The Boyd School Of Law

Only one college of Nevada’s two universities is ranked in the top one hundred colleges across this country.  The Boyd School of Law was formed just over ten years ago.  Its present law school ranking is 76 out of approximately 200 accredited law schools.

To have a professional school in the Nevada System of Higher Education is absolutely wonderful.  It is there because private money built it and supports it.

But for Bill Boyd, the Thomas family and the Mack family, UNLV would not have a law school.

We have the capacity to build world class centers of education.  We don’t do so because we don’t care about having them.  

The Best

Have you ever known anyone whose doctor, lawyer or other professional was not one of the ten best in the world?  Obviously, this simply cannot be so.  But we seem to have the need to exaggerate the competence of those with whom we deal.

We not only tend to exaggerate the status of our own physicians, lawyers and experts of all types, but also exaggerate the status of our own universities.  If you didn’t believe that your college or university, especially the department in which you studied, was not a top 10, then I’d be surprised.  Unfortunately there is only room for ten at the top ten levels.

I didn’t go to a top 10 college.  I wish I had had the brains to do so.  But I went to the best school that would accept me.

Take a look beyond the borders of Nevada to learn about the leading colleges and universities in the United States.  If you can get into one of these, why should you ever settle for less than the best? Unfortunately, UNLV and UNR are not even in the top 150 colleges and universities.

For those of you not presently looking for a college or university to attend because that is a past chapter in your life, don’t you think you ought to do everything to make Nevada’s universities competitive with the best?

30%

The dean of the Education College of one of the ten highest ranked universities in this country recently told me that over thirty percent of the teachers in this country are incompetent.  What a shocker.  I’ll be interviewing him in the future when he visits Las Vegas.

UNR & UNLV

Can you get a good quality education at UNR and UNLV?  Of course you can.  But wouldn’t you want the best college education possible from a school that attracts the best students and the best faculty?  I would.

Both UNR and UNLV are not the best – they are not even close to being the best.

Nevada has always had the capacity, but never the desire to build world-class universities.  That has hurt our ability to attract high tech business and to build very sophisticated financial centers.

We missed the boat.  I doubt it will ever come by again.

How Good Are Nevada’s Two Universities?

Where do you send your children to college?  Like most parents, we sent ours to the best schools our children could get into.  How good are Nevada’s two universities?  UNR is ranked 181; UNLV has no ranking.  Wouldn’t that make you look at the 180 better schools to send your kids?

There Will Always Be A Question

The Nell J. Redfield Foundation did UNR’s new president, 

Marc Johnson, no favor when the Foundation threatened to make no additional donations to UNR if Johnson were not chosen president.  If the letter the Foundation wrote was not an intended as a threat, it certainly looked enough like one to be one.

The Regents also failed Johnson in not openly repudiating the Redfield  threat long before Johnson ‘s selection.  Johnson could probably and will probably handle the presidency very well.  I have heard good things about him.

But there will always be a question of whether the other candidates could have done a better job had one of them been selected in a fair search.

Dr. Marc Johnson

Two issues bother me about Dr. Marc Johnson becoming President of UNR.  I hope those issues can be resolved so that I can support him as all Nevadans should support him.

First is the way he participated in his own appointment in a manner which smelled of a set up – that is the votes were lined up before the search, and  $100,000 was wasted in choosing candidates, none of which was ever going to get the job.

My second concern is Johnson’s performance as the Interim UNR President.  He did much to go it alone, without considering the needs of the other institutions and the system as a whole.  He shirked  his duty as the leader of one of eight, rather than one of one.

I spent five years trying to get the eight higher education institutions to work together.  We had some success.  I hope Johnson does not return us to those times where all the institutions fought each other which did nothing but injure the whole system.