Keith Whitfield faced a tragic and difficult challenge three years into his tenure as UNLV president, a shooting that claimed the lives of three faculty members and traumatized thousands of students and faculty members.

He sat down with Nevada Week to share the university's recovery process five months later and how the experience impacted him personally and as a leader at UNLV.

Five months have passed since the shooting on UNLV's campus that killed three professors.

Do you think that it could have been prevented?

(Keith Whitfield) I don't think so.

Without-- you know, the person is no longer living, and so you can't really understand where their mindset was.

But to do the kind of action that he took, that was somebody who had serious mental problems.

And so with that, you're just challenged.

We don't live in this perfectly safe society.

And so thinking about trying to say, Well, could it have been prevented?

No.

The response of Metro, the response of our police department was outstanding.

Actually, I think what got prevented was any further loss of life because of their very quick, immediate, and decisive actions.

-The three professors who were killed, they were Patricia Navarro-Velez, Cha-Jan "Jerry" Chang, and Naoko Takemaru.

They were all people of color.

Do you think the shooting was racially motivated?

-No, I don't.

There's been a lot of conversation about that, and there's been a lot of speculation of that.

And when one looks at the people who were lost, you can instantly jump to that conclusion.

But we didn't see anything else that actually suggests that.

That has been a continuous question and conversation, both by Metro and by our University Police Department, and we just don't find anything.

But it could have been.

We just, we don't know.

And so to me, to some degree, the loss of life is loss of life.

And it's, the motivation doesn't matter.

Everyone should feel and be able to feel like they're safe on campus.

And that was a situation where we lost three very valuable people.

-I wonder, though, in determining how you respond to this shooting, how important was it to learn as much as you could about the motive?

-Not myself.

We have incredible law enforcement here in Las Vegas, and they did an extensive search.

This gentleman had sent out letters to lots of people.

And you know, we've had October 1 here.

We don't know those things when we end up having a situation where you don't have that suspect actually alive.

But it is important to know, because it does help you think about what other safety things could you have done.

Sometimes I don't think there's going to be a clear ability to be able to figure that out.

But it is interesting, important to try to figure those things out.

And you learn as much as you can.

-What do you understand his motive to have been?

-Disgruntlement with not being selected for positions.

He tried a number of times to get a job at UNLV and was unsuccessful.

And I think rather than thinking about perhaps his own lack of fit or whatever-- that happens with a lot of people.

I mean, we're a wonderful university.

Lots of people want to come and work at our university, and there's only so many slots.

And so I think he thought that it was a personal front.

I don't want to even say what I think.

It's that that's what happened.

He applied a number of times, and he was never actually, I think, even brought in for an interview.

So he used that, I think, as part of his motivation.

-There was a fourth victim in this shooting.

And at your State of the University Address in March, you gave an update on his condition.

He was also a faculty member.

You said he is out of the hospital.

Have you spoken to him?

-Yes, I have.

I have visited with him and had some other communication with him.

-What have you talked about?

Can you share that?

-I gotta tell you, it was kind of interesting.

I think I was very interested to see how he was doing.

He was hurt pretty badly.

-How long was he in the hospital?

-I can't even tell you.

We encouraged him at one point in time to make sure that he really did stay in the hospital, you know, fully take care of some of the physical therapy and other things he needed to do to be able to get better.

But during my visit, I thought it was interesting.

I was so interested in wanting to see him and make sure that he was okay.

And when I walked in the room, his eyes got big.

And I'm looking.

At first I'm wondering if something was wrong.

He goes, You're the president.

I said, Yeah, I'm the president, and you're you.

And had to take a second to get over-- I was so concerned about him, I didn't think that he thought it was a big deal for the president to come.

I wanted to make sure he didn't think that was something bad, that the president would do.

And that's because we care about everybody on our campus.

So I'm definitely about ones that experience something as tragic as he had.

-What comes next for him?

-He is going to come back to the university and teach at the university and stay here.

He's very interested in staying, and so we figured out a way.

And he's an excellent teacher.

We figured out a way to have a path forward for him to be here at UNLV.

-The university's response to the shooting has been the Rebel Recovery program.

What is included in that program, and how are you going to fund it?

-So there's, let's call it three or four elements.

The first element is to pay attention to mental health.

My background, I'm a health disparities expert focusing on mental health.

And so I always kind of like to say that, because people say, Well, why are you focused on it?

I've been focused on it even through COVID.

But it is because it's my background, in particular.

And so that was the first thing we thought about.

We have a lot of different resources on campus.

