ҹɫÊÓƵ

President Brian Sandoval: Welcome back, Wolf Pack family. I'm your host, Brian Sandoval, a proud graduate and president of the University of Nevada. Today's guests are grounded in a strong belief that public higher education and the transformative power of the liberal arts can shape individuals and society for the better. Joining us today are the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Casilde Isabelli, and the Executive Director of the University’s newly created Center for Constitutional Law, Rick Trachok. Dr. Isabelli has been a dedicated member of the University of Nevada community for more than 20 years in the Department of World Languages and Literatures. She is an established scholar in Hispanic applied linguistics and bilingualism, with research that focuses on second-language acquisition, study abroad and psycholinguistics. A seasoned attorney and legal educator, Rick currently serves as senior counsel at McDonald Carano and lectures at UC Berkeley Law School. He previously chaired the Nevada Board of Regents and has led the Nevada Board of Bar Examiners since 2000. He served 15 years as an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada. Today’s podcast is recorded in the podcast suite within the @One at the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center. First of all, welcome Dean and Dr. Trachok. If I could say, we're very excited that you're here.

Rick Trachok: Well, we're glad to be here.

Casilde Isabelli: Thank you.

Sandoval: So let’s get started. Dean Isabelli, I’ll begin with you. You’ve been part of the University of Nevada community since 2000. What inspired you to make the University your academic home and eventually take on the leadership role as dean of the College of Liberal Arts?

Isabelli: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about myself, the college and all our programs. A little bit about me, of the story that brought me here to UNR and Reno is both professional and personal. The personal side is I came here married with a partner that also needed to succeed professionally. We found it – a great area between Incline and Northern Nevada – where he can thrive and create his own career. So happy partner, happy life here. The other part was I interviewed for this position of an assistant professor of applied linguistics in the then named the Foreign Languages Department, now called the Department of World Languages and Literatures. They needed someone with my background in applied linguistics and teacher training to come in and run the basic Spanish language program, that offered Spanish to about 1,000 students on campus. And I came in with the experience to do that. From there I interviewed with a great team, great department chair, and I knew this was the place for me once I interviewed with them. So, I started as an assistant professor in 2000 and worked my way up to associate professor and full professor. And in that time, I also had a lot of leadership opportunities that I did not think I had the experience to do, but I was slowly growing after 12 years of running the basic Spanish language program, working with wonderful graduate teaching assistants – teaching them how to teach Spanish – I was then asked to be the department chair of a very complex department. It offers eight languages, many faculty, many goals, missions, needs. And I did that for eight years. Before I was tapped into being, or asked to be, the interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts in 2022. And I’l say I was probably asked to be the interim dean because I worked many of the task forces at the University level, the HSI task force, the Hispanic-Serving Institution Task Force, UNR PMT committee, where I was chair of it for two years, Faculty Senate ad hoc committees to give some background to all the questions that they had, I was on the task for the internationalization committee to internationalize our campus. And of course, with the college, I was really a central part of the then-dean’s Applied Liberal Arts Initiative. And so, came to see this interim position leading a college  with three disciplines, the arts, social sciences and humanities, 25 units, 14 academic departments 3,500 students and the ask to really work with advancement and our donors and make some friends, and I loved it and I thrived, and I knew this was my next career opportunity, and therefore I applied for the position and I finished up my first year and now I’m in my second year and I’m loving it.

Sandoval: Wow time flies! So I know you have a lot of initiatives. And you know, I’m a proud graduate of the Liberal Arts college, but, what are you doing that is new?

