Excitement. Adventure. Opportunity.
Words you would find on a recruitment poster for the Marines, right? Or maybe a brochure for the Peace Corps?
Surprisingly enough, they're just a few of the enthusiastic terms used by four decades of faculty to describe why they came to UNLV.
Whether they arrived at the dusty Maryland Parkway campus in the 1950s or in the mid-1990s when the dust had given way to green campus malls rimmed with tall trees and modern buildings, most faculty members recall vividly what brought them to UNLV.
Many came to accept their first teaching jobs, attracted to an institution at which an enterprising spirit was needed to get things started. Later arrivals found a more established but still growing campus. One thing they all seemed to share was the desire to contribute to the progress of a young campus clearly on its way up. And, they all have great stories to tell.
One of the earliest arrivals was Herbert Wells, who retired last spring after teaching engineering at UNLV for 40 years.
Wells, who in 1957 was a process engineer at the Timet plant in Henderson, was asked to teach a surveying class at what was then the Southern Regional Division of the University of Nevada. Not long afterward, he joined the faculty full time.
In those days, in order to get a degree, students from the southern
campus had to attend classes at UNR for at least one semester, and
much of the administrative and curricular planning at the southern
division had to be approved in Reno.
Wells remembers flying up north at least once a month with three other faculty members for University Council meetings, during which it would be determined if the southern campus could offer new courses or services to the growing population of the Las Vegas community.
"Reno would tell us what was good for us," Wells says, "and the vote was often 26-4 if the issue involved us." The thought that Northern Nevadans were dictating policy chafed the southerners, who were determined to achieve autonomy as speedily as possible.
At the same time, Wells says, the people in the fledgling engineering and science programs had good relationships with their Reno counterparts. The northerners contributed extra copies of books for the library, as well as surplus equipment.
Wells tells of also getting help from his own students. Eight students enrolled in his first surveying class, and he had only one set of surveying instruments. However, one of the students, already a professional surveyor who thought he might be able to learn something new, brought his instruments to help out.
Wells also remembers registration the first year he taught. Part-time teachers were asked to attend in case students had any questions. He and several colleagues were watching the registration line when one student in particular caught their attention: a red-headed woman wearing only her freckles, a small pink bikini, and pink high heels. She carried a pink purse and a poodle dyed the same color. Speculation was rife among the observing instructors as to which classes she planned to take, says Wells, who at that point had not seen any of the more exotic sides of Las Vegas. All he knew was that she didn't enroll in any of his classes.
By the time Wells joined the faculty, the southern division had outgrown its quarters in the basement of Las Vegas High School. Maude Frazier Hall was built in 1957 and provided the structural heart and soul of the campus.
"Everything was done in Frazier Hall," Wells says. "We had all of the faculty in one room, except for the chemist and the biologist who each had a laboratory." The library was in what is now the Registrar's Office, the labs were in the area that houses the College of Extended Studies. Construction of the gymnasium - now the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Natural History - and Archie Grant Hall soon followed.
James Deacon, now a biological sciences professor and the chairman of
the environmental studies department, also remembers the cozy quarters
of the early days.
"The campus was certainly small," says Deacon, who joined the faculty in 1960. "But that didn't bother me at all. I was really excited about the beauty of the place and how different it was from the plains where I grew up."
However, the principal attraction for Deacon was not so much aesthetic as practical; accepting a teaching post at UNLV provided him an opportunity to do research on some hard-to-find subjects: desert fishes.
"When I started looking for a job, one of the things that was really attractive about this place was that it was in the desert, near some of these creatures. And there hadn't been much work done on them. There wasn't an ichthyologist within 450 miles. It was a whole new, vacant area of the globe full of interesting creatures," says Deacon, who came to UNLV directly from graduate school at the University of Kansas.
While research opportunities might have brought him to UNLV, it was the students who kept him here. Deacon became immediately committed to his students; for him, what has become a modern buzzword in academe - "student centeredness" - was a matter of course. He has always involved students in his research projects and has taken every chance to get his students out of the classroom and into the wilds to apply what they've learned.
He remembers, for example, two summers of classes in Clark Canyon in the Spring Mountains, where students collected and studied animal specimens.
"All the time we spent in the field contributed to a high level of student involvement," Deacon says. "You get a lot more interaction there than in the classroom. Learning becomes more personal; it becomes an opportunity to focus not only on the scientific ideas, but also to integrate them into the rest of your life."