And also, we've had incredible assistance from the Resiliency Center.

And so the combination of those two things are making sure that we have-- actually, we were just talking the other day.

We've had emotional support dogs come to different events, making sure that the resources that we do have for faculty, staff, and students are actually very up-front and out there.

We had a mental health townhall.

And I've got to give a shout-out.

We've got a student group that actually started before this called Project Wellness.

And it's our largest student group on campus.

And they are reaching and touching people and being this great communication.

They're just, they're fantastic.

So that's one piece of it.

A second piece of it was to have a Security and Safety committee.

This was a group of faculty, staff, students, almost, you know, it's a large committee that is taking a look and thinking about making recommendations to me about things that we should be doing on our campus to feel like we can increase the security.

A third piece of it is another coordinating team that consists of our provost; our, I call him our chief of police, our director of police services; the provost CFO; and our communications person.

And it's to make sure all the things going on are coordinated.

It gets to the point about funding.

We are pursuing any and every route in terms of getting funding, because this is not something you just write into your budget to be able to do.

So while we have provided some support for some of the changes we've made, we're also pursuing grants, the state.

And our local communities have been extremely supportive.

But we'll be looking for the state and also some other private funding to be able to try to enhance some things we want to do relative to safety.

-Have you been able to implement any safety or security measures following the shooting without that funding?

-So without that funding, we have done some.

We have taken a look at our security cameras and seeing what we can enhance there.

And there's some changes relative to actually monitoring and making sure that that's clear.

We have also added what I think is one of the most important and significant changes, and that is that we've increased our police force by adding what we call the "Yellow Jackets."

The Yellow Jackets are these gentlemen, trained personnel, that add to our police force.

They are private security that adds to our police force.

So we have a much greater security presence on our campus, basically, even until ten o'clock at night.

They have very long-- we've gotten some funding now to be able to extend them into December of this year.

-Okay.

Do you have enough police?

Because it was just a couple of months ago that the University Police Department asked the Nevada Higher System of Education to be designated as a critical labor shortage.

-There are some slots that have not been filled.

The director has been able to increase the police force, I'd say, slightly.

It's got to be probably a good 20%.

But there's still maybe another 20-25 slots that still need to be filled.

-To be clear, this is not just a problem within the university system.

This is a shortage that the state is facing in terms of law enforcement.

-And you're seeing it nationally, particularly coming out of COVID.

It appears that a lot of people would-- if they could retire, they retired.

And there's been a lot of changes in the workforce.

I think this has been one that's been adversely affected by that.

That's part of the reason, to try to make it one of those critical workforce sources so that you can make sure that the pay is very attractive for the incredible, dangerous, important work that these folks do.

-Talking about the workforce and the retention of your professors and bringing professors in, you recently were able to get through a cost of living adjustment.

That was historic.

But then now you have this other funding that's needed.

How do you rationalize that?

-Oh, I don't rationalize it.

It is very interesting.

First and foremost, our folks really deserved more pay.

Secondly, one of the things that we were seeing quite frequently is that we weren't being able to be competitive when we were recruiting people in.

And it wasn't because of the place.

They loved the place but would look at the salary and say, It's easily 10%, 15% less than what I'm either making or what I'm getting offered from other things.

So that is going to make us far more competitive, I think.

And, again, because I think our faculty and staff have deserved it.

You know, I've long been a supporter of it and supportive of the upcoming 11%.

But what it creates is an incredible challenge.

It's a lot of money.

I can't give you the exact number, but it is a lot of money that really wasn't designed for it.

And so we've been trying to actually change lots of different elements of the university in terms of operations for lots of things to make sure that we have the money to be able to pay folks.

And so what we're hoping is, is that we can even get additional support from the state.

Right now we're reimbursed at like 66% in the state funds.

And to try to get up to 80% would create an incredible benefit for us.

-Is that funding you will be trying to get from the state prior to their next legislative session?

-I say I work on it every day is what it seems like.

But we do have those conversations.

And I think the Governor, the legislature, they've all been sensitive to it, but it's trying to figure out how do you actually get it done.

The rate in which we're at is kind of-- there's a historical piece to it.

I think that there were a lot, including the Governor, who thought it was gonna be 80%.

But it was run by this other condition policy that was run before, which was only 65%.

So I think that they feel for us, they understand what the situation is, and they're looking for ways to be able to fix it.

-What's on the potential chopping block that concerns you the most?

-You know, what we've tried to do is to try to spread the pain.

It's not just one particular area.

We've cut operating budgets more than anything else.

We're rebels, though.