Isabelli: A lot. And again, I’ll try and summarize it quickly. And I don't want to have anybody that I don't mention know that they're not less important. But initiatives is our 2025–2030 strategic plan that we just put into place this fall. And it definitely supports the Wolf Pack Rising UNR’s mission and goals to become an an R1, AAU, nationally recognized institution, investing in people, serving our state and telling our stories. And so what comes out of that are really supporting my faculty to be the researchers that they need to be and providing the need the resources that they need to be able to survive and thrive. Making sure I put a committee together to make sure they are being nominated for national prestigious, and highly prestigious awards. Those are all things that bring recognition to our institution. I am really focusing also on branding of our college. The College of Liberal Arts seems to have taken on a different semantic meaning in the last maybe 15 years. And so we decided instead of trying to keep explaining who we are, we decided to instead highlight the three disciplines in our college. So you’ll see in any of our branding, including the jacket I’m wearing, that we say we’re the arts, social sciences and humanities within the College of Liberal Arts. So that is really one of the things that we’re focusing on, by rebranding and telling the stories of our faculty through this new inaugural Insider Magazine that goes out nationally. I think we sent it out to 3,000 alumni. We’re starting with alumni, and just telling our story about our research our programs, and another important aspect is having our alumni be able to tell their story of how their degree in the liberal arts has fulfilled their career objectives. And so we try and focus on those digital stories that you might see posted everywhere. We focus on those that decide to stay in Nevada and hold really important positions. And they’re from leaders, lawyers, to educators, to also one day, I’d also like to interview you, being a liberal arts grad. So that is one of the initiatives and recent accomplishments that’s getting out there. I am, like I said, really supporting our faculty so that we are contributing to more book publications and article publications in high-end articles so that we can contribute to the institution’s desire to raise our R1 status and to hopefully contribute to being a member in the AAU community. We’ve got curriculum that is strengthening the Core Humanities program, where almost all of our students need to take, and so making them understand the importance of the humanities. This summer, I’m going to be having one of our foundation professors teach a course in Italy on modern Italy. So that’s going to be exciting. So new-

Sandoval: I’m going to enroll in that. Yeah.

Isabelli: Yeah. Yes. We’re going to be allowing parents, if they want, to come along to listen to him, but we’re gonna be, the backyard of this class is going to be Rome. Building the Collegiate Academy, we’re so happy to expand on it. Our professors are building it and working with Dave Shintani on that, building the arts, land and environment certificate that we’re offering up at Lake Tahoe. And speaking of Lake Tahoe, keeping the focus on the low-res MFA programs in creative writing and interdisciplinary arts. They’re both very well enrolled, and the faculty and those alumni that run the program are nationally recognized artists. And finally, space! We have been working very hard in the last six months to move into the third and fourth floors of the vacated space and bringing in the World Languages and Literatures out of Cain Hall, philosophy out of Jones, our outreach and engagement office from PBS second floor of and Core Humanities out of Thompson. And this is my transition to talking about the Center for Constitutional Law. It is on also on the sixth floor, and with the Center for Constitutional Law that Rick has worked so hard to build, is we also have a minor in legal studies, and now we’re going to be launching pretty soon the interdisciplinary major in law, business and society with the Business College of Business.

Sandoval: No, that's incredible. And now you can take a breath. So, moving over to you, Rick, and this is something that I'm really excited about, this Center for Constitutional Law. So will you talk a little bit about the genesis of it, because it was you. I mean, this was your idea and something that you've made a reality.

Trachok: Well, thanks for the question and thanks for the invitation. And I have to say, I'm very excited that we have Cassie as our dean. It's great working with them. About five or six years ago, our son, who’s a lawyer, asked me, “Why am I teaching down at Berkeley? Why am I not teaching high school government classes here in Reno?” He said, “Because we need it so desperately.” And I thought about that a lot. I thought it was a good question, and I thought, “But it doesn't scale.” So, I started thinking through what we really need is a program that teaches the teachers, that gives our high school and junior high school teachers the background and the tools so they can teach how the Constitution came into being, how it works and how our system of government is supposed to work. And so as I kept working that through, we had just finished the acquisition of the Tahoe campus. I thought, well, this is the perfect place to do it. Everybody wants to come to Tahoe in the summer. We could invite Nevada’s junior high and high school government and civics teachers to spend a week at the lake. I could bring scholars from around the country to meet with them, to help with different topics in constitutional law and constitutional history that they could incorporate into their classes. I vetted the idea with Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law, just to get his thoughts on it, and then I approached you. You jumped on it immediately. Then you and Provost Thompson and I had a series of other meetings, and then I started working together with Cassie to see how we could build it out. So the genesis was my son's question. Erwin, who is one of the top scholars in constitutional law in the country, was very excited about it because no center around the country was focused on the teachers. They were all focused on students and having summer programs for students, which in my opinion didn’t scale up. And I thought with our new campus, this is a perfect opportunity to bring Nevada high school teachers, and junior high school teachers into one place where we bring the top minds in constitutional history, constitutional law to work with them. And so that was the genesis of the program. It took a long time.

Sandoval: And, you know, it’s even more than that, though. You’ll be publishing articles, and you’ve brought in some eminent scholars, legal scholars who have already provided some lectures.

