Leonard M. Jessup interview, August 6, 2018: transcript

i AN INTERVIEW WITH LEONARD M. "LEN" JESSUP An Oral History Conducted by Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2018 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans and Israel B. Salinas Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea and the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE “I decided to just keep going, and I devoted my career to higher ed. I wanted to continue putting back into this system that I felt I got a lot out of. Again, repaying a debt.” What began as a passion for playing school sports would later lead Dr. Len Jessup on a path to lifelong service in the area of higher education. From his California childhood he would soon find himself across different U.S. states performing various higher education duties from professor to university president. In this interview, Jessup talks about his grandparents’ decision to emigrate from Italy to the U.S. and how grateful he feels towards his family as a result. He recalls playing baseball in college. In his eyes, being part of several sports teams helped him develop into the person he is now. He describes doing research during at the University of Arizona and speaks to what it was like moving from one university position to the next. Ultimately, his colleagues would recommend that he move to Las Vegas to become a part of the UNLV family. While in Las Vegas, Jessup v met often with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and helped develop UNLV’s medical school. He also played an active role in the development of the Raiders Stadium. On his impact at several universities, he notes, “When I get to the end of my path, I want to look back and I want to know that I did as much as I could to help.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Leonard M. "Len" Jessup August 6, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Claytee D. White Preface…………………………………………………………………………….…...…iv Parents’ emigration from Italy to the U.S.; baseball and college Chico State University; graduate degrees; research at the University of Arizona; California State University, Long Beach, and Washington State University; UNLV…………………………………..… 2–9 Moving to Las Vegas; Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval; Claremont Colleges campus; educational philosophy; school sports; Raiders Stadium; UNLV Medical School.……………………………………………………………………...………… 9–19 Building a Las Vegas house; Las Vegas Raiders; funding the UNLV Medical School; Cristo Rey Schools and demystifying the University of Arizona; fundraising in Las Vegas; Las Vegas and the “good old boys’ network”; how he wants to be remembered at UNLV; Maryland Parkway ……………………………………….........................………….19–36 Appendix photographs……………………………………………….…...………… 37–42 vii 1 This is Claytee White. I am with Dr. Len Jessup in his office in Claremont, California, in his fabulous office. It's a great old building. It's beautiful. Yes. Tell me a little about the building. This campus [Claremont Colleges] started in 1925. The first college was Pomona College, and that president, James Blaisdell, whose home is still across the street right there, it's preserved, and the Pomona faculty decided that they wanted to do some graduate work. So they started to do graduate work and then Blaisdell spun it out into its own college. So we were the second college in the consortium in 1925. This building came a little bit later than that. It's not quite that old. But it's a beautiful old building. Beautiful building. I love it. I don't know if I said the date. It's August 6th, 2018. Dr. Jessup, I want to start with just a little about your early life. Tell me a little about how you grew up, where that was, what your parents did for a living. Sure. I come from a long line of Italian ancestors and small businessmen and women. I'm a hundred percent Italian on both sides of the family; my grandfathers came over from Italy just before the turn of the century, late 1800s, around 1900. They were both poor fishing families. My dad's side, they were in a village outside of Venice, fishing. Then my mom's side were fishermen from Sicily. They were fleeing some pretty harsh social and economic conditions and oppression in Italy at the time. They came to New York separately and then to San Francisco, and then the rest of the families came, and then they started raising their kids, my mom and dad. Then my mom and dad met. The families didn't get along because it was a north-south thing, even though they were all poor. But the family from Venice felt that they were true Italians and the Sicilians weren't actually Italians. The families never really got along, actually. 