here of education.
[William] Carlson.
Yeah. Bill Carlson. Bill was a member of the Rotary Club, and although he never carried the title “president,” he was probably the first what you’d call Chief Executive Officer on this campus. He carried the title “Dean,” and was appointed from Reno. And that would have been in the early 1960s. And he probably would have been in the Rotary Club at the time of the Centennial. That probably was the tie with the medals, because he would have been the senior officer here as well as being a Rotarian. So he would have been active. Since long before I came, there have been university ties with the club.
In the Carlson building where my office is, they have a large bulletin board, and they have a picture of Dr. Carlson on the wall. The bulletin was donated by the Rotary Club of Las Vegas [in 1983].
And his wife is still living here and still active in women’s affairs around town. My wife knows her very, very well, and so there are a lot of ties like that.
As a follow up on that, we talked about adopting the elementary school. One of the things that we do is bring those kids to UNLV. They go to basketball games, football games, and then one of our great projects is every Christmas, we take a group of needy children to JC Penney’s. We’ve been fortunate to have the JC Penney managers in the club over the years. And they have a morning of being able to buy clothing and what have you. We buy it at wholesale prices, but they can go in and shop for a morning at JC Penney before Christmas. Then we finish that morning by bringing them here, and usually have our basketball players visit with them and talk with them and actually play basketball with them, so it’s been a very nice tie between the club and the kids at the school and the university.
That’s a great project. This is tape one, side two, continuation of interview with Dr. Goodall. I wonder if you would talk a little bit about the events that led up to your joining the staff at UNLV, including the vision that you brought to the job as president, and your plans for the enhancement of the institution at the time you came.
Well, there’s an interesting anecdote, I can tell you about that. This would have been January of 1971. I had gone with the delegation from Michigan to the Rose Bowl where the University of Michigan was playing. And on the way back, my wife and I and some other Michigan people stopped here and went and stayed at the Hilton Hotel. The same Hilton Hotel, it’s still where it was. I rented a car, and I thought, I’ve heard there’s a university here, and I will go see if I can visit it. So I drove down Maryland Parkway, and couldn’t find the university. Finally, up here, it’s still there, there’s a laundromat up there on Maryland Parkway, just south of Flamingo. I pulled in there, and I went in the laundromat, and I said, “I hear there’s a university around here someplace. Can you tell me where it is?” And they said, “You’re just about two blocks from it. Just keep on going south on Maryland, and you’ll be right there.” So I drove down Maryland Parkway, and of course, it was Christmas vacation, so there weren’t many people around, but I walked around campus. The bookstore was open. I went in, wandered around the bookstore, looked at books and what have you, and thought, “Well, that’s nice, I visited another campus.” Got back in the car and went back to the Hilton, and we spent our time here, and flew back to Michigan.
When I got back, I had a telephone call waiting for me. On the morning that I had been wandering around this campus, I had received a phone call from Darlene Unruh, who was chairman of the search committee, looking for a president for the campus. And she wanted to tell me that I had been nominated, and would I be interested? And so at that point, having been here and having no notion about this, I then filled out, sent her the papers and so forth, and it was really several months later, you know how long those searches go. But then probably in April I was invited out for a visit and it was soon after that that I was offered the position, accepted the position, and we moved here late in the summer of ’71 (sic).
And who was the incumbent president at that time?
Don Boepler had been president, and Don had been appointed chancellor. So the reason the position was vacant was that the president had moved to the chancellorship and they were having a search to replace Don.
Did either Dr. Boepler or the search committee give you marching orders about things that they expected you do if you came, or were you your own man?
I’ll just say there was a lot of questioning of the usual kinds of things, working with the legislature, wanting to know about background, and that sort of thing. I remember giving a speech, at an open meeting over in the lobby of the Judy Bayley Theater where anybody who wanted to could attend, and the search committee was there, and I remember the press was there. Anyway, I gave a speech there. I guess all the other candidates had done so, too on other days and, but that was the way it really began, and I think – You know, I had gone through this before. One of the things that I had going for me was I was on the newer campus of a state university system. And I found that the rhetoric was always the same. People in the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois are worried about the Urbana campus. People on the Dearborn [campus] worried about Ann Arbor, and people at UNLV [were] worried about Reno. And so the script was about the same. You simply changed the names in the script. I think because I had the experience of working in a multi-campus system and not being on the oldest, most senior campus, they felt that was good experience for the kind of things that would occur here. Also, I had served on what would be considered to be the “urban” campuses. I was on the Chicago campus, I was on the metropolitan Detroit campus, and UNLV, of course, is a much more urban campus than Reno. So those campuses had that in common.
