It is May and just a week after being named UNLV’s eighth president, David Ashley surveys his office at the University of California, Merced. The walls hold paintings by his wife and reflect his love of the outdoors. There’s a photo, taken one winter by his son, of California’s El Capitan. On the bookshelf is a slide rule from his undergraduate days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — his was the last class required to use slide rules rather than scientific calculators.
He especially treasures a piece that a student from Ghana gave him when he was teaching civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The hand-carved sculpture is of one boy helping another climb a tree. “He told me it was an excellent example of project management,” Ashley says. “In Ghana there is a saying: if you find a good tree, someone will always help you climb it.” The sculpture, too, embodies his view of UNLV: “There are so many ready to help us climb our ‘good tree.’”
The search for UNLV’s eighth president was swift. Carol C. Harter announced in February that she was stepping down after 11 years. By April, the regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education had assembled a 30-member advisory board and selected a strong, but very different, group of finalists. Among them was Ashley, the number two official at the University of California, Merced. Initially, the regents picked another candidate, who withdrew before the final appointment was made.
During his final interview, Ashley told the committee about the UNLV shirt he’d received during the campus tour. He’d wear it fondly, either at his next business meeting or the next time he mowed the lawn, depending on the outcome of the search. “Literally 10 minutes before I got the call saying the search was on once again, I’d put the shirt in a drawer I reserve for my weekend stuff.”
Ashley had come out on top on the strength of his administrative record. During the campus forums, he adeptly fielded questions ranging from the importance of international studies to his views on technology infrastructure. The buzz around him focused on his ability to size up the situation and take calculated risks. At the final meeting of the search committee, several members commented on how Ashley started off quiet but finished strong, growing on them with each encounter.
“Well, I am quiet,” he says to account for first impressions. “I’ve seen excellent presidents who love the stage and can capture a room. I want to listen, to understand, to interact. My style is more about engaging people with ideas and concerns, about engaging individuals.”
He’s also about gathering data. During the second round of interviews, it was clear that Ashley had done his homework. He had visited the website, read media clips, and talked with colleagues about UNLV. He knew about UNLV’s fundraising campaign and understood its drive to elevate its academic programs. A search for a university president is not a competition, he says, “it’s about finding the right match. UNLV had to do its part, and I did mine. I had to know that I could serve the university well.”
Ashley is an engineer specializing in construction planning, so it’s a bit odd that an administrative career just wasn’t in his plans. As an undergrad at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he explored four majors before settling on civil engineering. Summer jobs as a laborer — digging foundations and assisting welders — had opened his eyes to the construction field. A career in research developed from a study-abroad program that took him to both Western and Eastern Europe as well as from campus projects that offered access to senior faculty. “It can be very hard to explain why research universities are important to students. For me, I lived it. I know how those interactions with faculty outside the classroom so enriched my learning.”
In 1977, with degrees from MIT and Stanford, he envisioned a career dedicated to teaching and research. Within a decade, he had gone from assistant to associate to full professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He was racking up publishing credits and winning highly competitive grants from such organizations as the National Science Foundation. Universities from Sweden to South Africa were offering visiting professorships, and his own students nominated him for teaching awards. The university took notice and began grooming him for administration. “It just wasn’t what I wanted,” he says, so he headed to UC Berkeley, where “the most treasured position is professor.”
A couple of years later, though, an early retirement program had eroded the senior faculty, leaving few of the usual suspects to head Berkeley’s top-ranked civil engineering department. It was simply “my turn,” he says. The challenges of faculty recruitment and program redevelopment were rewarding, but this time one particular duty — evaluating professors — cemented a career in administration. “I’m not trying to be modest here,” he says in his soft voice. “I am a good researcher. But, when I had to evaluate my colleagues and their excellent research accomplishments, I realized that what gave me a comparative advantage was that I was a very good administrator.”
Ohio State University soon tapped him to be dean of its massive engineering college. In his four years there, he redeveloped curricula and launched programs that boosted student retention to 70 percent from less than 50 percent. He also led a corporate partnership program and tapped into alumni in Asia.
Then, colleagues from the UC system called him back with a rare opportunity. They wanted to build a research university from the ground up in an underserved part of the state and they needed an academic visionary. Was he interested? At Merced, he spent four years hiring faculty, establishing curricula, battling for budget, and building facilities worthy to be at the table alongside the system’s nine other campuses. The school opened last fall with a diverse student body, and nearly half the students were the first in their families to go to college.
His single best day in the job came Sept. 6, the day after UC Merced held its grand opening with dignitaries from across the community and the state. The first day of classes was calm compared with the festivities of the previous day. “What made it so exciting for me was the thought that it was the first of many normal days. Our students were in their classes and our faculty were teaching — it was what we had all worked so hard to achieve.”
