We're sitting down with new UNLV president Dr. Keith Whitfield.

That's this week on Nevada Week.

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(Kipp Ortenburger) In August of last year, the Nevada System of Higher Education Board of Regents selected Dr. Keith Whitfield as UNLV's 11th permanent president.

Now, for higher education one might argue there couldn't have been a worse or maybe a better time for a new president to assume this role.

Consider that back in August of 2020, Southern Nevada hit its highest spike of COVID-19 cases and deaths at that time, our state legislation had just concluded a special session finalizing budget cuts to higher education, and local civil unrest continued in the wake of George Floyd's death.

Now, before, during and since then we've seen UNLV play a significant role in our region's pandemic response as well as addressing students' needs, and more recently, President Whitfield himself has begun to outline a roadmap for the future, what he calls "Top Tier 2.0."

It builds off UNLV's current Top Tier strategic plan and emphasizes economic development and social justice as areas of key expansion.

On this show, we're going to talk about these key areas identified in his plan.

Also, President Whitfield has found success increasing key university indicators such as enrollment and graduation rates in previous posts, as well as building strong relationships with local business, philanthropic and community-based sectors.

We'll talk to him about how he might apply this success here, among many other topics we hope to cover.

Please welcome Dr. Keith Whitfield, UNLV president.

President Whitfield, I cannot tell you how great it is to have you here in person in-studio.

Amazing.

And maybe that's where we start our conversation here.

So much is slowly progressing to business as usual, more of a normal routine that not necessarily means we are quite there yet.

I want to get your perspective first on just where you will be, what a normal workday might be for you as we kind of get to more of this reopening, and let's not forget our county commission has noted that a lot of the restrictions are going to be lifted on June 1.

So maybe that's a good place to start.

(Dr. Keith Whitfield) June 1 is going to be another one of those stepwise moving forward, and it will change the context for things.

You know, we're going to slowly reopen.

We're trying to bring back a good part of our workforce on July 1, and then for the fall, our design is going to be that we will be the new normal.

-The new normal, and let's start there.

I know that last fall-- let's start with that benchmark-- 20% in-person, 80% online.

As I understand that, those are going to almost flip.

You're going to have about 80% in-person and 20% online.

-Exactly.

-Let's talk about what's not going to change.

Are there big pieces of this that are going to look like they were in the pandemic?

-And partly because we want to make sure we have some flexibility for students who can't come back, who are either taking care of parents or a loved one, maybe immune-compromised themselves, and so we want to leave a little bit of flexibility there.

But I tell you, part of the piece that I'm hoping we do is we have to learn from this.

There may be some opportunities where having a mixed format where some classes are in-person, some are done virtually.

We're looking to see if there's ways in which we can actually provide even a better education from doing that, so it's going to be continuing to experiment like we've been doing for the last 16 months or so.

-There's been some some talk of federal applications have been down, which might be a sign that enrollment generally across our whole university system, not just within our state but federal, nationally here, could be down.

What's the projection?

Do we think that our enrollment at UNLV will be resilient?

-So there's the data and then there's me.

I'm very hopeful that what we're going to do is see just a lagged number of people actually signing up and coming back to the university.

If we look at the data where we sit now, we always compare ourselves to where we were last year.

We're a little less than 2% down, which is still not bad.

I think even if we could get to zero, be flat comparatively speaking to where we were last year, which was a tough year last year, I think we'd be doing very well.

-I did some research on you.

You ask "why" a lot, I've noticed.

Of course the most obvious question here is why, especially with where we're at, your new tenure here under the circumstances that you came into the role as president.

Why is "why" such an important question maybe instead of "how" or "what" here?

-Yes.

"Why" ends up being a good question for understanding the mechanics, the intentions, the design.

We have an incredible-- I have-- I sit as president of an incredible university that has already done so much, so the "why" ends up being let's make sure that as we're making these great strides moving forward that we make sure we're doing it for the right reason, that we're answering and making sure that we fill in where there may be gaps in terms of need or opportunity.

So "why" ends up being a good question for a lot of reasons.

-I wanted to throw a "why" at you.

You describe UNLV as quote, hungry, a hungry institution.

Now, I want to put some context here.

This was in relation to faculty in a conversation around research.

Why hungry?

Why is that a good indicator?

-You know, hungry is a good indicator.

I have been at other universities.

I'm sure we might touch on it in a little while, but I've been at other universities, and that hunger piece of it makes you strive to do better.

It's very easy to become complacent, and I think with higher ed, much is changing as much as moving, that if you're not hungry to think about doing more and explore-- and actually, I have a few quote, unquote, famous quotes that I of course have gotten from somebody else-- which is to fail fast.

Don't sit and be so concerned about, you know, well, we've always done it this way, and it's comfortable that way.

Stretch yourself a little bit, okay?