2 But in any event, my mom and dad got together. My dad was a fireman. They started having kids. There’re five children in my family, me and two brothers and two sisters. I was the first one to go to college and to graduate. I went primarily to play baseball. I went to a little California community college in northern California, College of the Siskiyous, which is still there in Weed, California, near Mount Shasta, and I played baseball. I quickly figured out that I was not good enough to go beyond that and play baseball, but I did pretty well in the classroom. It was my coach actually who was also one of the advisors at this little college that kind of counseled me to follow a bunch of these guys that I had gotten to know. They were all going to go down to Cal State Chico [California State University, Chico]. He encouraged me to go down. "Just go with them." I was going to play baseball there at C.O.S. and then maybe go on and play baseball in the Minor League, which didn't work. When I figured that out—in fact, I went to him as my advisor and said, "I'm thinking I'm just going to go for the two years and I'm going to get a business certificate." Because they give out certificates to do clerical skills and little things around an office, and I thought, I'll do that and I'll get a job and it will be great; that's what I'll do. I didn't know any better. Nobody in my family was talking about college. I credit him, Dennis DeRoss, with encouraging me and saying, "No, no, no, that's not what you're going to do. You're going to do general ed and you're going to follow these guys to [Cal State] Chico. Even if you don't play baseball down there, you're going to go down there and go to college." Okay, that's what I'm going to do. Anyway, I had similar encouragement like that from the right people along the way and just kept going and then got into academe. What's driven me is kind of in two parts. One is that I still feel a debt to my family, my ancestors, for leaving Italy because they were doing that, making sacrifices for me. They were doing that for kids and grandkids that they didn't even have 3 yet. They were doing it to sacrifice for future generations. I got to benefit from that and, thank God, they went to California. Education was so cheap in California at the time with the California master plan [California Master Plan for Higher Education]. Otherwise, I could have never gone; I wouldn't have been able to afford it. I felt the debt to them for doing that. I'm very cognizant of that. I think about them a lot. While my mom and dad were still alive, I would talk a lot about the family and why they did that. Then because I was in California and I got to go to college because of the great system that had been created and the low price, I decided to just keep going and I devoted my career to higher ed. I wanted to continue putting back into this system that I felt I got a lot out of. Again, repaying a debt. What do your parents and your brothers and sisters think about this? You're the first one going to college. Yes. Several have followed since. I'll tell you what, my dad was actually not very supportive, interestingly enough. He was supportive when I went for the first two years because I was playing baseball, so he could see that there was a purpose to that. When I followed those kids down to Chico, he told me that it was a complete waste of time; I was just wasting money and wasting time and I was just going to go down there and goof off. Two years later, when I finished undergrad, he was not supportive of what I was doing. I just kept going right into a master's program there. He and my mom came down for my MBA [Master of Business Administration] graduation at Cal State Chico. I remember after the ceremony—I had gotten some awards and stuff—a bunch of the faculty came up to my family. One of the professors said to my dad, "You must be very proud of your son." My dad said—I still remember it to this day—"I have no idea what he's doing, but it seems to be working out for him, so I'm okay with it." For about two 4 years, plus I was in that master's program for two years, that was probably the first positive thing he said. I understand now. From his perspective I totally get it. Then when I went on and did the doctoral work, then we talked. He was getting up in years and started to open up and was retired and was more open and would talk about things. He knew at that point that I was on a good path. He had no clue what I was doing. He didn't understand what a Ph.D. was. I didn't either when I started. I was in information systems. He had no clue about what I was doing. I came home to visit one Christmas and I had an old Kaypro computer with the old modems where you plugged a phone into it. I'm doing that in their house, and my mom and dad are like, "What in the hell is he doing to our house?" But they knew that I was on a good path, so they were cool with everything that was going on. Fortunately, he got to see me finish and then start as a faculty member for a year or two. So he got it. It was great. He could have been my dad's brother with that attitude that he had. Yes. So that got resolved. It was good. He died at sixty-five. My mom made it to ninety, so she had a great long life and got to see me do a lot of stuff, and so it was great. It worked out really well. Wonderful. Tell me where you went to school after the bachelor's. Chico, I stuck around and got a master's there. I just kept burning straight through. I really liked what I was doing. It was all new for me. For me, being on a campus was just magical. It was just incredible. So I kept going. I went to University of Arizona and did a doctorate in business. That was all the formal schooling. It was a faculty member that