Like Wells, Deacon recalls having to be resourceful at gathering teaching supplies. He taught a class in comparative anatomy for pre-med students, and since he had relatively few laboratory materials, he suggested that students get more involved by collecting some of their own. As it happened, two students who worked for veterinarians decided to take advantage of raw materials from the vet to build a horse skeleton.
"The skeleton stayed around the lab for years," Deacon says. "They even put a little paper heart inside."
Animals were naturally a part of Deacon's discipline, but he ran into more than his fair share unexpectedly right on campus. Roadrunners frequently scurried about, he says, and there was a fox den about where the Juanita Greer White Life Sciences building stands now. And one of the first scientific articles from the new university was a report of a very rare spotted bat that had been found semi-mummified in the gymnasium building.
Then there were the rattlesnakes. By the time Deacon arrived on campus, the library had been moved to Grant Hall, and Billie Mae Polson was the librarian. One day, Deacon received a phone call from Polson, who still serves the library, now as senior catalog librarian, requesting that he "please do something" about the snake under her desk. It didn't faze Deacon or his students that the serpent was a rattler.
"We had started getting students involved in natural history projects, so we were collecting snakes and lizards and fish and mammals and all kinds of specimens all over Southern Nevada. So it was not a big deal to collect a rattlesnake from under Billie Mae's desk. It turned out to be one of four we collected on campus that first year; it was a sidewinder, not really very big."
The primitive setting that provided such a good laboratory for the biologists brought a stark dose of reality to another early faculty member.
English professor Felicia Campbell was fresh out of graduate school
when she was interviewed by telephone for her teaching position on
campus. She accepted the job sight unseen and flew to Las Vegas in
time to start the fall 1962 semester.
"Jim Dickinson [James R. Dickinson, sent from Reno in 1951 to start evening classes in Las Vegas and for whom the library is named] picked me up," she recalls. "I didn't have a car; I didn't know how to drive. I didn't realize there were places where you needed to do that."
Campbell spent her first Las Vegas night in a room across from the campus. "I thought I was going to walk across the street for breakfast, but there was nothing in any direction for at least three miles. When I came out of my room that first morning, Ann Fowler, a new sociology teacher, was standing on the street corner looking across at UNLV. We looked at each other, and she said, 'My God, it's a gas station.' There was nothing but these old, flat buildings. So we went and got a bottle of Gallo."
Yet, Campbell was undaunted. "I learned to drive and bought a car, those sorts of things. I was looking for excitement, adventure, something different, and I had found it," she says, noting that the only other university she had applied to was in Ibadan, Nigeria. Hence, she acknowledges that she probably had a greater tolerance for the unexpected than the average English professor.
Still, she must have had some doubts about what she had gotten herself into that day during her first year on campus when she encountered a gun-toting stranger.
"I was teaching one day in Grant Hall, and this guy came in. He had a very large pistol, and he sat down in the back row, put the pistol down, and just sat there. I didn't know what to do, so I kept on lecturing." The pistol-bearer sat for about 15 minutes, then got up and left. "I'll never know whether it was a close call or not," she muses.
Campbell was impressed in quite a different way by another student. Bob Coffin, now a state senator, was enrolled in her American literature class.
"I remember this well - it was 1968 and I was pregnant with my daughter. My students were making book on when I was going to disappear." Coffin's contribution to that memorable year was to make a personal telephone call to one of the authors he and his classmates were studying.
"We had just read Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle - this was before Vonnegut became really famous - and Bob called him up. Vonnegut was terribly flattered that somebody was using his book in a class, and he talked to Bob for quite a while."
Campbell remembers the early days as a "tremendous amount of fun." She relished being exposed to the interdisciplinary benefits of having most of the faculty in one building. And when faculty gathered for meetings for a time at the Tropicana Country Club, she enjoyed witnessing the comings and goings of such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr.
"We had a lot of fun talking and dreaming about the university in
those days," she says, adding that she, too, has memories of those
interminable airplane flights to and from Reno and of asking for
permission to develop the southern campus.
Like Campbell and many other early university faculty, foreign languages professor Donald Schmiedel had not seen the campus before arriving to teach his first classes in 1965.
He and his wife were married in Ohio that August and considered the trek West both a honeymoon and an adventure.
"I thought I would spend a few years here and go on to someplace else.
But it was an absolute adventure. You got the feeling you were
building something, that you were in on the ground floor. Things were
chaotic at times, but then things are always chaotic. We were never in
a rut here because we always wanted to see if something new was going
to happen."
