Sierra Nevada College: Looking back, 40 years later

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. — One look at Sierra Nevada College's campus doesn't accurately represent the school's 40 year history.

The clocktower, expansive lawns shaded by pines, stately dormitories and LEED-certified Tahoe Environmental Research Center don't betray a slightly less glamorous history. Today's campus is pure modern-day Incline Village, the old a little more old-school Wild West.

The new campus straddles Country Club Drive, close to the beach. The old on College Drive stood much higher on the mountain.

Students now stay two to a room in monitored dormitories, where at the first campus they lived in on-campus trailers, free from oversight.

An old theater was converted into a library, an old Laundromat into classrooms. Books and lab supplies came from a failed college in South Lake Tahoe.

A handful of students, no more than 26, attended SNC. Now some 400 are on-campus undergrads.

“It was very, very small, quite a ragtag mix of stuff,” said June Sylvester-Saraceno, now the English Program Chair at SNC. Saraceno started in the fall semester of 1987 as an English professor on the old campus.

The college was founded as Nevada's only private, four-year school in the fall of 1969. That's when Ben Solomon, a future president of the school, went to work as a volunteer professor for the school with wife Margaret.

Getting started

The school's founders quickly offered Solomon an ultimatum.

“In 1970 they said they were planning on closing the school,” Solomon said. “They said if I was willing to run it, it could stay open, and they gave me a third of an interest in the property. It cost me $5,000, my first ever donation to the college.”

The school didn't have many students or faculty — Solomon served as CEO, secretary and treasurer for the little campus.

But, it continued to grow, adding students from as far away as Iran and Slovenia.

The school needed to be careful with its funds, Solomon said, and instituted a system of paying professors one half of the tuition their students paid for a class, turning them essentially into contractors.

Margaret Solomon said the relationship between the small college and their neighboring residents in Incline was distant in the school's early years.

“They didn't really show much interest,” Margaret Solomon said, referring to the Incline community. “They weren't interested or involved in the campus.”

So the campus functioned fairly independently. An old trailer park abutted the College Drive campus, and as tenants left their homes the Solomons bought them up for student housing. Students helped to build Ralston Hall on campus using materials from the Army Surplus store, including bulldozer blades used as stairs.

The small, isolated campus functioned as a very tightly-knit community.

“It was like a family,” Margaret Soloman said, recalling the time a female student came back to campus to find her housing under repair, so she slipped into the Solomon's home near campus late at night and woke up for breakfast with the family in the morning.

Students often visited the home, especially when the Solomons picked up the food local grocery stores were about to throw away and dispense it to the them.

Growth

Early on the school wasn't buoyed by attendance from Californians eager to get up to the mountains, as SNC is now.

No, in the early days, most of the students were Vietnam veterans attending school on the GI bill and a bevy of international students, including students from Iranian families friendly to the Shah after he was deposed in 1979. The school advertised in “Rolling Stone” magazine to nab students.

By 1980 the Solomons had a board of directors to help them run the college and Ben Solomon took over as the school's president.

By the time Saraceno arrived in 1987, though, the college still had a loose vibe to it.

“It was sort of Wild West in terms of how things got done,” Saraceno said. “If you wanted to do something, you just got to do it. If you wanted to start a school paper, somebody said OK. You just got to go for it.”

The school's cafeteria was little more than a microwave and a coffee pot, Saraceno said, but it spawned a level of intimacy.

“I still hear from students from those early years,” Saraceno said. “You knew everybody, and you knew everything about them, maybe too much.”

Current President Robert Maxson, who came on in 2007, said he still hears former students from those years reminisce about living in the trailers.

“They loved it because they didn't have any supervision,” Maxson said with a laugh.

Saraceno said it wasn't uncommon to find a trailer without its wooden steps, which would be cut up occasionally for firewood.

Even with a happy campus, though, Solomon knew the school needed to grow.

“We knew we didn't have enough room up here,” Solomon said. “So in the 1980s (donor) Nancy Binz and her foundation bought half of the property our trustees found down at what we called the lake campus, and a guy who lived here named Mansel Ocheltree donated the other half.”

The school began to build on its current campus in 1992 and moved down as buildings went up throughout the 1990s and into this decade.

“There was a lot more pride in the school,” Saraceno said. “My old office was in the corner of a trailer. It was kind of ghetto. But once we got down here there was a real sense of pride, people didn't mind sending pictures home.”

A hard place, and the future

By 2005 the school fell on hard times. Poor management led to serious financial problems, Solomon said, and the school's enrollment dropped as a heavy pall hung over the campus.

Saraceno said she updated her resume and the situation looked tenuous.

But thanks to donors and strategic partnerships, the college was saved, Solomon said, and a change in leadership followed with the hiring of Maxson in the late fall of 2007.

“I can't tell you what it meant to have Bob Maxson come in, we just don't have a weak link in the administration any more,” Saraceno said.

Under Maxson's leadership the school righted the ship, and is heading toward a bright future.

“We're not fragile any more,” Maxson said.

The college in the last two years has raked in its largest freshmen classes ever. Maxson said the school is poised to continue to grow aggressively.

“We want to go after the best and brightest students,” Maxson said. “We're going to go after high school valedictorians and National Merit scholars, if you want to be in the game, you've got to do that.”

He said the school is focused on being a first choice for a majority of their freshman class.

The school is going to continue to work their recruiting connections in California's student-rich population centers as it grows, Maxson said.

As far as the campus, Maxson said the next building students will see is a performing arts center. And, SNC may see growth in its incredibly successful athletic program, which has brought home national titles in skiing and snowboarding consistently over the past 15 years.

“I think this school will add more sports in the near future,” Maxson said. “Soccer, golf, tennis, cross country, they're all on the table if they're low cost and don't require a large roster.”

The school certainly has come a long way from the small campus on the mountain.