I mean, what we do is to figure out, I like to say, making $1 out of 15 cents.

We've still got central things that are very important for our mission, and so we're figuring out ways to do that with basically half the funds to be able to do it.

It is very hard and very challenging.

-Back to when the shooting happened.

There was a petition for UNLV to become a closed campus.

What does that look like at the college level, and how much consideration did you even give that?

-We are a certain kind of university.

We're an urban research campus.

And actually my most recent stint was at Wayne State University, another urban research campus and one that is one of the top 50 safest campuses even in the country.

And it's not closed off.

We're a public entity.

It's hard to try to say that you're going to close yourself off from the public and only let certain people through.

The other thing is that as you look across the country and see, that has not been an effective deterrent to having incidents happen on campuses.

And so it's-- and that's really the physical boundary making of trying to make a campus of that, that never seems to be completely successful.

And so it's something.

While we thought about it, I thought about it for a lot of nights, it wasn't practical.

We don't want to have our university represented that it's closed off from the community.

We are-- 70% of our students or more come actually from the community.

And so it would seem very odd to kind of break off and hide us that way.

But even more importantly, there just doesn't seem to be a great gain in terms of safety.

-What becomes of Beam Hall where the shooting took place?

-So one of the things that we have done is to slowly try to allow people in there.

There are faculty members going there, but we don't have any classes in there for the spring semester.

In the fall, we'll open it back up, and we will have fairly normal operations there.

We're going to change some of the aesthetics there to try to make it so that it doesn't feel like the same old thing.

And we're going to have a security person there.

There's going to be several little parts and pieces.

There's some other things we're thinking about doing.

Like on the first and second floor, people can just kind of wander in.

And I think the people in those areas feel a little bit, you know, vulnerable.

So we're going to figure out if there's ways in which we can actually even change the infrastructure, what the building actually looks like, to be able to provide additional things.

But that's an additional cost.

-You said this fall?

-Yeah.

Well, we've been working on it.

It's not new.

We've been working on it this entire semester.

-Any pushback of reopening?

-There's always differences of opinion, but I've been surprised how little we've actually had.

For some, it's that it's still a traumatic incident.

They don't want to go back there.

What we've done is be able to say, If that's really how you feel, let's find a way to find an additional place or an alternative place for you to go to.

The issue is I believe there's something like 30-31 classrooms in that building.

It's a big building.

It's over 100,000 square feet.

Trying to take it offline for the fall when there's even more students here, it was just not practically feasible.

In addition, I will say that I think not making it kind of a mausoleum or, you know, bad ground to be on, to kind of semi kind of work slowly through being in that building again and allowing people to start to feel comfortable is going to allow us to transition a lot better that way.

And so I think-- again, we've talked to chairs.

We've talked to faculty members.

I'm going to talk to some faculty members this afternoon, actually.

You know, while there has been some concerns, we've just tried to address those individually.

But in large part, people, I don't want to say they're okay with it, but they understand it's needed for the university, it's needed for normal operations, it's needed for all the classes that we do.

-I'm assuming you've been inside.

-Yeah.

-How many times?

-Three, four times.

One time, and it was a part of the Rebel Recovery program, it's very interesting.

We, our campus, this main campus is 335 acres.

It sits on the ancestral land of the Nuwu and Paiute people.

And so I don't want to take credit for it, but I think it was my idea of saying, They have shepherd that land for a long time, were shepherding it, let's see if we can have a healing ceremony.

So we actually had a healing ceremony.

That was the start of this semester, where, I don't want to call him a shaman and misrepresent, but a religious leader from one of the tribes came and actually did what's called a smudging ceremony, where they went, and it was to alleviate bad energy and an evil that might be there.

And I think, you know, no matter what your belief is, no matter, you know, spiritual or not spiritual, I think it was the idea of that, you know, we're going to figure out a way to make this be a place where we can go and feel comfortable with and go through a process.

And then we actually did the building.

That was my first or second time in the building.

And then we actually took it outside.

And it was wonderful to see the university community come out and kind of go through that process and have an opportunity, one of many opportunities, to do some healing.

-On the topic of students feeling safe on campus, but switching gears a bit, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago recently conducted a study of the national campus environment and found that more than half of Jewish and Muslim students felt in personal danger on campus because of their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What have you heard from your students, how safe they feel in regards to their views on this conflict?

-I don't have numbers to say whether it's half, but we do have a lot of expression of not feeling safe.

And it's on both sides.

And one of the things that we've been doing-- and I'll just take a step back and say, the interesting thing about safety is that it's as much a perception as it is a reality.