I believe by then this was already UNLV and not Nevada Southern.
Yes, that’s right. Nevada Southern – That change occurred really in the late ‘60s. Don Moyer was president at that time. In fact, Don Moyer would have been the only person – is the only person – ever to carry the title of both chancellor and president. When he was hired, the person at Reno had the title president, and he was called the chancellor of Nevada Southern. Then when they adopted a system, they gave the term chancellor to the system officer, and made each campus have a president. So Don had both titles, actually, because he was there at the time of that change. And that was in’68, it was – eleven years later that I would have come after that had occurred.
You mentioned relations with the legislature. I assume you had to spend a good deal of time in Carson City.
I did. We did not, in those days, have hired lobbyists. Today, we have government relations people at the university that really spend most of their time there. I probably, when the legislature was in session, would spend at least a day a week in Carson City. And the Reno president would probably spend one or two days. The chancellor did some, and then the chancellor’s financial officers. A lot of legislative relations is dealing with the budget. The system financial officer that worked for the chancellor would be down there a lot. But the two presidents carried a lot of the lobbying burden at that time because there was no legislative relations specialist, per se.
During those early years, to what extent was the relationship between you as our president and the sitting president of UNR one of cooperation as opposed to [conflict.]
Well, Joe Crowley and I, we got along very well. I had the greatest of respect for Joe, and while there was the normal rivalry between north and south, it certainly was not a personal rivalry. I think that Reno was fortunate to have Joe, and I always found him very supportive and very helpful, and to this day think very highly of Joe. Joe had the unique experience of being one of the longest serving president in the country. When Joe stepped down just about a year ago, he had been president for twenty-some years up there, and so he was a very long-time president. So while we sometimes were on opposite side of issues, we had a very good personal relationship.
It’ll be interesting to see how the current issue works out about this new building going up down the road in Henderson, whatever it’s going to be called.
Yes. I’ve not followed it that closely, other than just the newspapers. I don’t have any special [information].
It’s going to be interesting. When you came, obviously you were here what, eight years as President?
I was six years in the presidency. Six years.’79 to ’85.
I wonder if you would reflect on the things you were most proud of as accomplishments as president.
Well, I think every president of UNLV could probably list the buildings that were built when they were president, because it’s been a constantly expanding, growing campus. And we were able to again, hire very good faculty during that period of time.
I suppose that there were a couple of things that I was – probably were most important to the university. One would have been the creation of the UNLV Foundation. That occurred while I was president. Of course, the University of Michigan Foundation was a well-established institution, and I was familiar with working with the foundation, and so strongly supported that idea. And I think that gave a strong financial underpinning to the academic side of the campus, in addition to what came from the legislature. It has become even far more important through the years than it ever was when I was president. But I think the creation of that was probably something that was very important.
And then on the athletic side, it was building the Thomas and Mack Center. And again, I parallel those because the Thomas and Mack center provided a new level of financial underpinning on the athletic side of the campus, in the sense that up to that time, the most people that we could ever have at an athletic event was about 7,000 because we rented the Convention Center. We’d play our basketball games down there, and you never could have a big crowd. Well when we built the Thomas and Mack Center, almost immediately you could have 18,000 people, all paying. All buying tickets. And so at the same time we had the Foundation generating a new stream of revenue on the academic side we had the Thomas and Mack generating a new stream of revenue on the athletic side, and I think those two things gave the campus sort of a leap forward in their respective areas.
Other buildings that were built while I was president would be Beam Hall. We have several Beam Halls now, but [I mean] the Beam hall where the Business School and Hotel School are located. The Alta Ham Hall was built. Artemus Ham Hall had been built beforehand, but I knew Art Ham, and knew his support for the campus. Tom Beam began his giving to the campus while I was president. He made his first million dollar gift while I was president, and then went from there. Today, of course, the Beam name is common all over the campus. You have the Beam engineering building, the new Beam music building, and so that family’s been very generous to the campus.
And then another, I think, very important thing. Marge Barrick began her giving to the campus while I was president, [supporting] the Barrick Lecture Series, which is one of the strongest programs on the campus even today. The Barrick scholars in the Graduate College, and Barrick faculty awards. All of those have grown out of Marge’s generosity to the campus, and I think that was certainly something I was very pleased to see happen.
Were there any particular advances in the College of Education during your tenure as president?
Rich Kunkel was the dean during that period of time. In fact, I just learned yesterday that Rich has now moved to Florida State as dean. He’d been dean at Auburn and I think just left there to go to Florida State. In fact, Dale Andersen told me that yesterday.