I worked with at Chico who encouraged me after the MBA program. I did some interviews. I could have gone to work for First Interstate Bank and Ross Perot's company, Electronic Data Systems [EDS]. I had options, but they just didn't sound like 5 interesting jobs to me. Bernie Hinton was the department chair at Chico. He was an Indiana [University] professor and he had gone there and he was the department chair. He encouraged me to get a Ph.D. It was the same kind of thing: Are you out of your mind? What is a Ph.D.? What do I do with that? So I thought, okay, I'll go down there and if I can survive the Ph.D. program, I'll come back to Chico and I'll teach. I saw what those men and women did for their jobs and I understood that. I had seen it. I thought, okay, I could do that. That would be fun. I like Chico. So that was my plan. I went down to the University of Arizona and, of course, it's an R1 [a research university]. Then I started doing research, and before that I had no clue that you could get paid to do research. That was at the time of the advent of the Internet. Networking was just starting. I was in a business school in organizational behavior, but I had a minor in management information systems. I got exposed to the beginnings of the Internet. The thought that you could get paid to do research about how people might use network computers, I thought, oh my God, I can't believe I could actually do research on this and you get paid for doing that. If I'm a faculty member that would be a part of my job. And just write? I'd write about it? So that exposed me to research. Then I thought, okay, I'm going to go on a research track. But when I finished it was a down market and there really weren't any good jobs open at any R1s. What year? In 1989. I ended up going back to—not Chico, they didn't have any openings—but I went to Cal State Long Beach [California State University, Long Beach] which was my first teaching job, at “the beach”. It exposed me to the research side of the game, which was just amazing. 6 So just say what R1 is. So Carnegie [Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education] does their classifications of schools and R1 is research one or tier one, and we played off that with the top tier strategic plan. I was at a school like that for the doctorate, and so there was an aspiration to at some point to get back. When I went into Arizona, it was thinking, I'm going to go back to Chico and be a professor. When I left Arizona my goal was: I'd like to be at a good research university out on the West Coast, because all my roots and everything were west, and I wanted to be in a college town just for a variety of reasons. I started at Cal State Long Beach, but I worked my way up and I went back. A friend of mine asked me to come back to Indiana University, so along the way I did four or five years at IU, which was great, a good Big Ten school. Then finally the job that I really always wanted, after I got out of school, opened up at Washington State University [WSU], a good Pac-12 school [a collegiate athletic conference that operates in the Western United States], and I went back and I was able to build their information systems program from scratch basically with a good friend of mine, Joe Valasich, and I was there for eleven years. It was great. It was exactly what I wanted to do. Was UNLV after that? No. I'm trying to think how that all went. I did a variety of roles while I was at WSU over the eleven years. First was to work with Joe and Mark Fuller and others and we built that information systems program. It was a great program. Then I got to know the president really well because our program was a hot program with Seattle and all the technology and everything; Lane Rawlins and I ended up getting to know each other quite well. Then we had an opening in the dean's role there for the [Carson] College of Business and Economics, and he encouraged me to apply. There was a search firm doing that 7 search, and leading the search was Alberto Pimentel from Storebeck/Pimentel [Storebeck Pimentel & Associates]. He's based here in L.A. Through that search I got to know him really well. Then I ended up winning that search and I became the dean. I was forty-one or something. I was forty, thirty-nine. I was really young, probably too young to do it. I never really wanted to be a dean; that's not why I got into any of it. I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing; I was a professor. I had a named professorship. I was at a good research school and a good college town out west, and I had everything I wanted, and raising my kids up in that Pullman area; that's what I wanted to do. So he asked me to be the dean and I was the dean there and helped him finish out his term. No, sorry. Then he asked me, for the last two or three years of his presidency, he asked me to move over and run the university's foundation, the advancement function [Washington State University Office of Advancement], and so I did that for the last few years of his presidency. Again, I actually said, "No, I didn't want to do that." He said, "Please, as a favor I need you to do this." He wanted to double fundraising. The biggest gift at the time was five million dollars. He