After Unthinkable Tragedy, UNLV’s Lee Business School Is Ambitiously Rebuilding

On December 6, 2023, a former business professor who had unsuccessfully sought a faculty position at UNLV entered Frank and Estella Beam Hall, home of the Lee Business School, and opened fire. He killed three people before police shot him dead. Two of the victims, Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha-Jan “Jerry” Chang, were Lee School faculty. 

For the people who were inside that day, the building has never quite been the same.

“Those of us that were here, many of us were hiding under tables, myself and my team included,” says Anjala Krishen, interim dean of Lee School. “We survived by the skin of our teeth.”

A SCHOOL IN MOTION

Krishen, a marketing professor who joined UNLV in 2007 and built the school’s first MBA advisory board before stepping into the top job in July 2025, did not arrive into calm waters. The day she started last summer, she was already in meetings with university leadership about an urgent fundraising target. “It was like, ‘OK, we need to bring in $60 million – like stat,’” she tells Poets&Quants in a recent interview in her office on the UNLV campus. “It’s been a wild ride.”

In less than a year, Krishen has launched a Ph.D. program push, built a fundraising campaign from scratch, commissioned a decade-long data initiative, and relaunched the school’s mentoring program. She is overseeing the fastest-growing college on the UNLV campus, now at 4,700 students across 11 undergraduate and eight graduate programs. She is also, she acknowledges with characteristic directness, figuring out whether she wants the permanent job.

“We’ve got so much momentum that it would be sad to let it go right now,” she says.

READY TO LEAVE BEAM HALL

The case for a new building predates December 6. Lee has been talking about it since at least 2007, when Krishen first arrived. But after the shooting, the argument changed.

“Safety was a big concern before that happened,” she says. “When we say we want to get out of the building, a lot of it is for safety.”

There is also collective trauma embedded in the walls of Beam Hall. “It’s not that it’s a bad building,” Krishen says. “It’s just probably not a good building for the business that happened there.”

BUILDING BUSINESS TOGETHER

The new home is planned for a site along Maryland Parkway, between the Flora Dungan Humanities building and the Tam Alumni Center. The target is to be moved in by 2030, with fundraising – branded internally as Building Business Together, or BBT – aimed at hitting its goal by 2027, and possibly sooner.

The campaign is entirely homegrown. With no broader university capital campaign in place, Krishen’s team built their own, from the paperwork up. Naming opportunities range from $50 million for the building itself to $5 million each for department and lab namings, down to individual conference rooms and classrooms.

“It’s not a pipe dream anymore,” she says. “It’s actually going to happen.”

The school already has several gifts closed and others close. “We’re hardcore on it,” Krishen says.

ONLINE GROWTH – BUT NOT ‘PLUG AND CHUG’

In January 2025, Lee launched a fully asynchronous online MBA priced at under $19,000 for in-state students – one of the lowest price points in the market. The program mirrors the curriculum of the school’s hybrid MBA, which Krishen helped develop when she was running the program before COVID, converting it to an every-other-week in-person format that she believes may be the only hybrid part-time evening MBA in Nevada.

The online expansion did not happen overnight, and she says that’s the point. “It’s not, let’s convert everything from in-person to online,” she says. “It’s, let’s rework it to make it set up correctly.” Faculty teaching online must complete training, and the school has a dedicated online director and support team embedded within the college. “There are a lot of checks and balances to make sure we’re not just plug-chug.”

THE UNDERGRADUATE QUESTION

The harder question is undergraduate. Several bachelor’s degrees – marketing, entrepreneurship, cybersecurity – are now fully online. But Krishen is more cautious about what online delivery means for 18- and 19-year-olds, and is actively working on ways to preserve community for students who never set foot on campus.

“I want them to have that UNLV experience too,” she says. “It’s the networking along the way that makes a big difference.”

The school is exploring dedicated events and programming funded by an additional fee that online undergrad students pay. “We want them to feel included,” she says. “Feel like part of something.”

A PhD PUSH – AND A DECADE OF DATA

Among Krishen’s first moves as interim dean was to revive momentum around a doctoral program that had stalled multiple times over the years. She went directly to Greg Lee – the namesake of Lee Business School – and made the case for redirecting existing, unused gift funds toward a PhD launch.

“Once they got behind us, it feels like the right thing to do,” she says.

The first cohort, targeted for fall 2027, would include finance, marketing, and information systems. The Lee family is funding fully endowed doctoral fellowships – one per department – with the school covering additional students. The proposal is headed to the Nevada Board of Regents in June.

Running alongside the PhD effort is what Krishen calls the “decade of data” – an initiative to compile ten years of research output, enrollment history, faculty activity, and student and alumni outcomes into a single, searchable database. It will feed directly into a new strategic plan, replacing one she says was overdue and underspecified.

“If you don’t have 10 years worth of benchmarks, how do you set a meaningful target?” she says.

Krishen started her career as a database administrator at Oracle before moving into academia, and the instinct shows. The research database – every paper published by Lee faculty in the past decade, now aggregated into a single system – is already complete. Enrollment data is next. “My background is data,” she says. “I’ve always been about aggregate data.”

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