We were at that time struggling with where we should be in the field of doctoral education. And the College of Education was the first college to have doctoral education on campus, and the first program to develop independently of Reno. At first, those programs developed kind of jointly, and then they separated. There was some rethinking of that program, but we had that program [but] I didn’t want to give it up, because I didn’t want us not to be a doctoral-granting campus, and so I worked hard with the College of Ed to stay in the education business at the doctoral level, even though we had to revamp the program during that period of time. It was later that we added doctoral programs in many other fields across the campus, but that was the first one. I believe biology was second, but that really began in education [in 1973.].
You’ve talked about some of the things you’re the most proud of. What were some of the major challenges that you faced while you were on campus? Things that weren’t so much fun.
Certainly, we faced the recession of ’81 to ’82 [that] hit all of higher education very hard. The revenues went down. We had a year there when there were no salary increases for anyone. The governor was Dick Bryan, who was later a United States senator, but Dick was governor, and Dick in effect said to state institutions, “I’ll make a bargain with you. If you accept the fact there can’t be any salary increases, I’ll make a guarantee we’ll have no layoffs. We won’t force you to fire anybody.” So essentially, state employees bought into that, and we had a biennium there without salary increases. But [we] also went through the recession without having to lay off people. While that wasn’t happy, it was better than perhaps having massive layoffs in the process.
Also, there was, system wide, both at Reno and here, a major controversy over what was called “The University Code.” And there were perceptions, I think in retrospect probably more perception than reality that the regents were attempting to attack tenure. And so it was a very, very controversial period of time, and a lot of uncertainty among faculty, and a unease that somehow they were being challenged and that this was an attack on tenure. The regents – I don’t think that was their intention in the first place, but they backed off over time, and we moved through that. But I would say that what became known as “the code controversy” and the recession were probably the most difficult issues that we faced.
What was going on in athletics in those days? Was Coach Tarkanian here?
Coach Tarkanian was here. Actually, he had come in the early ‘70s, and then during the period of time that I was president, there were no new controversies, but we had the continuing issue of a court case in that the NCAA had put the university on suspension in ’77. That was two years before I arrived, and they said, “You have to do the following things: You have to have fewer scholarships,” and this and that.
One of the things the NCAA said was, “And you have to suspend your basketball coach for two years.” Well, a federal court then stepped in and said, “You can’t do that without due process. You have no justification for suspending your basketball coach.” Well, I arrived in ’79, at the end of the two year suspension period, and one of the first things I did – I think I arrived in July and had to go to the NCAA in August and say, “Well, our two years are up. We should now be taken off suspension.” And they said, “But you didn’t do everything that we told you to do.” And I said, “Well, the only way I could do the last thing you asked us to do would be to violate a federal court order. And I don’t feel I’m in a position to violate a federal court order. And so we’ve done everything that you asked us to do, except that.” So they said, “Okay. We’ll let you off suspension, but we want you to know we’re going to continue the federal issue on this particular matter, and we’re going to see if we can get the federal government to let you suspend the coach.”
So that aspect of it remained, and in fact, it remained all of he time I was president. And eventually went to the Supreme Court after I left. That case went to the US Supreme Court, and was settled on a 5-4 decision about 1987, something like that, in which what the court said was that the NCAA, although it has public members, is a private organization. And as a private organization, it does not have to follow the due process requirements that a public organization would have to follow. That case was around for all of those years.
Later there were more controversies, but that was a new set of controversies involving recruiting in the late ‘80s. But as I’ve often said, my issues in basketball were more in the court than on the court, since I was essentially dealing with the legal side of those issues. (They laugh.)
You said you’d been there for six years. Could you talk about the circumstances that led to your decision to leave the presidency and return to the classroom when you did?
I had always said that I was not sure whether I wanted to be a university president when I was 60 years old. But I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be one all the time between those two periods, the present and that point in the future. I had at that point been a university president for eight years in Michigan, six years here. And I had been through some of the difficulties that I mentioned: the recession, the code controversy, and so I decided that I wanted to step down. I did not want to continue to be in any kind of source of controversy in the university. And so I stepped down and went back to the faculty, not knowing what I wanted to do – I mean, not knowing whether I wanted to take another presidency or whether I’d be satisfied on the faculty. There’s always the sense that you want to go back to the faculty, but you can’t be sure. And so I went back to the faculty, and really was very happy.