wanted to bust through that and get bigger gifts and then get the university ready for a capital campaign, which we did in the final years of his presidency. It was awesome. I'm glad I did it now. Yes, because everything... It all built. It was in a quilt, in a fabric that was being weaved that I didn't even understand at the time. So he finished out that and then he retired. A new president came in. I went back on faculty, back into the business school. The new president was assembling all his own team. 8 When I went back into the business school, I chose to go back into not information systems because that's changing every day and I just felt like I couldn't go back in the classroom there. I asked to go into the entrepreneurship program where they do startups and little companies, and so I did that for four years and had a blast. It was probably the most fun four years of my career, because we were out in Seattle working with tech firms and startups. It was just really fun, really, really fun. Then my alma mater came knocking, University of Arizona, so now a couple of decades later. They wanted me to come because of all the experience that I had had; that didn't make sense to me at the time. I was a business school dean already, I had done all that fundraising at a very high level, and I had done all that tech and startup stuff. That's a business school that's all about entrepreneurship and innovation. They were on this climb in rankings and they wanted to keep this climb going, but they wanted the business school to be privatized essentially, to become self-sustaining so that it wouldn't have to worry about funding. This was on the heels coming out of the economic downturn. And so I went and did it. It took about four years and we did that. We grew enrollments and that had money associated with it. We ramped up fundraising. We helped the university build a commercialization function to spin out ideas from the university. We did a bunch of stuff that had revenue associated with it. It was great and I learned a lot. Then UNLV came knocking. I'm trying to remember who was running that search. Oh, that was a guy from out east that I didn't know, because I'm going to get back to Alberto Pimentel in a minute. Then UNLV came and it was because, again, a combination of sets of experiences that I had had, and I also was on the board for the medical school and did a bunch of med school stuff, and so it was all this great fit for UNLV. Jerry Baker ran the search and came 9 and said, "You're a really good fit. There are people out here who know about you. They're interested in having you come." Initially I wasn't interested. We were just sort of getting to the point where we had accomplished the goal for the business school there and it was now starting to think about, okay, we are not really worried about money anymore, so now what? Where do we go next with this business school? It was a good time. And they had a great ride after that. But anyway, it was really attractive to come to UNLV. The thing that was the draw—we knew Las Vegas. Kristi and I would come up once a year and we'd usually stay at the Hard Rock [Hotel Las Vegas] and we'd go to The Joint [a show]. We like rock and roll music, so we'd go and listen to bands and stuff. We knew the town and I knew the university just because I knew some faculty and stuff. I actually did an accreditation review for the business school at one point, so I kind of knew the setting. But the thing that was neat was that Governor [Brian] Sandoval had, in his economic plan as a key pillar, the growth of UNLV and for UNLV to ascend and become this research university contributing to the diversification of the economy of the state; that was a key part of his economic plan. That was really compelling to me that I could pull together everything that I had to help a university become an R1 because the community and the state needed it to happen and that there was commitment to doing that. Think about that. Around the country there's not very many states that do that; that have all that in alignment. I got to know Brian really well and worked with him really closely. I think he was and is fantastic. He's a moderate Republican and very progressive. He very much gets it about education, especially higher ed. As liberal as I am, I love him. Yes, he was great. He's got a few more months to finish out. I would love to see him run for 10 United States President in the next run, but I don't think it's in the cards. He would be great. Yes, he would. I think he's coming to UNLV, to our law school or something. I've been hearing that. He's got a post in the law school and there are rumors about maybe him being president of UNLV. I don't think he would do that. But he's already signed up with Dan Hamilton to teach in the law school [UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law]. Good. I like that. I like the idea of having him on campus. Yes, I agree. The tie into Alberto was...I was coming to the end of my five-year term there. I was about to go through my review. It was a natural time for me to start thinking about other options. Things went a little crazy with a few of the regents, as you saw, in March and in April. That's an