At the time of his arrival, the campus had just become Nevada Southern University, and its first chancellor, Donald C. Moyer, had been appointed. But autonomy was still several years away.
Schmiedel, who currently organizes graduation ceremonies and has done so for the past decade, recalls the faculty's keen frustration over UNR's presence at Commencement. He points out that Nevada Southern wasn't even allowed to lead its own processional at the time he arrived on campus.
"We were not allowed to have our own marshal," Schmiedel says. "A fellow from Reno would bring a mace down and lead our procession."
But other strides were being made. In 1965 the first floor of the round library building was occupied, as was what is now the Lilly Fong Geoscience building. The university's first dormitory, Tonopah Hall, was under construction. There was even some grass around the library and Frazier Hall.
Schmiedel moved into the brand new Wright Hall, then called the Social Sciences Building, in 1965. The entire faculty of the foreign languages department, as well as the English department, were able to fit on the second floor. Schmiedel recalls that his office was on the south side of the building, looking out over an empty lot adjacent to Tonopah Hall.
"The space was sort of an informal parking lot - there were lots of informal parking lots in those days; if there was a driveway out to a road, that was where you parked."
The informal parking lot was littered with nails left over from construction - a continual annoyance to Schmiedel. One day, "tired of driving around through nails," he collected a quart jar full of them and turned them over to the first dean of faculty, Jerry Crawford, now an emeritus professor of theatre. Crawford, in turn, took the jar of nails to Chancellor Moyer. Though he's not sure if his point had any impact on Moyer, Schmiedel was pleased that the parking lot got cleaned up - even if he had to do it himself.
That do-it-yourself atmosphere didn't bother nursing professor Mary Fitzgerald either; she found the growing campus a stimulating environment.
"Every year was a new adventure," says Fitzgerald, who came to Las Vegas in 1965. "There were new people, new programs, and new buildings."
She was working part-time at Rose De Lima Hospital in Henderson when she heard about the nursing program at Nevada Southern. Fresh out of graduate school and interested in teaching, she applied for a job and was hired.
"I'll never forget the offices," she says. "We had a large room in Frazier Hall with subdivisions of plywood to create faculty 'offices.' The walls ended about two feet short of the ceiling. There were about five of us in the room, and we didn't have to go out of our offices to talk to one another."
The office accommodations were a bit rustic, but there were other advantages to being at the young university, Fitzgerald says. She appreciated the freedom to try new ideas, such as a video conferencing exchange she established with the nursing program in Reno. Through the exchange, the southern associate degree was made available to UNR students and the UNR bachelor's degree was made available to Nevada Southern students.
Local TV stations were involved, Fitzgerald remembers, adding that,
"Every time the wind blew, the transmitter went down. So sometimes we
videotaped the course and mailed it to Reno." Eventually the number of
nursing students in Las Vegas warranted a full degree program.
The decade of the
1970s brought a spate of new faculty, among them musician Kenneth Hanlon,
who now serves as the associate provost for academic budget and
facilities. A trombonist playing full-time with the Si Zentner Band on the
Las Vegas Strip at the time, Hanlon wanted a part-time teaching job in the
UNLV music department to supplement his income so he could afford to
commute to the University of Southern California to study toward a doctorate.
However, the music department had only full-time openings, and Hanlon was persuaded to accept one of them in 1970 - with the expectation that he would have time to continue to play in the Zentner band.
Opportunities came quickly for faculty in those early years. In Hanlon's second week on the job, Howard Chase, the founding chair of the music department, resigned his position as chair, and Hanlon was tabbed to replace him.
He admits he was a neophyte in the administrative realm.
"I had no idea what I was getting into," Hanlon says. "My first year, every time I turned around I'd get a phone call, and it would be, 'uh, Mr. Hanlon, you've done x, y, or z, and that's not the way we do it.' And I would just laugh and say, 'Well, I'll add this one to my list. Tell me how we do it, and we'll do it right from now on.'"
Hanlon's office was also in the Social Sciences Building; he shared a floor with the dean of the College of Fine Arts, the whole speech and theatre department, and the entire College of Hotel Administration.
"Now, all the old timers say, 'Remember when we used to know everybody?' That was part of the good old days," Hanlon says. "There was so much more collaboration because people knew one another."
Physics professor Len Zane, who now directs the Honors College, agrees with Hanlon that it was easier to get to know other faculty when the university was smaller, as it was when he came to UNLV in 1973.