I think after that, I was called about several other university presidencies around the country, talked seriously to a couple of places, but continued my career here from ’85 to 2000. I stayed here, and thoroughly enjoyed my faculty time. The university’s [been] very good to me, the continuing presidents were very good to me, and so I was quite satisfied doing that. Did not miss the administrative side of things, which I thought I might. Fortunately, I was able to do a number of those things. One of the things I had pushed for, unsuccessfully, when I was president – and my predecessors had, too – was the creation of a law school here. I worked very hard on that without success, and others had done so. Don Boepler had before me. When we finally got the law school created here, then President Harter asked me to chair the committee to find the first dean, and so I was chairman of that search committee, and found the first dean when we hired Dick Morgan from Arizona State. And then Dick asked me if we still had money for the dean, he had to hire faculty. And so he created a search committee on which I was the non-lawyer on the committee to recruit the first law school faculty. I’ve been active in a number of activities like that, chairing committees for the president or the regents.
Last year, I worked with Keith Schwer from our Center for Economics on reapportioning the legislature. Reapportioning the regents. Our Board of Regents has to follow the equal district, equal population district rule. And so we created options for them as to how they would reestablish their districts in order to meet the requirements after the census of 2000. We had the new numbers, we knew that more regents had to come from the south, and so Keith and I ran a number of models for them to look at to decide how they wanted to reapportion themselves to meet the 2000 requirements. Now of course, it wasn’t their decision to make. That decision’s made in the legislature. But they could make recommendations, and as long as they agreed, the legislature was probably going to adopt what they wanted. That’s pretty much what happened. They made recommendations to the legislature. The legislature did pretty much go along with what they wanted, but Keith and I really were working for the regents, not the legislature in that process.
Continuing along that line, what were the relationships with the regents like while you were the sitting president?
Pretty good most of the time, except for the issue of the code controversy, I would say. And again, I think probably I was fortunate. When I was president, I think the regents were not as involved on a day-to-day basis as they are now. I think perhaps [there’s] more tendency to micromanage today than we had then. So I think I was fortunate in that regard.
By the time you arrived, of course things had already happened in the area of race relations. I wonder what your observations are about the relationships between the different groups: the Chinese, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, and the Caucasians during the early years and during the twenty years [or] more you’ve been here.
Okay. Of course when I was in elementary and high school, that was before Brown v. the Board of Education. So growing up in Missouri, I grew up in a segregated city. Interestingly, when I was at the University of Michigan – Dearborn, as you may know, Dearborn and the Detroit metropolitan area has one of the largest concentration of Muslim population in the United States, many of them having moved here to work in the assembly plants at the Ford Motor Company. There were two mosques in Dearborn. I think there were no Jewish synagogues. So whenever there would be a flare-up in the Middle East, I knew that I would have student unrest on my campus. Mainly because we had a lot of Muslim students. And so I watched.
That was the major problem that we had there, and we were sensitive to it and tried to be aware of what was happening, and if they wanted to have a demonstration or whatever, we tried to make it possible for them to do what they wanted to do. Because usually, they were not attacking the university on those issues, they were simply wanting to state their case. They, I think, tended to think the problem with the Jewish position was very well presented. They wanted to be sure to have a chance to present their position. So in terms of ethnic group relations, in my first presidency – or chancellorship was what the title was there – that was probably the biggest kind of issue, the issue involving the Arab Muslim students.
After I moved here there was never a time, I think, when we had what I would call major crises. We always had a minimum – I had more than one minority member on the regents. Lily Fong was an Asian-American, and Lily served on the regents during my early years, and was always very concerned about minority kinds of issues, especially about Asian-American issues. She was very proud of the role that Asians had had in the early years of Nevada, and she would always to make it a point to be sure if anyone was writing a book or something, that they had the information necessary about the Asian history of Nevada. But that led her to be sensitive to minority issues in general, if it was Hispanics, if it was African-Americans or whatever, she would always be alert to this issues.
We always had a black regent while I was president. Always a black female, as a matter of fact. In fact, I believe that during the entire time I was president, we had a majority of women on the board. That lasted, really, several years after I left the presidency, where there was strong female representation on that board. On campus, we’ve always had fairly small representation of minorities, although the Hispanic, probably the growth in Hispanics has been the major change over time. And we’ve never, I think, done as good a job of reaching the Native American population as we should have. We don’t have a major Indian or Native American population here.
Of course you weren’t in the public schools, but you could observe what was going on here. How were the relations between the races during the early years, soon after you arrived, say, the first five, six years?