area I don't want to talk about. So Alberto Pimentel is running the search for Claremont Graduate University. He initially came and said, "Do you think you'd be interested?" When the search first started. I said, "No, I'm not." Then he came back again, as he was reading what was happening over there, he came back and said, "I think you should just come take a look. Just come look." So Kristi and I came down and took a look and the rest is history. Tell me about this campus when you first saw this campus. With the way you look at education and campuses and being on campus, what did you think? Well, it's of course beautiful. What I've been telling people here is that they don't realize how unique and beautiful this situation is. It's like somebody took a really good private school from the East Coast and sort of plopped it down in Los Angeles. We're tucked up here in the San Gabriel foothills [Foothills of the San Gabriel Valley] in this beautiful little community. The downtown is called the Village, and it is. It's streets of little restaurants and cute shops. It's just a few blocks away. We walk there. The setting is obviously beautiful. This is called the City of 11 Trees and Ph.Ds. But what's cool about it is it's this little intellectual and innovation hub that's this pristine little college town up here, but, yet, we have L.A. as our playground. We have the whole L.A. basin. A true global city is right there. This school is already very externally facing, so the faculty do a lot of work all around the L.A. basin in school districts and with the police and all kinds of groups, which is cool. Then it's also unique because it's a consortium. It's the model that Oxford and Cambridge were kind of built on. There are seven independent colleges here. We have a shared services agreement, so we share our police force, we share the bookstore, we share the payroll system, but that's it. We're all independent. We each have our own board. I answer to a board separately. There's not a chancellor. It's not a system. We're really independent, but we leverage our togetherness to do things less expensively. It's a unique setting, too. Now, is it in a community? These houses that I see as I drive through, these are independent people owning houses right here on campus? A lot of the ones right around campus are owned by the university. The university owns the ones you can see here. Either this one or one of the other six schools probably owns almost everything on this street because this is sort of on the western edge of campus. The house that I am living in is owned by the university and it's about one block over and it's a beautiful old 1930, just beautiful old home, all designed for—it's like an ambassador's home; it's built for entertaining. Beautiful old home. I walk to work. Even one block over, a lot of those are owned by one of the seven universities. Then when you get out about another block, then they're private homes in this community. A lot of it revolves around this university; it's the economic engine for this whole town. But it's also a huge retirement community. There are several really nice retirement facilities and some good hospitals around here, and so it's kind of become a little retirement 12 mecca, too. It's amazing. It's great. It's a great little town. Tell me more about your educational philosophy, and as you talk about it, I'd like for you to weave in sports. Oh, yes. I don't know that I have an education philosophy. I think there's something about research. Yes. As I taught—first of all, I thought any of the jobs that I did in higher education from a faculty member all the way through, and I've pretty much done all the jobs, just about, I always felt, and I still do, every day I step foot on a campus, I don't care what campus it is, I just think it's a huge privilege just to be there in what it does in transforming people's lives. I always felt a great honor and privilege to be involved in the endeavor. I always looked at it that way in everything that I did including in teaching. I never subscribed to the traditional approach to teaching of the sage on the stage; I never assumed I was the one who knew everything and I would talk—you know the old model—and they would open their heads and my lectures would go in and then it would come back out for a test. I never did that, really, and especially toward the latter years of my teaching time. It was a complete active learning classroom, completely. I had students working on projects in the class and I was directing teams and projects. I had the good fortune along the way, twice, of building a classroom of the future, once at Washington State University in the business school and then once at the University of Arizona also in the business school. Now we're envisioning, with a couple of partners, doing it here, too. What I did then, and I want to do again but just with a little more state of the art technology, is to 13 build a classroom built around active learning, but with technology supplementing it and helping it to happen. The one in Arizona, for example, was four walls because it was a traditional classroom, but two of the walls were just complete white board walls, so you could write on them. On