Failing, we learn from failure anyway, and not that we're designed, that we're trying to design for failure, but we can actually learn from that.

And if we keep our mind open to that, we have a growth mindset, it actually allows us again to be a better university, which that's just what UNLV is.

It's been on track for doing it for a long time, and we're going to continue to do that in these precarious years that are going to be ahead of us.

-And you mentioned your past and your previous roles.

Let's talk about that for a second.

You were provost of Wayne State University in Detroit.

As I understand it, that university has similar populations as as UNLV does.

One of the things you were really good at doing there was increasing graduation rates.

This is potentially a challenge for UNLV.

Our six-year undergrad graduation rate at UNLV is about 44%.

How and what can maybe you replicate from your days at Wayne State University to increase that?

-It's interesting because it's the same and different.

It's a similar population in that we had an okay minority population, much larger here, actually.

It was a commuter school, so it was similar in that way.

A lot of first-generation students, so it was similar in that way.

You know, I want to start off and say that I was part of a team.

I led a team that increased graduation rates.

I think from the time I got there till the time I left, it was maybe an increase of 24, 25%, something like that.

That's done in steps.

It's done with a commitment to student success.

Student success, you would think that's just naturally what a university would think about, but it has to be something that is on the front burner, that is what everybody is committed to, what you even try to make sure is a priority in your funding, in your design and how you think about yourself as university.

We've been doing that, and I think, you know, they picked me because maybe I can try to push that even farther.

There has been a lot of hard work that's already been done.

I'm really so happy and excited about the foundation that's been set, and I think some of the things that we're going to be doing are going to be really even more 21st century, using apps, using technology.

But it's funny, some of it is basic stuff, like making sure that students understand this is their university, that they belong there and that they should ask questions and that the questions don't come just when there's a problem.

The questions come when you explore and think about what could be.

So we'll be trying to work on the culture, both for our faculty and staff, but as well for the students.

-Let's talk a little about community colleges.

I know this is another big part of yours too, and also the partnership with Clark County School District, particularly for maybe some of those students of color where we see typical achievement gaps here as we do see nationally as well.

How important are those collaborations, and give us maybe some specifics on programs you would like to see the three institutions work on together.

-These are great questions.

This is stuff I love to talk about.

That was also something that I brought from my previous employment was a connection to the community colleges.

We're a little lower in terms of the number of students that we get and that ultimately we see are going to graduate, I think it's around 25%.

I hope I'm not getting that number wrong.

I've been at a place where it was 44%, so it's absolutely critical that we make sure we make connections with those institutions and, you know, too-- I can't think of what our numbers are, but it's over 70% of our students come from this area.

So our students are in the school system, so of course it makes sense to be connected to those kinds of entities.

And in terms of the kinds of things we've at least initially started talking about, some of it has been workforce development.

I think a lot of that is put at the community college level, but there's things four-year institutions should do as well.

That is going to help in terms of economic diversification, which is one of our things that we want to be able to contribute as a university to the community.

And the piece that I'm very passionate about, I wish we had-- we're going into a more normal summer even, but it's summer programs for students.

One of the things that we can do as an institution is be able to basically have that 365 days a year that you're learning.

If you're not learning, you're falling behind.

We live in a society that because of technology and lots of other things, basically you're always learning.

So providing summer programs, other kinds of opportunities that augment, supplement the great things that CCSD is already doing-- I think Superintendent Jara, I share his passion, so we connect on some of those things.

But we've thought about how we can triangulate and actually work between CCSD, CSN and UNLV.

It's not going to be 100% of what we do, but it's a critically important part of what we do because we are the urban research university for our state, and that means then that we're connecting in these very interesting ways.

So that partnership is going to be essential and very important in my mind.

-Let's talk about that research part, and maybe we combine the research part with the conversation we're having here, which is more around social justice and closing some of these wealth gaps.

Social mobility is such a big part of UNLV.

Let's talk about the research side of this.

UNLV is a rated R-1 university by the Carnegie Foundation, which 120 universities within our system, very rare air there at the high-activity research level that the university has.

Let's talk about social mobility and some of the research related to maybe some of the urban research areas here.

I mean, do you see potential avenues that UNLV can take to maybe focus on systemic racism within higher education, maybe implicit bias, those kinds of areas?

Is that a research arm that UNLV could pursue?

-It's an area that we already pursue, and I think there's going to be more of it forthcoming.

You said a bunch of interesting things that I can't help but touch on, one of them is in terms of social mobility.

Nationally, we're one of the better schools in terms of taking people from the lowest quartiles of income, of family income, of where they come from and being able to give them an education that allows them to compete on the upper quartiles.

That's what social mobility I think is always rated as, and we do very well for it.

I think it's because we were designed well to be able to understand the needs of our students, and that's very important.