I think there were no major problems. The civil rights battle was behind us. The issue of the assassination of Martin Luther King was behind us. One battle – Again, this preceded me, but it was related to this campus, and that was the fact that if you go back to the early ‘70s, we called our athletic teams the Rebels. And apparently, they had a mascot called the Rebel, whose dress I guess looked very much like a confederate soldier from the old south. And so you had minority students at that time wanting to change that use of that term. Well the university did not change the term Rebel. The continued to use the term Rebel, but they changed the mascot so the mascot no longer looked nearly as much like a confederate soldier. There’s one place on campus, where if you want to see the old mascot, and you want to see the old Rebel that looked like a confederate soldier, it is in the floor of the museum. The museum on campus, the Museum of Natural History, was at one time the basketball court, and it has a hardwood floor which was a basketball floor. And embedded in that floor is a picture of the old Rebel mascot. It is to my knowledge the only place on campus where you have that piece of history still existing.
So the image of the confederate soldier was considered unacceptable just prior to your arrival in when? ’69, ’70, somewhere along in there.
I came in ’79. I would say it was ’73, ‘74, something like that.
They withdrew that –
Yeah, mascot.
And were they using the Fremont cannon when you arrived, or was that –
Yes. The Fremont cannon was being used, and that was going back and forth to the winning team in the football games. Actually, the Fremont cannon was probably one of the first symbols between the two schools, and that’s because [of] Bill Ireland, a longtime faculty member here and the first athletic director – not first athletic director, but first football coach. And Bill was a longtime Nevadan, and Bill had ties to Reno as well as here, and helped establish that as a tradition between the two.
Bill would actually build the cannon, or –
I really don’t know that history. I don’t where it came from.
Those traditions are important, aren’t they?
Yes, yes.
Now this is April 18, 2002, continuation of the interview with Dr. Goodall, former president of UNLV. This is Patrick Carlton interviewing, and this is tape 2, side 1.
Dr. Goodall, let’s shift gears now and talk a little bit about the greater Las Vegas environment as you had a chance to observe it during quite a long period of time. What effect do you think the arrival of large corporations like Hilton and others has had on the business climate of the city, and how people are coming to feel about Las Vegas as a place to live?
Well certainly, when I moved here, we were in the early stages of that. Probably the corporatization of the gaming industry began with Howard Hughes, and the changes in the law, about 1970, about ten years before I got here. Up to that time, gaming was very much a family-owned business. Old names like the Gaughan family, that are still around. Houssels, and so you had that kind of ownership. The Binions would be another example of that. And one reason for that was until 1969, Nevada law said that every owner of a casino had to be licensed. Well that meant that you couldn’t have a corporation, a publicly-held corporation, owning a casino. If Hilton had owned a casino, then every shareholder of Hilton, every widow in Vermont and schoolteacher in San Diego, would have had to be licensed. So you literally could not have public ownership of gaming. The ’69 legislature changed that, to say that only key employees and owners had to be licensed. And that was the beginning of corporate ownership.
Hilton came in and bought the International Hotel. Changed the name to Hilton. Hilton was probably the first corporate owner, per se. Then after that, what you had happening was that other companies began to go public. Bill Bennett and Bill Bennington had been the major private owners of what was then called Circus-Circus. The Circus-Circus corporation then went public, sold its stock on the stock exchange, and then later changed its name to Mandalay Bay group, but the Circus-Circus company went public. Hilton was public, Harrahs went public. Much later, the Boyd Group went public. Really, you had the corporatization of the gaming industry. And I think – you know, the old people who’ve been around a long time will tell you – Always true, I suppose – Better in the old days. “In the old days you had – “ They’ll tell you they had more comping, easier to get free meals, or they treated you more like family when you went to the casinos, and again, the extreme statement of that. People will say, “Oh, it was better when the mob was in charge.” But what they’re really saying, when it was smaller and more personal, like anything else, that it was a different kind of environment. Once you had the corporate dominance of the industry, then you had the accountants requiring that every part of the casino carry its own weight. So that you couldn’t be giving away a lot of food in the restaurant because you’d then make it up at the gaming tables. Restaurants had to carry their own weight. So I think you hear today that you have more impersonalization, more the normal kinds of corporate values rather than individual values in the business
Certainly, there is far more employment in gaming today. When I got here, the Tropicana was the south end of the strip, and the Sahara was there, and Caesar’s Palace. The MGM Grand, which is what is now Bally’s, was there. But a lot of the strip was vacant. It was really the late ‘80s, when you had the Mirage being built in ’89. That was sort of the beginning of the next era, I think, with the [construction of] the Mirage, and then hotels like the Venetian, Bellagio, that was really a next step up, a major change, I think.
Well I’ve heard people say that Las Vegas feels like a big city now, but other people say it’s still a small town in terms of its style, and that there are still certain families which have a lot of influence, and are still well-known and well-networked, too. What’s your view on that?
