She could show you a high time
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 3, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
She could show you a high time
Living the good life, don't be that way
The reason University of Nevada, Las Vegas president Carol Harter has to spend more than $100,000 a year wining and dining bigwigs is that millionaire donors have to be hustled in places they find comfortable, explains UNLV vice president John Gallagher, who oversees the UNLV Foundation.
"The last thing they want is to be taken to Burger King," Mr. Gallagher explains.
Pardon me. I had the impression a lot of folks who get to be millionaires in America's private sector manage to do so by knowing the value of a dime ... let alone a dollar. To his dying day, John D. Rockefeller lived in a modest room with a single lamp. The folks who have gone out to profile the lifestyles of America's millionaires of late have found that most work long hours and live in surprisingly modest environs -- they got to be millionaires precisely because they don't stock the six-car garage with extra limousines.
Why not take them to Burger King? The students who attend UNLV -- the supposed final beneficiaries of all this philanthropic largesse -- dine at Burger King a lot more often than at Cafe Nicolle. Afraid the donors might actually meet one?
UNLV scholars preparing term papers don't arrive at the library expecting Afghan carpets, marble fireplaces and manservants bringing them Persian slippers and brandies on little silver trays. Any sensible donor taken on a tour of such trappings might well ask, "Gee, is this really the best way to stretch my donated dollar? It's all very lovely, but somehow I'd expected something a little more ... utilitarian. More books; less velvet."
Why wouldn't the same principle apply to dinner with Ms. Harter? A quiet and comfortable table? Sure. Ply them with a nice bottle of wine? Worth a try.
But dinner at Picasso or the Commander's Palace? Four hundred and fifty dollars worth of flower arrangements for a regents meeting? $1,800 dinners at the Kapalua Bay Hotel -- hundreds of bucks for booze alone -- the outing alibied by the fact that the Runnin' Rebels were playing in the Maui Invitational?
Did any of the student athletes get to attend, the better to wow potential donors with their table manners and scholarly erudition? Or were they left to pick up their own tab at Cheeseburger in Paradise?
It's not enough that Ms. Harter is poised to see her annual pay cross the $200,000 threshold this month -- not counting sundry other travel, housing and food allowances. No. The big spenders can't even be forthright about how much cash is streaming out this particular firehose.
First, the taxpaying public was told Mrs. Harter had a "$5,000" host account. "That's totally misleading," responded Regent Steve Sisolak. "It's a whole lot more than that."
In fact, it turns out Mrs. Harter handed out some $155,000 last year ... that we know about.
The standard explanation why taxpayers need not concern themselves with such profligacy is that this $155,000 was funneled to Ms. Harter's "host" accounts through the UNLV Foundation. Since the foundation is itself privately supported, all this travel and gift-giving and wining and dining isn't really on the taxpayer's tab.
True, up to a point.
But money is fungible. As UNLV's lobbyists continue to return to Carson City, whining to lawmakers that the school can't afford enough reference books and beakers for its chem labs, are the delegates really expected to keep turning a blind eye to the salmon and roast pig on Maui, the $500 tables at the Lili Claire Foundation dinner, the holiday parties, the giveaway tote bags? Aren't they likely to ask, "Gee wouldn't a couple of those Hawaiian luaus have funded a whole lot of lab equipment?"
One begins to suspect the reason the university bigwigs think nothing of trying to buy their way into the "big time" with moolah instead of solid, demonstrable achievements is precisely because they don't have to earn it.
For the bottom line, of course, is results. No matter how unsavory Mrs. Harter's wastrel ways while her students hold down part-time jobs and try to figure out how to pay their parking fines, money talks. How much have all the $1,800 dinners produced? Enough private donations that UNLV lobbyists will journey to the capital next year and proudly proclaim their state subsidy can be reduced by 10 percent? Twenty percent? Thirty percent?
UNLV is a college still best known locally as Tumbleweed Tech and nationally as home to a thuggish basketball team that piled up more recruiting violations than a Tijuana pimp. If Ms. Harter's efforts have turned all that around, great.
So: Which donors who'd planned to endow a chair of history or economics at Princeton or Rice or USC have shifted their bounty to UNLV following that charming tete-a-tete with Mrs. and Mrs. Harter and Treston the Hawaiian torch-dancer?
Tell us.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at 1-800-244-2224.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
