With the pending retirement of Carl Diekhans as President of Great Basin College (GBC), there will probably be some pressure to hire a replacement with grand ideas.
We hope those ideas won’t be too grand.
Great Basin is an institution that Diekhans has led very effectively to become one of the premier vocational-technical institutions in the Northwest.
One of the problems in hiring a president for such an institution is that it’s not nearly as sexy as, say, a four-year liberal arts and sciences university such as UNR or even UNLV. So, what typically happens is that someone takes the job and then tries to reinvent the school as their own version of Harvard on Interstate 80, complete with politically correct speech.
That won’t work in Elko, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Ely, or Pahrump.
We suspect that is knowledge already held by rural Regents such as Kevin Melcher and Ron Knecht.
But there may be some members of the community advisory committee and the rest of the Regents who don’t fully understand that Diekhans has done a masterful job of balancing all of the constituencies and has the institution headed in exactly the right direction. Those are the folks who would like to see the equivalent of Stanford on the State of Nevada’s dime.
GBC exists to train people in rural Nevada for jobs with mining companies, agriculture, manufacturing and law enforcement.
It doesn’t exist to do research, to grant degrees in things like women’s studies or have a football team.
What it also can and should do is to provide a solid associate’s degree in two years for those who would like to go on to UNR, Utah, Boise State or Arizona State but for any number of reasons either academic or financial need to spend a few years at home first.
In short, GBC is an institution which is aimed at practical education and whoever is selected to become its new President needs to understand that he or she is not being charged with building the Harvard of Interstate 80.
One of the weaknesses of the system is that Nevada’s Board of Higher Education Regents first goes out and hires a search firm.
That search firm has no real way of knowing a candidate’s predilections. It is mostly in the business of checking academic and employment records. A candidate with a wonder record could easily turn out to be a disaster if he or she is not asked the key question explicitly, many times, which is, do you want to be the President of an institution which does what GBC does as opposed to changing the institution?
Those questions can only be answered in an intensive interview.
Grandiose plans are not an option.
A lack of regard for rural America is not a good thing.
And, someone who wants to use this job as a stepping stone is not out of the question but it should be a long term stepping stone.
GBC is a very important part of the Nevada educational picture and needs a dynamic leader who fully understands the mission.
Anybody who wants the job to change the mission should be disqualified right up front.
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