Yes, I think that would be true. I think in many ways it’s a small town, in terms of, again, old-time families that were important here. And a willingness to work together. I remember, for example, at the university, when we had an interfaith religious center sort of in the center of campus, and the two people who came together to talk to university administration about making some land trades so that that could be on the edge of the campus, was Senator Jim Gibson, probably the most powerful member of the legislature and a strong Mormon; and Jake Von Tobel, who was one of the most powerful businessmen in town and a strong Catholic. And they represented not just the Catholics and the Mormons, but they represented power in Las Vegas. And when Senator Gibson and Jake Von Tobel came to talk to you, you listened. And although they were from different religions, they were good friends, part of that small ruling clique, and we made some trades in order to make it possible. It worked for us, but we needed land in the middle of campus, and we got them off [to] the edge of the campus. And so it was to our mutual benefit, but certainly, you had examples of where families like that worked together across religious lines, across racial lines, and so forth.
Have you observed much influence or support from the Jewish community in town?
The Jewish community is very strong in Las Vegas. There is, again, an old, well-established Jewish community. A couple of the older congregations are strong, Jewish congregations. A lot of support for the campus, because there’s been an interest on campus in Holocaust studies, and so they have been very supportive, and so yes, I would say that there’s a strong Jewish community, and it has been strongly supportive of education.
Shifting to the government, the various levels of government at the city, the county, the state, and the federal levels. To what extent do you feel that the presence of these various levels of government is both felt and obvious, and how well is the role of these various government entities understood by people in general?
Well, one of the interesting things that most people don’t understand is that many of the things that we associate with Las Vegas are not in Las Vegas. Sahara Avenue is approximately the southern border of the city of Las Vegas. The southern city limits. Therefore, the Las Vegas Strip is not in Las Vegas. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is not in Las Vegas. And I think often people don’t think about that, so that people will come to town, have a convention at Caesar’s Palace, and invite the mayor of Las Vegas to give the welcoming address. Well, he’ll come and give the welcoming address, but you’re not in Las Vegas when he does that. I’ve often said I suspect the mayor of Las Vegas gives more welcoming addresses to conventions outside his city than any other mayor in the country.
Really, at the local level, the strongest government’s the county government. The county government here is a very powerful government, moreso than the City of Las Vegas, because it controls a larger area, and controls the strip. And also, it is looked upon as a more powerful, prestigious government. It’s very common for people to leave the legislature to become members of the county board, rather than the other way. For example, Myrna Williams was a member of the legislature, then moved to the county board. There are other reasons for that, too, of course. It’s more nearly a full-time job. You get a lot more money being on the county board, and you don’t have to go to Lansing all the time – er, Carson City all the time.
If they had to go to Lansing, [Michigan] that would be a real challenge (he laughs).
A real challenge, that’s right. But there’s been, I think, generally, a good cooperative spirit among governments in the state. It’s not government against government so much as you still have – even more in the past – the north-south feeling. And that’s always been there. For example, you can almost count on the fact that if a mayor of Las Vegas wants to run for statewide office, they’re not going to have much support in the north. I think that when Jan Jones, as the mayor of Las Vegas, ran for governor, it was clear that her being mayor of Las Vegas did not help her any up north. I think Oscar Goodman knows the same thing. If Oscar were [running] for a statewide office, the fact that he’s mayor of Las Vegas would probably count against him anywhere north of Tonopah.
Now we have North Las Vegas, too. I believe that’s also a separate –
That’s a separate community, yes. In Clark County, there are about five or six independent cities: Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, and Mesquite. Your other communities, like Laughlin are not incorporated. Laughlin is simply governed by the county. But the others are independent cities.
That would be the same for Searchlight. They’re not incorporated.
Searchlight is not incorporated, no.
Well North Las Vegas seems to be making some moves these days
They are. They’ve got some very nice development going up up there. Some very nice residential areas, and they’ve really made some major moves.
Having been many places in the country, how do you view Las Vegas as comparing with other, let’s say, southwestern cities in terms of similarities and differences?
Well of course the two that I can compare with easiest are where the two I’ve lived, and that’s Phoenix and Las Vegas. And I would say there are a lot of similarities. That is, you have the notion of they’re being spread out rather than going up. You have a tendency toward a lot of outdoor living, hot in the summertime, a lot of tourism in the wintertime as northerners come to escape cold weather. And so I would say that in terms of the life – I have a daughter in Phoenix now, so I still go to Phoenix quite often, so I know that metropolitan area, and I see a lot of similarities between the two. A lot of new building, a lot of traffic problems. Both of them have much more difficult traffic issues than they had fifteen, twenty years ago, and likely to stay that way. Both of them very tied to the automobile. They’re not going to build subways or things of that type. Hopefully, the monorail here may be of help, but that remains to be seen, I think.
