It wasn’t an easy spring for UNLV. There was the departure of President Len Jessup, anger among donors toward regents about it, and the loss of a major donation that was — controversially — linked to Jessup’s continued employment.

But UNLV President Marta Meana, who took the helm in July after 21 years at the school — including six years leading the university’s Honors College — said she’s seeing a lot of progress toward healing.

“I’ve been meeting with just about everyone I can meet with and focusing on the fact that I really do truly believe that everybody has the same goal,” she said in a recent interview on the IndyMatters podcast. “We may have our differences, but everybody has the same goal of helping UNLV succeed and if you all share that goal, then there’s a place to work from.”

A longtime psychology professor, she said the skills she’s learned in her field over the years have equipped her as she assumes the role of peacemaker.

“You can have empathy for the people you’re working with even when you can’t give them exactly what they want,” she said. “Also, conflict — psychology teaches you to manage human conflict that’s always going to be there when you’re in an institution with a lot of people. So it’s been very formative.”

A native of Spain, Meana’s family moved to Montreal when she was seven, and she said she had to learn English and French from scratch. She went on to study at Montreal’s McGill University with the idea of becoming a therapist, but was drawn to research and eventually applied to become a psychology professor.

She almost didn’t come to UNLV.

“I talked with my dad the night before the interview and I said, ‘Look, dad, I’m not going to go because I already have three offers and why would I go there.’ And my father told me, ‘You can always say no, but don’t say “no” to an opportunity because you never know where life is going to take you,’” Meana said. “Truer words have never been spoken. And I came here and I fell in love with this university, with these students.”

What’s different about UNLV, she says, is the energy, “the feeling that somehow here I could make anything happen because I wasn’t fighting for elbow space, as you might be doing in a more prestigious, older university.”

And she’s also found an unexpected joy in being at the most ethnically diverse university in the country. Unlike in Canada, where she encountered few Hispanics, she’s been able to share her culture with many more of her students in Las Vegas.

“At first I didn’t pay attention to this, but through the years I’ve seen that this is something incredibly important -- because they see in you a model and what it communicates is that they too can reach these heights,” she said in an interview on The Nevada Independent’s Spanish podcast.

Just this year, Hispanic presidents have taken the lead at three of Nevada’s colleges including UNLV, as well as in the Clark County School District, where more than 46 percent of students are Latino.

“Although I speak for everyone when I say I’m the president of all the students, not just Latino students, and I’m sure that my colleagues feel the same … I want to say that we have a sensitivity to the obstacles that our Latino students have,” she said in Spanish. “It doesn’t surprise us. We know it. So we hope that this will mean decisions that take that into account.”

Growth at the Honors College

Meana hails from the UNLV Honors College, a program where high achieving students take honors classes, get more mentorship from faculty, and produce a senior thesis. During her time at the helm, she helped triple the enrollment and double the number of minority students.

“It was really not doing very well. It was a very small college, nobody knew about it, and it was almost as if as an institution we didn’t have the confidence,” she said. “And so I went out there with that confidence because I didn’t have to put it on. I really do believe in this place and when you do that and when you set high expectations for students, they rise to them and it’s just an amazing college.”

In a span of three years, a student had won the prestigious Goldwater scholarship for achievement in science, math or engineering, two students had won Truman awards for public service, and one student was a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.

She said her secret for helping students win such high-profile accolades was “to create a community so that these students are making each other better every day and also to focus on grooming them.”

“Although they are smart kids and they’re already accomplished, in order to get them to that level where they can apply for a Rhodes Scholarship or a Truman or a Goldwater, they require the kind of grooming that those prestigious universities back east do all the time and that we have not done enough of,” she said.

She acknowledged it’s challenging to bring the same personalized experience to students in the general population as they’d get in the small honors college. But she’s committed to working on it, especially when it comes to helping students who are the first in their family to attend college to find success.

“For me, it’s a combination of looking for money to help these students and creating a community where they feel that they belong, that they have the right to be here,” she said.

