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In its brief 45-year history, the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas (UNLV) has evolved from a small regional institution with 41
students, three faculty, and one building to the state's largest comprehensive
doctoral-degree-granting institution with 25,000 students; more than 2,300
employees, including 800 faculty members; and over 70 buildings. UNLV
is expanding beyond the boundaries of the current campus to create satellite
campuses and research parks. UNLV's commitment to serving the Las Vegas
metropolitan area is reflected in its membership and activities in national
and international organizations such as The Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan
Universities, an organization of 60 universities located in urban areas
with populations of more than 250,000 people.
Although it has grown and evolved into a nationally and
internationally recognized educational institution, the university continues
to adhere to its original mission of creating a center of academic excellence
in southern Nevada. As southern Nevada and the university have grown,
however, UNLV has expanded its mission to include a broad array of opportunities
for students who come to Las Vegas from every state in the nation and
nearly 100 countries throughout the world.
UNLV's entrepreneurial spirit has led to such distinctive
accomplishments as a world-class program in hotel administration and tourism,
innovative desert environmental programs, expanding international educational
opportunities, and numerous interdisciplinary offerings and research centers.
In recent years, the university has created, developed, and won provisional
accreditation for a law school; assisted in the development of a public
elementary school on campus to train teachers; and built an international
gaming institute, a new music building, and a magnificent new library
that has become the intellectual center of the university as well as serving
as a symbol of the university's commitment to academic excellence. In
the future, UNLV plans to build a new Science, Engineering, and Technology
Complex and partner with the University of Nevada, Reno in an Academic
Medical Center that includes the new UNLV Dental School, a joint UNR/UNLV
Pharmacy School, UNLV's Cancer Institute, and a variety of biomedically
related programs and research. At the same time, UNLV will work to enhance
programs in all colleges across the university. The institution will adapt
to unexpected, dramatic opportunities while at the same time consciously
attempting to shape its future according to the goals outlined in this
document.
In 1995 Dr. Carol Harter became the seventh president of
UNLV. She instituted a yearlong, campus-wide planning process in which
faculty, students, staff, alumni, and members of the community participated.
In those discussions, the phrase "premier urban university" emerged as
the cornerstone of the university's strategic plan. The planning process
also defined how UNLV would be distinguished by its ongoing commitment
to being student-centered while increasing its research emphasis, its
excellence in both liberal studies and professional education, its emphasis
on both traditional values and global citizenship, and its attention to
both local needs and international concerns.
Each year since 1995, there has been an annual campus-wide
retreat to evaluate the university's goals and to suggest changes and
additions. In order to emphasize the importance of and need for continuous
planning, the campus created the University Planning Council, chaired
by a member of the President's staff, to coordinate the university's strategic
planning effort.
That process led to the creation of a planning document
that outlined the university's goals for the decade, 1996-2005. Because
many of the goals have been achieved before the end of the decade, the
Planning Council has undertaken a significant revision and updating of
the document.
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