CSN not planning to change campus name, despite city remarks
North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee’s chief of staff recently said a big victory for the mayor would be announced soon: attaching his city’s name to one of the College of Southern Nevada campuses.
Except the people who are in charge of that decision say there isn’t a plan to change the college’s name.
According to CSN spokeswoman K.C. Brekken, the college doesn’t have a plan in place to change the name of CSN Cheyenne to CSN North Las Vegas, let alone a plan to announce such a change in the near future.
The college is state-funded, and a spokesman for the state agency that governs the college said any name change would need to come from CSN.
“I stand by the original statement which is the mayor has been pushing this since he came in, and there are some high-level conversations,” the mayor’s chief of staff Ryann Juden said. “I believe it will be announced this year. I think it will be pretty quick.”
Juden told The View newspaper in a story that ran Jan. 1 that the name change would be announced soon.
Juden said the city had been talking with CSN, the chancellor’s office and Frank Woodbeck, executive director of the College Collaborative with the Nevada System of Higher Education. The talks have progressed to becoming more serious in nature, looking at what actually implementing a name change would look like such as looking at mock-ups of the campus sign with the new name, he said.
Dan Klaich, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education, said in an email that he has had discussions on a variety of topics involving CSN and North Las Vegas, including the name of the Cheyenne campus.
But that issue is not one he is leading. “Any serious discussion to change an institution’s name must come from the campus (including CSN’s president) and would ultimately be a decision of the Board of the Regents,” the email said.
Brekken provided the following statement:
“CSN has a great relationship with the City of North Las Vegas and has had many conversations with the mayor about the name of its first campus. Although there are no current plans to change the name of the college, we look forward to continued discussions about how we can better partner with the city and promote the college’s presence in North Las Vegas. For instance, we are currently examining leasing some space in North Las Vegas City Hall, as we do in the Las Vegas City Hall, to improve access to postsecondary education in Southern Nevada and alleviate space constraints on our main campuses.”
The name change is something Lee has had his sights on since taking office in July 2013. The idea is to root the campus more in the community by using the North Las Vegas brand. The campus is at Cheyenne Avenue and Pecos Road.
“The mayor’s optimistic, and he’s not going to say no,” Juden said. “Nothing’s concrete, but we’re going to still keep moving forward.”
Review-Journal writer Francis McCabe contributed to this report. Contact Bethany Barnes at bbarnes@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861. Follow @betsbarnes on Twitter.