Improving UNLV’s reach and reputation

Meana says she believes the academic community at large has a higher opinion of the university than some locals do about it, and it's time for UNLV to sell itself better.

“It really is about self-promotion, but not self-promotion in some kind of fake slogany way,” she said. “We are doing incredible things here, but we haven’t been as good as other universities at putting that out with the fanfare that we need to do.”

She sees this when she travels out of the area: “Twenty years ago when I came in, I would go on conferences for my research. People would say, Las Vegas has a university? I’ve got to tell you, that doesn’t happen anymore.”

One of her goals is to ensure UNLV is more “infused” into all things Las Vegas.

“We have to be at the table. We have to be at the table with non-profits. We have to be at the table with organizations engaged in economic development. We have to be on people’s minds and the community on our mind,” she said. “This is not just about student internships, all of which is terrific, but UNLV has to be sitting at a bunch of tables in this community to know what’s going on, to weigh in, and to learn, to see how we can help.”

Confronting challenges

Meana is taking the lead at a school that’s at a crossroads in many ways. Fundraising has stalled for a $236 million construction project for the UNLV Medical School, stymied in part when a donor withdrew a $14 million contribution as it became clear Jessup was on his way out.

“Now I do want to make it clear, we do have a fully state funded medical school that’s running really well,” Meana said of the program, which is starting its second full school year. “What we’re talking about right now is a building so that we could actually increase the size of the entering classes.”

Meana presented a plan last week that would split the large project into two, more achievable phases — starting with a $57 million library. She also said she remains in touch with Kris Engelstad, who was outspoken against Jessup’s departure and rescinded the donation.

“I have talked to her and will be talking to her more,” Meana said. "I’m not going to speak for her, but I know that Kris cares a lot about UNLV and cares a lot about this community.”

As for concerns about the UNLV Medical School leadership, including a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the school’s former chief of staff had arranged for a $50,000 marketing consulting contract with a friend that apparently hasn’t yielded any deliverables, Meana took a diplomatic tack.

“Well, I’m a new president and the position I’m in now is assessing all of those things. I’m in learning mode and in reviewing mode and in assessing mode, so that’s what I’m doing,” she said. “I’m in my seventh week. I’m not going to make pronouncements.”

There are also simmering questions about governance. Departed President Len Jessup had criticized the leadership structure of NSHE on his way out, saying the regents in charge were making it difficult for presidents to stay on board long-term. While there’s an effort afoot in the Legislature to change the structure of the 13-person board by amending the Constitution, Meana said she’s not going to get involved.

“That’s not the role of a sitting president,” she said. “I understand there are people looking into that and that’s fine, but no sitting president is going to do that. You’re running your university under the structure that you’re under and that’s what I’m doing.”

Acting president

While Meana holds the title of “acting president,” leadership at the Nevada System of Higher Education will start taking the temperature of the campus community this fall to determine whether there’s an appetite to launch a search for a permanent president yet or whether to hold off.

When she was appointed, she said she wasn’t interested in the job on a permanent basis. She told the Las Vegas Sun more recently that it’s too soon into her tenure to say whether she’d throw her hat in the ring once the time comes.

In the meantime, the school is moving forward. It crossed a hurdle when on Friday, regents approved a $1.5 billion budget request to the Legislature that is $120 million higher than NSHE is currently getting.

Among the asks: that UNLV receive money to finance its enrollment growth, invest in its Healthy Nevada initiative to expand the health-care workforce in Nevada, and continue staffing the UNLV Medical School to full size.

“So there’s no like real special ask. It’s basically all of the initiatives that we’re growing,” she said.

As for whether she’s the right person to take UNLV to new heights, including its quest to be a Tier 1 research university and raise its graduation rate?

“I wouldn’t say I was the only person for this job at this time, but when I was approached I thought I could help,” she said. “I had been here for 21 years. I love this place. I’ve worked at many different levels of the university and I’m very focused on student success and very faculty identified, and so I thought I could help.”