There are places you look and say it's physically not a safe place to be.

And then there's also the perception of not feeling safe.

And so to make sure that we didn't actually have physical things going on, myself and director of Police Services actually were communicating for a while every single day.

I said, Is there anything going on?

You know, What happened?

Was there a meeting?

You know, anything.

And we've had a couple of incidents.

They've all not been violent.

But you know, they've been contentious, and I think that people see that and can feel a sense of lack of safety that way.

-Well, let's talk about the incident recently with the physics professor from Israel.

He's invited to give a talk on black holes.

His presentation is interrupted by pro-Palestinian supporters.

And instead of those supporters being removed, the event is stopped and it's ended.

And I believe this professor is escorted to his vehicle.

Did that follow UNLV policy?

-It did for the most part because the devil is in the detail, and it's about the timing of it, of that.

The rescheduling of the event happened, basically, just as Police Services were arriving.

I can't remember what their response time was, but it was pretty good.

So that basically, the gentleman who was an incredible professor, his name escapes me at the moment, he said, Well, if you want to talk about black holes, come on and sit down and talk.

They didn't want to do that.

And so the people who, the folks who were actually organizing said, Why don't we not do it right now.

We'll find another time more convenient.

And then the police show up, they escort the folks out.

So that was following the policy of that.

And we have reviewed that now and thinking a lot more about it.

One thing that's at the heart of who we are is actually our academic mission.

And so when that is being interrupted, and interrupted in a way that is not professional or civil, those are the times when we actually will have folks intervene and say, You can't do that.

And in this situation, was it perfect in the timing?

No.

What we've done since is that whenever we have any event that we think might pose a risk or might pose conflict that might happen, our police department is actually there.

-To those who have called on you to condemn hate speech and condemn anti-Semitism, what would you say?

-My focus has been that we need to treat people with humanity.

We need to treat-- you know, as a university campus that is one of the most diverse in the country, that's one of the strengths that we have is actually that we are able to interact and be in this environment with people that don't necessarily look like us, talk like us, have histories like us.

And so it has to be that we actually treat each other well, because then we actually are learning from the situation.

One thing I'll share with you is that there almost is no right response.

In all the responses, I mean, there have been like two sides.

And half the side says, Thank goodness you spoke up about it.

We really appreciate it.

The other half says, You didn't say enough.

You should have said this.

If you look on the other side, they say the exact same thing.

And it's almost, I won't say that it's the exact same number, but it really is kind of some, you know, different people have a different idea of how you should respond.

And what I try to remind them is, you know, let's just be thoughtful.

I'm just a university president.

And what my goal is, is to be able to support and embrace the most proactive educational environment there can be.

And from that then, it is our people that actually make that.

So things like, we have protests on our campus.

We've had some this week.

As long as they are civil, as long as they are following the other policies that we have, we actually embrace free speech.

And so sometimes I think it's more important for them to have the opportunity to have free speech than it is for me to actually set one.

But one of the goals that I have for our folks, and we've had a couple of the groups, student groups in particular, trying to figure out how they could come together.

It's for them to have a conversation, for them to understand another's perspective on this.

And if we can get there, that's what I'm very much open for.

-My last question for you.

At your first State of the University Address, you said there was inherent structural racism at UNLV.

That was in 2021.

Has it been sufficiently addressed in your opinion?

-That is kind of a goal of striving but never arriving.

We're a university made of people, and people come from different perspectives and have different ideas of things.

But I think what we've tried to show, particularly as the university administration, and I think our faculty address this, and I think our students represent this, is that that's what we would like to have is a place that does not have racism, that does not have sexism, that does not have all the other "isms" that go on.

And is it better?

I think it is better.

You know, one of the first things the provost and I did in the first semester was to create an ombudsperson.

And actually, we filled the ombudsperson.

We had a slot that needed filling.

That gentleman has worked with the different cultures that are around, because even within a department, it can have its kind of own little subculture.

He has done an excellent job at talking to people and talking through things and even talking to some of the leaders about how they can make sure that they're providing an environment that is not as racist, that it's not as all of the "isms" go on.

And so I think we've made progress.

Now, do we have still a ways to go?

Of course.

We have lots of ways to, plenty of things that we can continue to do.

And one of the things we'll do, we have an excellent interim chief diversity officer.

We're going to make that person permanent and try to figure out how we can provide resources so that they can work at least at the level of kind of all the colleges to be able to work on this issue.

-UNLV President Keith Whitfield, thank you for taking the time to join Nevada Week.

-Thank you very much.