Last time, we began commemorating the 150th birthday of the University of Nevada, Reno.
Sports has been crucial to that history. The university’s football team, the Sagebrushers, started playing in 1896. Three people associated with the football program are in the college football hall of fame: Buck Shaw, who coached with several teams … Frank Hawkins, a running back raised in Las Vegas who went on to an NFL career with the Oakland Raiders … and Chris Ault, a longtime coach and athletic director. One player is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Marion Motley, who starred on offense and defense at Nevada in the 1940s and then for the Cleveland Browns, and one of the first two African Americans to play professional football. Ault’s legendary 2010 team, featuring quarterback Colin Kaepernick, went 13 and 1, and won the school’s first game ever against a top 10 team, Boise State. Some of the university’s star athletes have included Nate Burleson, now a host on CBS Mornings and The NFL Today, and legendary golfer Patty Sheehan.
UNR has had important leaders, and sometimes they were controversial. In the early 1950s, president Minard Stout forced the firing of several tenured faculty, prompting the resignation of their most famous professor, Walter Van Tilburg Clark. After Stout left, Charles
Armstrong calmed things down while also getting the Getchell Library built and helping start the University of Nevada Press, whose first director was a reporter, writer, and university staffer, Robert Laxalt, the author of Sweet Promised Land and a shelf of novels and stories about Basque culture. N. Edd Miller succeeded Armstrong and led the school through the protests of the late 1960s. He was so willing to listen and work with students that there was a campus demonstration IN HIS HONOR.
The longest-tenured president was Joe Crowley, a political scientist who served for 22 years. That gave him time to make a lot of important changes, including creating a foundation for fund-raising, making the medical school statewide, and founding the Reynolds School of Journalism. The new student union would be named for him, and he would be a major figure in higher education nationally as well.
Today the school is part of the Nevada System of Higher Education. In 1951, the University of Nevada’s Southern Regional Division opened in Las Vegas High School, and today is it the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The system also includes Nevada State University in Henderson, state and community colleges, and the Desert Research Institute. The University of Nevada, Reno’s fall enrollment a year ago was nearly 22,000 students. It’s come a long way.
The current president is Brian Sandoval, and he has promoted dual enrollment, a merger with Sierra Nevada University, and an affiliation with the Guinn Center think tank. It’s named for a former governor, as Sandoval is.
As I am, too. And I am an alum of the university, and a proud one, with a statue of me up there. My college years did a lot to shape me. I ran for student body president, and my campaign advisers told me that it would help my campaign if I took a Kappa Alpha Theta to the Comstock Stomp dance. I ended up with Bonnie Fairchild, and that led to 57 years of marriage and three children. When it comes to the University of Nevada in Reno, I have a lot to be thankful for. On its 150th birthday, so do we all.