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In January, Howard Rosenberg stepped down from the Nevada Board of Regents, the panel that governs Nevada's higher education system, after serving for 12 years.

Rosenberg, an art professor at the Nevada university campus, came to the board in 1996 after having to fight like the devil for the right to serve. He had been elected by voters over an establishment favorite without help from any of the traditional interest groups, so he didn't owe favors. After he was elected, university officials dragged him before the Nevada Ethics Commission in an effort to prevent him from taking his seat. Their complaint was that because he was a faculty member, it was improper for him to be a regent. The commission voted in Rosenberg's favor.

Rosenberg's cocky demeanor suggests an arrogant know-it-all ill-suited to serving on a governing body where he must work with others. That, at any rate, was the conventional wisdom.

As it turned out, however, he turned out to be a good example to those in politics. And other members of the board who were skeptical of him reached out to him to help him succeed.

"I was always made to feel important to the discussion," he said recently. "I mean, even the people who were dead set against my setting the precedent that I set (a faculty member serving as a regent), once the decision was made, it was fine: 'Now, let's get him educated.'"

He learned techniques of governing from his colleagues. He toned down his sharp rhetoric. Even in areas where he felt absolute certainty he was willing to change his mind if the situation persuaded him. He became known as the strongest advocate for students in decades.

Early in his service, regents voted on a "technology fee" to beef up the computer infrastructure of higher education in Nevada because legislative funding was inadequate to keep Nevada up with advances in technology. Rosenberg, believing that computer technology is a state expense like desks and buildings, voted against it. When the matter came up for reconsideration, the head of the Graduate Students Association stood and addressed Rosenberg. He remembers her saying something like this:

"Regent Rosenberg, please, we know how you feel. We appreciate your feelings in the matter, but we need this stuff. Without it we're not going to be worth what we should be worth when we get out into the workforce. Please, we want you to vote for this."

He looked up and down the table of student presidents and asked if they all felt the same and they indicated that they did. He then said, "Well, okay, if that's what you want, kids, I change my vote."

"He just didn't know how it worked, but he was a fast learner, and he soon found out what he could do," said Elko Regent Dorothy Gallagher. She said he learned and changed. "I watched him develop into an outstanding regent."

In turn, the other regents found they had something to learn from him BECAUSE he was a faculty member.

"Howard would recuse himself (from voting) from time to time, but his perspective was enormously helpful," said board chair Michael Wixom. "Howard brought a perspective of the campus that we wouldn't have otherwise had and a perspective of faculty and a perspective of students and in that regard, he kept us focused on student issues."

One indication of how much a working part of the regents he became is, he is reluctant to cite specific accomplishments on the board that he is particularly proud of because he believes the regents' accomplishments are GROUP accomplishments.

All this is not to say he didn't have sharp disagreements with other regents. For instance, when they fired two community college employees -- including the college president -- Rosenberg was harshly critical of the lack of due process provided to the two. But he did not make it impossible for him to work with the regents in the future.

He also faults himself on some counts, such as his inability to work well with the current chancellor, Jim Rogers. He thinks he and Rogers are too much alike. "The chancellor has unmined possibilities," he said. "Had I been smart enough, clever enough, street-smart enough to be able to work a relationship with him, that might have been more helpful than it was confrontational at times."

There are those who think the Nevada Board of Regents should become an appointed body because it is "dysfunctional," as one newspaper editorial put it.

The record of the regents is a sharp contrast to the conduct of legislators who have been trying to change the board to an appointive panel. Where the legislature has battled over ideology and sometimes has become unable to function because of members' certainty of their own rightness, the regents have been better able to put dogma aside in order to govern.