That's in the context of a research institution, and a research institution actually is very important for a lot of reasons.

A lot of people don't think about, you know, I'm going to send my kids somewhere, and what's important?

Having a research institution is very important.

What that means is at the heart of what we do, we think about asking questions and problem-solving and thinking outside of the box, even sometimes about failure and all of those sorts of things.

So it's in a context that's very important in terms of how we think about things and how we educate students.

Now, tying that to the social justice movement, we do have a number of incredible scholars; Melva Thompson-Robinson comes to mind.

There are some others that are not only looking at social justice and what happens in terms of the social fabric of what happens in our country, but also looking at health disparities, for example.

As you know we have a brand-new medical school, and we were just recently talking with Senator Spearman about some of the things that she's interested in relative to kidney disease.

That's one where we're now pulling people from liberal arts, of course from health, from the school of medicine, from public health and from lots of different perspectives and looking at how all of those things play together because there's the disease process but then there's the differential that occurs within minoritized populations.

And so why is that, and then how can we actually improve that?

So an example of how we'll be contributing in lots of different ways to let's call it social justice broadly.

The systemic racism piece is interesting because what's difficult about it is that we have to take a second and be okay with saying that we're not perfect and that we need to grow and that we need to change and that there are things that happen that shouldn't happen.

Admitting that wrong is where you can start putting it together and making it better.

So for example, we've got an ombudsperson that we just hired so they can hear some of the stories that are going on and making sure that when there's a time to be able to intersect, interact with entities, we do it so that there can be fairness and just in decisions that are made.

-Can we talk about some of the specifics there?

In the State of the University address, you did call upon that the university does have some problems with systemic racism.

Are there indicators you have seen in the six months that you've been here?

-Well, you know, it's interesting because I'd say too that we have structural racism, and it's not a little play on words.

They actually are different things.

Structural racism is the idea that what you have is policies and structures in place that actually differentially treat people.

That's something that I know there's a lot of folks who did not like hearing that, because I think that UNLV, I think we believe that we really are being fair and we're doing good.

It doesn't mean you're not doing a good job, it just means that some of the things that we've done, the way we've done them or the way that we do them actually disproportionately affect some people than others, and those people end up being sometimes from minoritized groups.

-President Whitfield, can you give us some examples there.

-An example?

Boy, I'm going to find a way to get in a lot of trouble.

But I'd say in terms of our faculty, you know, we have the second most diverse student population in the country, tied for second.

Our faculty diversity on the other hand has fallen behind.

Now, part of that is because there are low numbers of minorities going and getting a PhD and getting a doctorate and coming into the academy.

There's others where we should be able to do better than what we're doing, and we have been looking at that.

Actually, it started before I got here of having search advocates that are people that are going to be there and talk about where are we searching for faculty?

Are we making sure that we hire faculty that match our values and what we're interested in, and one of them being diversity.

So those are going to be ways in which we'll actually advance.

But the problem that we have right now is that we don't have enough faculty of color.

It's something that I've heard from so many people that they want to do more, so we're going to be able to-- the culture is ready for it.

I think that's what's really important.

If we did not have culture within the university that actually would be welcoming, we wouldn't want to bring in a minority faculty member, have a horrible experience and then go out and say, oh, it's horrible at UNLV.

It'll be very welcoming I think for them because there's a lot of desire for that.

But those again are structures that exist, that the way in which we've done things has not made that as a balanced, important priority, so then you ultimately yield more minority faculty.

-Is it naive to say that if you have such a large minority undergrad population that there's a potential there for some form of pipeline to bring students through to become faculty at some stage?

-It sounds like you want my job, because that's exactly right.

Actually, we're an Hispanic serving institution, and we're working with the other-- there's 16 other Hispanic serving institutions that are R-1's, that Top Tier, and we've just gotten together and said you know something?

If we're going to deal with this problem, if we're going to fix this, we're where they start at.

We're the ones with those students that are coming through.

So we're developing programs, working even nationally with programs to be able to produce more for example Hispanic PhDs, MDs, ones who will go out in the community, ones who will come into the academy.

One of the interesting things that's going on right now is that even with the number of PhDs, let's say, who are minted, they have more opportunities than just going into higher ed, you know.

There's business, there's industries, there's tech that all want those same levels of expertise, so then we have to compete.

I think one of the things that we can do is make it actually more attractive to understand academia, and I'm a little biased, but it's such a great lifestyle that you get to change people's lives.

You basically get to-- there's a lot of freedom that you have, and it's freedom to explore and expand and think about, you know, hard questions.

It's a good lifestyle, and I think if it's told as that rather than oh, you've got to teach, you know, people and there's publish or perish.

But you do those things because you're passionate about them, so we have to help develop that passion and then connect it to that job outcome.

