Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Nevada State University President DeRionne Pollard was out of town in early November when Republican Donald Trump won the race for the White House.
With a few days by herself to reflect on what President-elect Trump’s win would mean for the university, she started thinking about her students, many of whom could be targeted in Trump’s effort to deport 11 million undocumented residents.
“A significant portion of my students are first-generation, students of color; I have Dreamers attending this institution,” Pollard said. “I now spend an inordinate amount of my time thinking about how to protect and insulate this institution as much as I can given the students we serve.”
Speaking at a roundtable with local college presidents, Pollard said her university was working with students and faculty to develop a plan for Trump’s deportation proposal, the details of which have yet to be announced.
Students are “unsettled” by the incoming president’s plans, and the college is monitoring his administration and the state government’s role in deportations, she said. Around 3% of college students in Nevada are undocumented, according to the Higher Ed Immigration portal.
UNLV President Keith Whitfield — as well as Desert Research Institute President Kumud Acharya and College of Southern Nevada Acting President William Kibler — joined Pollard answering questions from a small audience about the potential effects of Trump’s tenure on higher education.
Kibler, who joined CSN in July, spent most of his career in Texas, a state that’s been hit hard by calls to ban diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Last year, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation prohibiting Texas colleges and universities from having DEI offices.
No matter the changes sought at state and federal levels, Kibler said colleges and universities needed to maintain their values.
People need to be “concentrating about things that are within our control, which is, especially, how we treat each other, how we respond to each other (and) how we support each other,” he said.
Acharya addressed concerns about rising antiscience sentiment as well as animosity toward experts and how to combat it. He said researchers needed to speak to the personal effects of what they’re studying.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is a vaccine skeptic.
“We battle that situation day in and day out,” he said. “We have a number of our faculty who are really good at … explaining complex science situations in ways that people really understand that it impacts me. It touches me. It touches my children, touches my education.”
In a 2022 interview, Trump called climate change a “hoax.” His 2024 campaign also told Politico that he would again remove the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, an international agreement to lower global temperatures.
The Desert Research Institute relies on federal grants to provide environmental education and conduct climate research. In 2022, the institute received $17 million in federal funding, around half of which came from either the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense.
“Because of all that, I think it took me about two weeks to realize this is probably not going to” greatly impact DRI, Acharya said. “But having said that, I’m speculating. I don’t even know what the new direction will look like.”
Whitfield took a question on the possibility of incoming funding cuts for arts and culture programs. He said the university needed to support the arts in any way that it could and make sure that they are a part of the student experience.
However, he said he was still largely unsure about what the Trump administration would bring.
“I just had a luncheon with some students yesterday and … it’s the unknown that they’re worried about,” Whitfield said.
Like Kibler, he told them to not “stress about things that you have no control over. Don’t stress about things that you don’t know will happen.”
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