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

Lee Business School graduate students. Becca Schwartz, UNLV

LAS VEGAS IS CHANGING – AND SO IS LEE

Lee sits in one of the most dynamic business environments in the country, and Krishen is trying to build programs that reflect it. The school’s four active centers cover real estate, entrepreneurship, economic research, and – in one of its more distinctive offerings – risk and insurance management, a partnership with the Keretesi family that includes a rare bachelor’s degree in the field.

“There are very few in the country that do a bachelor’s in risk and insurance management,” she says. “We’re very cutting-edge when it comes to what we’re offering.”

Industry ties run from advisory boards – which Krishen launched for the MBA program years before it was standard practice in the college – to a mentoring program that has since expanded school-wide, pairing students with advisory board members who opt in each semester. Some donors, she notes, have no prior connection to UNLV at all. “Las Vegas likes us,” she says. “And that’s a big part of our brand.”

AI AS A MARKET SHIFT

Krishen, 58, has been in higher education long enough to have taught digital marketing when having a restaurant website still required justification. She doesn’t frame artificial intelligence as a tool or a threat so much as a structural rupture – something closer to what the internet did to commerce, or what Google did to how people think.

“We created this thing that’s then going to change the way we think,” she says. “Which is, again, similar to Google – but I think it’s a market shift.”

She is clear-eyed about what that means for business schools, and cautiously optimistic about where Lee could fit. “I think business schools could be at the forefront (of AI),” she says, citing the field’s unusual position at the intersection of quantitative and qualitative thinking. “We kind of embody both.”

She envisions a future AI center at Lee – industry-funded, not just internally resourced – but acknowledges the timing is not yet right. “We’re still trying to write the alphabet,” she says.

‘UPLIFT PEOPLE’

The area where Krishen is most candid – and perhaps most frustrated – is brand. She grew up in Texas, went to Rice, and watched universities like UT and Texas A&M produce alumni who wear their schools like identity. She wants that for Lee.

“When you say ‘I’m a Rebel,’ it should mean something,” she says. “People should go, ‘Oh – I need to hire you.'”

She thinks the product is there. What has been missing is the willingness to talk about it. “If you spend a lot of time doing things and not enough time talking about what you’re doing, you get toasted,” she says. One of her early moves was to push faculty and staff to actively engage with the school’s social media – likes, shares, simple amplification. Her internal fundraising initiative is called LIFT – Lee Impactful Fundraising Team – but the word carries a broader meaning in how she thinks about the job.

“Lift is underneath everything I do,” she says. “Just uplift people.”

WHAT COMES NEXT

That includes faculty still processing what happened inside Beam Hall. It includes students who enrolled after December 6 and may not fully know what the building holds. It includes donors who never attended UNLV, alumni who have drifted, and a city that has never quite thought of itself as a college town.

Among those she is lifting are the colleagues of Patricia Navarro-Velez, Cha-Jan “Jerry” Chang, and Naoko Takemaru – the three faculty members killed that December morning by a gunman who wanted to work at the school where they taught.

Krishen, for her part, is not waiting for conditions to improve before committing. When asked whether she plans to pursue the permanent deanship – the university has a new provost starting June 1, and a formal search is expected in the fall – she doesn’t hedge.

“I care deeply about where we’re headed,” she says, “and I intend to pursue the permanent deanship through the formal process.”

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