Henderson Thirteenth Grade
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED FEB. 6, 2002
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Henderson Thirteenth Grade'
When do sponsors of Hooterville U. take off their clothes and paint themselves?
The proposed site of the still imaginary Nevada State College at Henderson -- the largest suburb of Las Vegas -- was relocated last year from a traditional-style campus at the entrance to an upscale master-planned community near the center of town to an industrial park off Car Country Drive, whose sole tenant complains he was promised more than discarded mattresses and the whine of off-road motorbikes.
The outfit's highly-paid "founding president" now admits he worried last fall the college project was "dead" due to lackluster private donations. (Taxpayers were once promised private backers would fund the whole project, which is based on the premise that Nevada needs more government-school teachers, and not necessarily of the high caliber now produced at UNLV.)
Well, the good news just keeps pouring in for this still-imaginary hole in the ground, into which influential Henderson state legislator Richard Perkins has so far managed to pour about a million tax dollars.
By this time of year, the University of Nevada Las Vegas has received about one-fifth of the applications for incoming freshmen which it expects to receive for the class of 2006 -- 2,000 applications to date, in fact.
But it turns out the proposed new Hooterville U., less than eight months away from opening its doors, has so far received applications from, um ... 10 to 15 students.
Never at a loss for words, founding college president Richard Moore -- apparently a fan of John Barth's "The Sot-Weed Factor" -- explained to university regents at their Jan. 25 meeting that he actually wishes no students had applied at all: He would prefer that prospective applicants wait till he can provide more specific details about the nursing and teacher-training curricula he hopes to offer.
NSCH doesn't even have a catalog or a class schedule yet, and "We're not in an application drive," Mr. Moore demurred.
Although that particular spin dance would seem to contradict the signals being sent by the nascent college's own Web site, which now encourages would-be scholars to rush in their applications with a promise to waive a $40 fee which -- so far as can be determined -- never existed in the first place.
For the record, if the proposed campus were to open with 15 students, the proposed $1 million start-up cost would work out to $66,000 per kid. Mr. Moore's own modest $182,000 salary would mean taxpayers would be paying him $12,100 (not counting benefits) for the supervision of each student.
Even if the eventual applicant pool does grow by a factor of five -- and assuming every applicant is accepted -- 50 to 75 students would fit in a one-room schoolhouse. At that point, wouldn't it be more appropriate to call Mr. Moore's current project "Henderson Thirteenth Grade"?
Yes, the recruiting drive Mr. Moore promises for April could doubtless drum up the 500 students he's planning for -- assuming he doesn't balk at hanging fliers on apartment doors and slipping them under windshield wipers at the supermarket. But what will then have happened to the notion that high "demand" justifies the allocation of scarce state revenues to this project -- and what will become then of the pretense that "high standards" are being maintained?
Mr. Moore is a great PR man -- he spent part of the Jan. 25 Regents meeting boosting the motivation of his employers by showing them clips from the inspirational film "Chariots of Fire." But behind all the flummoxry, the suspicion lingers that the educratic wolves have gathered here to feed off this succulent, newborn calf irrespective of whether it is ever to rise to its feet. Part-time instructors at Nevada colleges and universities receive $2,000 per semester of teaching, but Mr. Moore explained to the Regents he has to pay Clark County Associate Superintendent of Human Resources George Ann Rice $1,000 per day for "consulting work" because she's "a national scholar" ... whatever that means.
If this were a Mark Twain novel, it's about now that the villagers would be arriving for the third night's performance of the Duke and Dauphin (who promise readings from Shakespeare but end up crawling about on stage, naked and painted with colorful spots) carrying tar, feathers, and bags of rotten fruit.
But of course, the Duke and the Dauphin never show up for the third night.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, and the author of "Send in the Waco Killers." Subscribe to his monthly newsletter at Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591, where information on his next book, "The Ballad of Carl Drega," is also available.
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