You talked a while ago about the issue of the mob and so forth, and I assume that [has] something to do with the image that people have held of the place. How do you perceive Las Vegas’ present image to be- good, bad, or indifferent in the mind of people from the outside?
I think there are probably several different views. I think you still have sort of the gaming view, the “Sin City” view, that when they think of Las Vegas, they think of the Strip, and gambling, and the old days of the mob, and all of that is an image that probably conjures up negative images for them. The other view that you have I think increasingly is probably what I would call the “retirement view.” You have, again, people – I gave a speech last weekend in Los Angeles. When I finished, a couple came up, and they wanted to ask questions about retiring in Las Vegas. Who should they talk to, who’s a good real estate person, one of the best neighborhoods for retiring. But that was their concept. And of course, tied to that is the tax climate. The fact that we have no state income tax. I think a lot of people, if you go talk to people in Illinois, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia somewhere, they may think about coming here for a weekend, and then the Strip view, the Las Vegas view comes to mind, but they also may be thinking about the fact that when they’re 60, 65, they want to move here to retire. And then they have another view: what are the retirement facilities? What are the possibilities, condos or houses or whatever, and I think you have both of those images of Las Vegas today.
And how about the emerging medical situation? I know that’s very important to retirees.
Yes, indeed. That’s hit us fairly suddenly, and I think that’s going to be a major problem. And I just do not know what the solution to that is, but clearly, that will likely be a major negative impact on that second group, people that are thinking about retiring here. You see one of the things they want and need is good medical care.
For sure. I wonder if you’d make a general statement about what you believe to be the future of Las Vegas. You’ve mentioned already that gaming is strong, you mentioned that the retirement community is increasing. What other changes, if any, do you see as coming our way in the next ten, fifteen years?
Well, I think the great uncertainty is whether we’re really going to be able to dramatically diversify the economy. I’ve heard people talk about diversifying the economy for as long as I’ve lived here. And the reason they haven’t… They’ve had a lot of other industries, but gaming continues to be successful. So as gaming has expanded, even though they’re doing other things, the percentage of other things does not go up because gaming continues to hold its [niche]percentagewise through rapid growth. I think you’re going to continue to see gaming dominate the local economy. In spite of the fact that you’re going to have more Indian casinos in other states, you’re going to have other states that will legalize casino gaming as they run out of tax revenue and need to find something else – New York right now is debating whether or not to have that. I used to think, and I guess I still do to some extent, that the one thing that we have that most places don’t is a combination of gaming and sunshine. Where you can offer the gaming in a good environment. Now, to some extent, other places can do that. New Orleans to some degree, southern California, but I think we still probably have a monopoly on the extent to which we have massive casinos on the Strip in a good climate. And I think that will continue.
I think one of the big uncertainties is transportation, as to whether – Traffic and the road between here and California. Our weekend business here is California business. It’s drive-in business, and keeping the highways up to capacity so that they can handle traffic between here and California is absolutely essential. And I think the degree to which that’s going to happen is still an open question. I’m not sure on that.
I remember reading something recently about a light rail system between here and Los Angeles. It’s still up in the air.
Yeah. And that has been talked about for twenty years. In fact, we had a mayor of Las Vegas in the early ‘80s who, that was his whole campaign was the rapid train to southern California. And he talked about that, and then we had a city councilman later who carried that ball, but of course, very little has happened on this, so… But that would be a major thing to have happen, if we could [bring it about.]
And as follow-on to the future of the city of Las Vegas, if you put your thinking cap on, what do you perceive as being the future of UNLV in the next say, fifteen, twenty years? Where are we going?
I think we will continue to be the largest university in southern Nevada and in the state. And I think you will see more growth here. I think probably you’ll see some of that growth occurring in other locations. I think probably we’ll have a campus on the west somewhere, in the Summerlin area. I know Mayor Goodman wants to have something downtown, so I think you’ll have at least probably two more locations where UNLV will be offering courses and research activities. Most of it will still be at this location. I think the campus will grow. It will still be the major senior institution in this part of the country. You know, we’re a long ways from – if you think about it, the closest other places to go for a senior university would be Flagstaff to the east, San Bernardino to the west, Cedar City, Utah to the north. And so we’re sort of isolated. We serve a major area here where there’s just not much else in the way of higher education, and so we will continue to play that role, I think. I think you’ll see more graduate programs, more research activities, more research money coming in. I think we’ll grow in the way that universities grow.
And the effect of the influence of this Henderson campus, pro or con?