-Well, it's interesting and what a great segue into the economic development side of this conversation here too, because it seems like you can have both.

You can have faculty that are professors but are also working towards some of those aspects you mentioned, high tech, some other big-industry areas and still work with the university.

So let's talk about economic development.

You've repositioned economic development as a higher priority.

It was under another subset, you've moved it to its own main priority.

Why is that?

-You know, part of it is who UNLV is.

We're an urban research university, and what I mean by that is that we're urban, meaning we're part of the fabric of Las Vegas.

And as we have seen through the pandemic, one of the things that we need is diversification of the kinds of industry that we have here.

We have of course, you know, entertainment.

I'd argue we're the best in the world, but we need more than that.

And just as somebody who's new here, one of the things that I love is that this is a great place to live.

So when you start to put those things together, you say hey, we could attract different kinds of companies if we start thinking about that.

And one of the things that companies want oftentimes is an educated workforce to be able to work for them.

So we're a critical piece in being able to create that diversity and working with the chamber and other groups.

We think about that all the time.

At a more macro level, and I think that's what you were getting at, the idea that because we have these incredible researchers and they've got these great discoveries-- one of them, I don't know if you've heard about it-- but Ash Salamat is working on room temperature superconductivity, way over my head, but it may change the way that we look at energy in the next 10 years.

-I did research that zero transmission loss, maybe in the future.

-Zero transmission, yes.

-Those are the kinds of things that our faculty actually bring and offer, so we needed an office that would really be on the forefront of that.

And Bo Bernhard is basically a rock star at being able to kind of connect.

Where you can't see the possibility, he figures them out and he does a very good job of them.

We've increased industry that is participating out in our research park by over 250%, and I think that it was just putting somebody in there where that's their job to think about that every day.

And I think what's happening too is that Las Vegas is being seen as one of those places that's a great place to do business.

So we want to help be that place where we're the educational partner, we can be the research and idea partner, we can even be a place where you have an environment that is conducive to be able to even seeing students come through for internships, which I love, to be able to have opportunities to work with companies on real-world problems realtime and then they go and get great jobs.

-Outside of the sector of gaming and entertainment, as you mentioned.

So many other industries that we can develop on.

We've got about four minutes left.

I want to transition to financial sustainability, another high-priority area that you've already mentioned here.

Let's go back to where we were at the pandemic.

We did have a special session, significant cuts to higher education.

It looks like most of those cuts are going to be restored at some point here.

That's good news, but is that enough?

-I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I think that it's going to be a game changer for what's going to be done, but there's got to be a better investment in higher ed in the whole state.

We're down towards the bottom when we see investment in higher education, and I think that's the reason why UNLV and UNR and NSC and all of our higher ed partners have really been kind of doing what I have-- another one of my little catchphrases, which is making a dollar out of 15 cents.

But we need to have a better investment in that for Las Vegas to come back fully.

For us to be able to even realize ourselves as that partner, there needs to be a greater investment.

I have, you know, an unbelievable CFO, one of the best provosts I think in the country, and we are very strategic about how we use every single dollar.

And if we had more, we would do more.

-Well, I wanted to ask you that too.

Such a big role I would assume of a president is the fundraising aspect.

Of course we've been in this COVID-restricted scenario here where you can't necessarily go out in your first six months and maybe talk to some of those big donors, or maybe you have.

I want to know specifically how much of an average day of the president of a university is spent on fundraising?

-You know, I was at Duke for a number of years, and I know that's a bad thing to say at UNLV because we we remember our basketball history.

-You're going back a ways, but yes.

-That gentleman at the time was saying that, you know, people think that I do 80% of my time on fundraising.

He said you know, it's not that.

I was like, yes, it's probably 79%.

But that was for that university.

For me I think I am moving into spending more time, and they're developing relationships, you know, more than just the handout.

It's really developing relationships, seeing how people actually understand or sometimes don't understand what UNLV actually brings, the history and what the future actually brings.

So it's more and more.

You're hitting on a very interesting topic because I have not quantified exactly what it is, but it will be a bit more.

But I will tell you just from my perspective, I'm a student success-centered person and will be as president.

And while we definitely want to have the contributions of philanthropy, they make a huge difference, I'm going to make sure that I keep my eye on what that money is going to and making sure that it's doing the best that we can.

What's nice for me is that I have a leadership team that's outstanding from my government affairs person to the chief financial officer to my provost.

They keep me from worrying too much, but I still have to worry a little bit about it.

And my other piece is that I want to make sure that I connect with students as much as possible so that we know what we're getting the money for.

-President Whitfield, great conversation.

Thank you so much.

-Thank you.

-Thank you as always for joining us this week on Nevada Week.

For any of the resources discussed on the show, please visit our website at vegaspbs.org/nevada-week.

You can also find us on social media at @nevadaweek.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next week.

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