the hallway, we did two of the walls—it was on a corner—in glass so you could see what people were doing. The students could see out, but they could write on those walls, too. They could write all the way around the room. Then we had all movable desks and chairs. It was totally configurable and it was all built around teams. Students would be working in groups primarily. What I want to do is—Steelcase and others make furniture where the little square tables not only roll around the room but you can write on them; they're white boards. So the team can be doing work writing on it. Steelcase has got one where you pop it up and then they present and they pop it back down and erase it and it's ready for the next class. So I want to do that, a totally configurable flexible space but with a lot of technology in the room. Do you know what we're doing in the library, what Maggie was doing? No. You have to come just to see it. It's what you're talking about, but in the future with all kinds of virtual reality where students can come in, work on all kinds of projects. I don't even know enough about it to explain it because it's just opening in a few weeks. I'll have to e-mail her about it and find out more about it. I was using active learning, problem-based learning, using technology when I could get my hands on it where it was relevant, and on the foundation of thinking it was just a privilege to be there and to be doing what I was doing. I always wanted the students to walk away from the class feeling like they had gotten a 14 lot of value. When they got out of a class, the best thing somebody would write for me on an evaluation was that they could immediately put that to use; that that was super valuable to them, for whatever it was that they were going to do next. Anyway, that kind of drove all the teaching and stuff. The sports stuff...It's funny. I grew up in San Francisco and I went to a huge high school there. We played a lot of intramural sports outside of school, but I never really at the high school participated in sports because I just wasn't good enough, I didn't think. Then my parents moved and my last two years were at this little, tiny high school in northern California by the Oregon border, Fort Jones High School. It is near Yreka, California, which is (itself) near Ashland, Oregon where the [Oregon] Shakespearean Festival is, like way up. Eighty-two students at the time at this little high school, in four grades. And so they needed the guys, and the gals too, to turn out for every sport; otherwise, they couldn't make a team. So everybody played everything and it was really fun. I got to play everything: Eight-man football; then we did basketball; then we did tennis and baseball at the same time, in the spring. We couldn't do a track team for the whole track season because we were all playing baseball and tennis, but the league let us put one together for the final league meet at the end of the year. It was after baseball and tennis seasons were over. They let us field a team and then go compete in the league track meet. So literally, when baseball and tennis finished, we had a week and we're all out there going, "Who can jump? What can you do? Can you throw a shot put? Try this." We built the team and then all of us, the guys and the girls all went, and we did the league track meet. I discovered that actually I was decent at baseball. Then I went on to this little junior college and played baseball for a couple of years. I went there thinking, I'm going to go play in 15 the Minor Leagues. I'm going to play baseball; that's going to be the ticket. The anecdote about that that I tell is that I got there. So that little junior college picked the best one or two players off of the teams all around that area of northern California, so it's a pretty good team. Then one or two of those kids would go on either to the Minor Leagues or go on to play somewhere, if they were lucky enough, at a four-year school. We had a guy that pitched, Jimmy Brooks, who was from Yreka. He was the ace. He was the best pitcher on the team. When he got warmed up, he could throw well up into the eighties, which was fast at the time. He had a breaking ball—he had everything—and off speed. When you were ready that was your test; if you could hit off him live, then you had a pretty good chance that you would go to the next level because that was the level that he was at. I did that early on and did the, okay, I'm ready; I warm up and I want to go live. I went live against him. In batting practice if he was just throwing fast balls and he was telling me, "I'm going to throw fast balls," and if I knew it was going to be a fast ball, I could hit his fast ball. If I knew he was throwing a curve and I was ready for it, I could hit his curve. When I did not know what he was throwing and he was brushing me back and changing the speed, I couldn't hit off of him. So in the space of about two minutes, it's like you're presented with this—all of a sudden there's a fork in your road. One of the forks has got a barrier there and I'm not going to play baseball after this. So that made me realize that I wasn't going to go on, and that was fine. It was actually probably good that it happened early becau