Trachok: Well, what’s interesting is I’ve never started a center before, and I volunteered to do it because I didn’t have anything else to do other than teaching at Berkeley and Stanford and my law practice. So I thought, “Well, we need somebody to get this thing going.” As I started working with Cassie and the chairs and deans from a couple of colleges starting in January last year, we started formulating how should this look. The core mission is the summer teachers program, like we had with our inaugural event where we had Dean Chemerinsky and you for our May 3 discussion on constitutional issues. It became clear to me that we need to have a regular speaker series. We need to have visiting professors coming in each year to focus on teaching and writing. And the last piece of it is to create a student-run constitutional bulletin as a joint venture between the University of Nevada, and the William S. Boyd School of Law. And so those were the three legs of the stool, if you will. Right now, the speaker series has been very successful so far. Our next event will be Jan. 30, and we’ve had our first steering committee meeting between Boyd and the University on the bulletin. In terms of the summer program, that’s well underway. We’ve already scheduled it for the week of July 13 and the week of July 20 for the 30 teachers each week to come to the lake, and I already have the scholars lined up for that program.

Sandoval: Wow.

Isabelli: I want to add one more thing that’s on your task list this month, is to start the search for the visiting professor line. It’s going to be a professor who will be teaching a two-two load to teach con law classes to our students here at UNR CLA and also bringing the expertise that he needs.

Sandoval: No, and Rick referenced Boyd, and that's the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Trachok: That’s correct. And another thing we’ve been working on, you and the provost, Cassie, I have been working on it and the dean, Leah Grinvald down in Las Vegas, is we’re trying to create a year of law school, whether it’s the second or third year of law school, up at the Tahoe campus. We’re looking to develop it so we’ll have full-time faculty up here or rotating faculty where students can come and spend a semester or a year of their law school career up at the lake. In conjunction with that, we want to create a joint JD, Juris Doctor, and MFA Creative Writing program where you would graduate after four years with your law degree and with an MFA degree in creative writing. We’ve already created the curriculum for the MFA program. We have buy-in from both UNLV and UNR and from the Nevada program up at the lake, the low-res program up at the lake. So we have a lot going on in addition to the major in law, business and society.

Sandoval: No, it’s so exciting. So, I’m going to go back to the dean. You referenced your 2025–2030 strategic plan. So, what do you envision for the future of the College of Liberal Arts and its impact? 

Isabelli: Our most important impact is making sure that we are graduating students that are critical thinkers, great communicators, problem solvers, and that they go out into the world, stay here in Nevada and elevate humanity. That’s always our number one focus is our students. The other things are those that I already focused on, making sure that I’m doing everything possible to help our researchers, and scholars and creative artists elevate our R1 status, and contribute also to also to eventually having a membership invitation to the AAU through book publications, articles, grant funding and telling our story getting the word out about the great work happening here and making UNR a national figure.

Sandoval: So, what would you tell? There are some cynics out there.

Isabelli: Oh, yeah.

Sandoval: What’s the value of a Liberal Arts education?

Isabelli: Thank you for asking that because that is a easy narrative. It's an incorrect narrative and that is what we spend most of our time addressing, and how we address it is by telling our stories. And most importantly is those alumni we've found is our weapons and being able to tell the story of how they got a liberal arts degree and how it led them to the great career that they are in right now. Of course, we do choose those alumni carefully and we make sure that they are alumni there in very visible positions. And again, I try and choose those that are stayed in Nevada.

Sandoval: No, and I’ll tell you, as a beneficiary of a liberal arts education, it teaches you how to communicate, how to think and have ethics, which is transferable to any profession. So, Rick, real quick, in a lightning round, five years from now, the Constitutional Law Center — what do you want it to look like?

Trachok: First of all, we’ll continue with our lineup of national scholars with our speaker series. We’ll have the joint JD/MFA program at the lake up and running. The Bulletin In five years, will be recognized not only by a lay audience but also by the scholarly audience, and we’ll probably have graduated the second or third class of majors in law, business and society.

Isabelli: And I'm going to add, we're going to become a destination University to participate and be students in these programs.

Sandoval: Well, I would say we are a destination university and a national university, but these are things that you won't find at other universities and that's what makes us special and unique. 

Trachok: Could I add just one thing? You were asking the value of a liberal arts degree. I remember on the desk of the president of 40 years ago, the first law school I taught at, and the sign was, “What good is the ability to make a living if you don't know how to live?”

Sandoval: Well said. So, we will close on that. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for this episode of Sagebrushers. Thank you for joining us today, Dean Isabelli and Mr. Trachok. Pleasure.

Trachok: Our Pleasure.

Isabelli: Thank you.

Sanodval: So, join us next time for another episode of Sagebrushers as we continue to tell the stories that make our University special and unique. Until then, I'm University President Brian Sandoval, and as always, Go Pack!