I think that’s uncertain. It’s just so unclear to me what that’s going to be. If indeed, it becomes primarily a teaching campus. If it kind of plays the role here that the California state university campuses play in California, then it may indeed allow the university to be more of a research, more of a selective kind of institution. We’re still early in knowing how that’s going develop, but I don’t have a good sense of what’s going to happen there. One thing that I would not want to see happen, and hope doesn’t happen is that – Some people talk about having five or six state college campuses around the state, and I certainly do not see the need for that. I think you dissipate your education resources if you try to have that many state college campuses. Having one, I think, again, we don’t know what the impact of that would be, but I think I know the impact if you had five or six of them.
Has your department, Public Administration, started to move into distance learning yet, and if so, what’s your view on its viability for Nevada?
I think you will have more of that because of areas like the test site where you need some distance learning possibilities. Our department – and again, I’ve been retired for two years, so I’m not sure that I know everything that’s going on – but I think that we are probably not doing any distance learning as that term was used. We have taught our courses for our students, we’ve taught them in – I’ve taught in City Hall, for example, downtown. I’ve taught on Nellis Air Force Base. We’ve taught in Henderson, because most of our people are city and county employees, and so we go where there are concentrations of city and county employees. It may well be that there will be a concentration of city and county employees in Pahrump or someplace where distance learning would be necessary, and so I can certainly see that occurring.
Well, this is the time when I ask you the question, I say, despite my best efforts, I have probably failed to ask you something that I should have asked you and that needs to be put on the record for posterity. So what have I not asked you that I should have asked?
Well, I can’t think of any other particular area we need to cover. We’ve talked about the university. I have watched this university grow. I think it’s a strong institution and doing a good job of serving southern Nevada. I think that the state will continue to have the problems of trying to find revenue to do everything they need to do. We don’t have a state income tax, they’re not going to have one. I think any politician that mentions that is going to be in big trouble. And constitutionally, we can’t have individual income tax. It’s not allowed under the constitution. I think that we’re going to continue to grow. Las Vegas will be larger, and [the] Las Vegas area will be larger in the future than the past. UNLV will continue to grow, and we will face the problems that come with that, I think.
One of the things I did not ask about: we have I think about 335 acres here.
Yes.
There are still some fairly large tracts of land, mostly devoted to athletic facilities right now. To what extent do you think we will engage in what they call “infilling.” At Virginia Tech, we were doing infilling –
Well, you mention it, and that’s one thing that I would – again, it precedes me, I take no credit for it because most of it was done before I got here, but I’ve said before and will say again, I think the single most important thing that ever happened to this campus was not something that a president did or a regent did. It was something done by private citizens, and that was Perry Thomas and Jerry Mack, the two people for whom the Thomas and Mack Center are named, who came out here in the mid ‘60s and discovered this campus didn’t have much land, and they created what was known as the Land Foundation.
And again, they went around and got – it was a small town where everybody knew everybody – They got the most powerful businesspeople in Las Vegas together and created the Land Foundation, and went around this campus and bought up vacant land and held it until the university could afford to buy it from them, and then sold it to the university at what they paid for it, saving the university maybe one or two decades of land inflation. Just unbelievable. I don’t know how any private gift could have been greater than that. And if you know what happened to land prices in the ‘60s and ‘70s, you know how important that was, and I think that the reason we now have 335 or so acres instead of about 50 or 60 is because of their work with the Land Foundation. I think that any discussion of UNLV simply isn’t complete if you don’t think about what they did. Sometimes people say, “Well what did they do to get their name on the building?” Well, they did give a couple million dollars to the building, but that’s a couple million dollars out of about thirty million for the cost of the building. But what they did was literally make this campus possible by the creation of the land foundation in the 1960s.
Is there still an active land acquisition program?
Yes. The Land Foundation went out of existence, but we do have the land acquisition program. We have acquired land. The land where we started the law school a couple of years ago, we bought Paradise School. That’s the first land we have south of Tropicana. They’re still looking in this area to buy land, but they have now bought land down on west Charleston just west of the freeway, and that will be where the dental school will go. That’s the first location down there where UNLV actually owns land. They own some more land I think out where there’ll be a research center out in the Summerlin area, and I’m not sure where that is, and whether we bought it or whether it was given to us. I think maybe that was land that was given by developers because they want a research center out there. But we do have some other locations of land in addition to here. But this area has become landlocked because of the commercial development going up. But the Paradise School was an addition in this area.
Well. Any other comments you’d like to make.
Oh, I think not. That’s fine.
Okay. Well, I certainly appreciate your spending the time with me.
Oh, glad to do it.
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