Chancellor Rogers set fighting example successor will need to follow

A proclamation was read. Brief tributes were given. There were a few laughs, a couple hugs and a standing ovation. The atmosphere was cordial, but I couldn’t help cringing a little.

It’s already getting too quiet around the troubled Nevada System of Higher Education, which has been led the past five years by the firebrand Rogers.

During Thursday’s meeting at the Desert Research Institute in a building named after his father, Rogers stepped aside and watched the higher education system’s Executive Vice Chancellor Dan Klaich take his place. Despite the lack of a national search, Klaich’s appointment makes sense. He’s well-qualified and has valuable experience inside the state’s community college and university machine.

I only hope that being around Rogers has stoked a fire in Klaich’s belly. He’ll need the nerve of a D-Day Marine if, as expected, the state’s budget woes worsen. He’ll need to fight the collegial nature of his academic background to effectively thrust and parry with a governor whose administration has been no friend of higher education.

It’s something Rogers the fighter relished as chancellor.

When the history of Nevada’s higher education system is written, there’s sure to be a chapter on Rogers’ turbulent non-relationship with Gov. Jim Gibbons. There will be plenty of material because Rogers wrote numerous “memos,” some of them exceeding a couple thousand words, to the governor in an attempt to have him define himself on the subject of higher education.

Gibbons’ hard-line stance on taxes put him at odds with the chancellor. Gibbons has four university degrees, but he possessed no articulated vision of the importance of higher education. Rogers attempted to draw him into the open.

A favorite Rogers broadside came from his Aug. 13 letter to the governor. The chancellor immediately dispatched with the pleasantries.

“What is the message?” he wrote. “What is your intention as Governor with respect to financial support of the Nevada System of Higher Education? What position will your proposed budget place the legislature in with respect to funding the essential needs of Nevada, including the Nevada System of Higher Education?”

Bam.

It isn’t often in state history an official has so publicly slapped the face of a sitting governor. Rogers hit Gibbons more than Larry Holmes hit Tex Cobb. But the letters weren’t written for sport.

Rogers clearly believed Gibbons, a scandalized governor clinging to a no-new-taxes pledge, had no real philosophy of higher education. It showed when the governor took a meat ax to the budgets at UNR and UNLV in order to present a balanced budget he knew wouldn’t stand up.

An academic would have protested civilly, but thank heavens Rogers wasn’t an academic. Hard times or not, he refused to roll over and watch the system bleed out. He fought back and sometimes hit below the belt.

Rogers was more than an articulate loudmouth. He puts his money where his loud mouth is, donating and pledging $275 million to higher education at various institutions and in the process being named in the Top 12 of America’s biggest philanthropists by Time magazine. Although he wasn’t very effective, Rogers also implored the state’s wealthy to join him at the higher education’s high-stakes table.

As a cancer survivor and the owner of television stations, the 70-year-old Rogers might have been content to spout off in editorials about the sad state of Nevada’s university system. Instead, he grabbed the chancellor’s job at a token annual salary he donated back to the system.

Although he was often accused of unfettered egotism, what emerged from his pugnacious style was a man who believes improving Nevada’s public education system is our only real hope to rise above our transient, boomtown roots.

Rogers shouted loud and long about the higher education system’s strengths and shortcomings and went nose to nose with those who believe affordable education holds no higher priority than road striping.

With the state’s budget promising to get tighter, no allies in the governor’s office and Nevada’s philanthropic class suffering from a terrible case of deep pockets and short arms, Klaich had better be prepared to fight for higher education every day of his tenure.

He could do much worse than following the example of his pugilistic predecessor.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith/.