"One of the nice things early on was meeting people across campus," he says.
Zane was also hired on the basis of a telephone interview and thought Las Vegas would be an interesting place to live for a year or two. But he and his wife were impressed right away by the friendliness of Las Vegans.
"Everybody seemed happy living here," he says, noting that they had theorized that since "everybody moved here from somewhere else," they were here by choice, not by accident of birth.
Zane, who had received his Ph.D. from Duke and had spent time at Oxford and Harvard, had some adjusting to do when he arrived; he acknowledges that coming to a small, relatively new university was a bit of a letdown after spending time in the Ivy League.
"But there was no sense that we were going to accept lower-tier status. There was always a sense that we were going to become the very best physics department we could."
By the time John Stefanelli, a professor in the food and beverage department, arrived at UNLV in 1978, the College of Hotel Administration had already attained an international reputation.
Nevertheless, Stefanelli, who now chairs his department, remembers
finding the program even better than he expected. UNLV could offer
greater specialization opportunities than many other programs, he
says, and its relationship with the resort industry in Las Vegas was
unparalleled in hospitality education.
"The university and the hotel program were tiny then, but I knew I was coming into something special. You could feel it in the air; it was an electric environment," he says.
Although some of Stefanelli's colleagues elsewhere in the world still bought into the old stereotypical image of Las Vegas as a town consisting solely of hotels and casinos, they all seemed to know about the university.
"Even in those days, you did not have to explain to the hospitality
industry what the letters 'UNLV' meant," he says.
As if to confirm the university's "Young, Proud, and Growing" motto of the era, a growth spurt hit the campus in the 1980s, and with it came an influx of new faculty. They were attracted by the opportunity to be part of something new and vital, just as their earlier counterparts had been.
Martha Young, a professor in instructional and curricular studies, who
came to Las Vegas from Albuquerque in 1986, liked the fact that
"nobody stood in your way or said, 'That's not how we do it here.'"
Anthony Ferri, a communication studies professor, recalls that UNLV stood out in his mind among the universities to which he was applying at the time.
"I interviewed at other institutions, but UNLV was the bright spot,"
says Ferri, who came to UNLV in 1985 from Fort Wayne, Ind. "It was
very modern, flexible, and eager to move ahead, and it still is. I
don't know of any other place that was quite like that. It's one of
the good parts of the Wild West mentality in Nevada."
Both Young and Ferri admit they were somewhat unprepared for certain
aspects of the city though.
"I arrived at the airport and wondered why everyone was playing video games," says Young. "It didn't occur to me at first that they could be slot machines." Ferri also found the atmosphere in the casinos "very weird."
"It was a multi-sensual experience, the likes of which I'd never felt before," he says, adding that the university was a stabilizing force that helped him overcome his culture shock.
Many new faculty members, women in particular, have endured teasing from their colleagues elsewhere because of Las Vegas' image. Economics professor Helen Neill, an environmental economist who arrived at UNLV in 1992, says that when she wrote to her high school alumni newsletter about her job here, some of her friends added a postscript: "Helen is really lying; she is really working at a club off the Strip."
Neill takes the teasing with good humor. "After all, UNLV was my first choice," she says, referring to her job search after completing her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. "Once I interviewed with the faculty in the economics department, the more I really wanted the job. And after the on-campus interview, I really, really wanted the job."
Neill's enthusiasm mirrors that of faculty who arrived some 40 years
ago. For her, as for them, coming to UNLV meant the adventure of
living in Las Vegas.
"I'd heard a lot of stories about Las Vegas; it sounded like a
completely different world." And the university's relative youth and
spirit of innovation truly have provided her with many opportunities,
she says, citing as an example her membership in the university's
advisory group that developed the new master's and Ph.D. programs in
environmental science that began this fall.
UNLV now has some 20,000 students in more than 100 degree programs; its faculty and staff have grown to more than 2,100. The university's scholarship and service benefit many constituencies, both inside and outside the state; several UNLV athletes have won national championships, as has the men's basketball team. And more than 33,000 students have graduated.
It appears that four decades of effort have paid off.
Much of the intimacy of the early days is gone, thanks to the sprawling campus and the increasing number of faculty and students. Change, some of it subtle and gradual, some of it more pronounced, is leaving its mark on the character of the institution.
But one thing is certain: No one arriving today would mistake UNLV for a gas station.