Just six months later Ashley got a call from the executive search firm charged with recruiting candidates for the UNLV presidency. The opportunity to lead a growing institution was too good to pass up, he says.
“I know research,” Ashley says. “And I know how to make difficult choices to advance an institution. If you have your staff and faculty doing what you want them to do — being innovative and creative, developing new ideas — there will always be more things worthy of funding than funding available. The tough decisions always go back to that.”
UNLV, he is sure, has its share of tough decisions ahead. He expects to spend his first few months mining for data. “Are UNLV’s plans in line with the community’s?” he wants to know. “Are its goals too broad for its resources?” His initial impression is that it’s time to channel the growth, to find and support the pockets of excellence that will be key to building the university’s reputation.
Having worked in the UC system has given him a perspective on how to grow within the Nevada System of Higher Education. No institution can be all things to all people, he says; there’s always conflict between providing excellent academic programs and offering the broadest possible access. With clear missions for each campus and each serving as a piece of a whole, the state can do both. The focus should be on strategically increasing the size of the pie, rather than arguing over how to divide it. “If it’s just a competition between Reno and UNLV, all you do is split the already limited resources,” he says. “If you work as a system, you can create more educational access and more dynamic programs.”
By training, Ashley is accustomed to the planning required to get complex projects off the ground. His niche is risk assessment for major construction projects. “It’s about capturing all the uncertainties in a project so a ‘go’ or ‘no-go’ decision can be made.” The work suits his analytical decision-making style, and his ability to sum up the details.
Currently, he’s part of a five-person team evaluating a $5 billion, seven-year expansion of the Panama Canal. They’re assessing such factors as the amount of gas the large construction equipment will consume and what soil conditions might hamper productivity. The first attempt to dig the canal was fraught with miscalculations, with more 20,000 people dying from disease and mudslides. “The canal was the project of the century in my field, so it’s been particularly exciting to be a part of this,” he says. “It’s an application of much of the research I’ve been doing over the last 20 to 30 years.”
A large part of his job as president will be spent finding others to support UNLV’s climb. It’s something he discovered an aptitude for while at Ohio State. He joined that university in the middle of a fundraising push much like UNLV’s current Invent the Future campaign. At Ohio State he raised $190 million for endowed chairs, new buildings, scholarships, and support services. Ashley held regular chat sessions with young faculty members to hear about their work and the possibilities they saw for the future. He told their stories to the business community, which could tap into the creative endeavors of faculty while offering students valuable experiences.
“It’s not about asking for money,” he says, “it’s about sharing the story of a university. People will support UNLV — through giving, through volunteering, through advocacy — when they see in it what I see.”
UNLV’s alumni, he says, will be a vital part of moving the university forward. “The value of the enduring commitment of alumni can’t be understated,” he says.
That’s one reason athletic programs are so important, he adds. Years after leaving Texas and Ohio State, he still seeks out Longhorn and Buckeye football games on TV. In Texas, he also became a fan of women’s basketball. Sports have a remarkable way of helping alumni across the country maintain their ties, he says. In the community, especially one with no other “home team,” it’s a vital way to bring the community in. “A strong athletic program is also especially important for current students. It gives them a focus and a social avenue for their Rebel experience.”
In mid-June, Ashley and his wife, Anna, saw the arrival of their first grandchildren. Their daughter, Kimberlee, an accountant for a Fort Worth, Texas, aerospace firm, gave birth to twin daughters, Kylie and Samantha. His son, Mark, also lives in the Dallas area, where he works as a photographer. Rounding out the family are three beagles. “The middle one is named Elvis,” Ashley adds. “He’s ready for his Las Vegas years.”
The Ashleys met at a party in Austin, and found they share a love of the outdoors. They have traveled often to Yellowstone and the Pacific Coast to photograph wildlife, which Anna then uses as studies for her paintings. “She very much loves using her hands and her aesthetic,” Ashley says. “I love being active outdoors.”
One attraction of coming to Southern Nevada is the access it offers to national parks. With family in the area, Ashley was already familiar with Las Vegas before taking the job. His father, a chemical engineer who invented the Playtex rubber glove, had retired here before his death three years ago. “We’ve seen more of the community off the Strip than on,” he says. “It’s a very comfortable place for us.”
A decade ago he took up cycling for exercise, a hobby that also allows him to indulge his nature to tinker with mechanical things. A favorite ride winds 80 minutes along the rolling hills near Morro Bay, Calif. Sometimes the scenery lets him escape; sometimes work creeps into his thoughts. “My mind seems to go to the kinds of problems that, if you think too hard on them, you won’t see the solution.” In the quiet moments, away from the data that usually supports his decisions, he’s often found answers to his toughest problems.
