The University on the Hill: UNR Is Reno's Second Downtown
Some 21,000 students, a medical school, a seismic lab and the state's flagship ambitions — the University of Nevada, Reno shapes the city's economy, skyline and Saturdays. A guide to the institution above Virginia Street.
From downtown Reno, the University of Nevada, Reno announces itself the way it has since 1885: the tower of Mackay Auditorium and the quad's trees rising on the hill above Virginia Street, Morrill Hall's white columns at the top of the city's main street. The state's flagship university is not adjacent to Reno; it is one of Reno's load-bearing institutions — employer, landlord, cultural center and the engine of its educated workforce.
The numbers sketch the scale: more than 21,000 students, a faculty research operation anchored by programs with national reputations — the seismological laboratory that monitors the earthquake country Reno sits in, the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering born of the Comstock's mining wealth, a medical school whose students train across the state, and the Reynolds School of Journalism, whose building stands at the quad's edge. The university's cooperative extension serves every Nevada county, and its athletics — the Wolf Pack — give the city its Division I Saturdays.
The campus has been physically remaking itself for a generation, growing south toward downtown with new engineering, business and student-life buildings that stitch the university into the city grid. The growth is the city's economic strategy made visible: Reno's diversification beyond gaming runs on the graduates, research and employers the university attracts, and the town-gown relationship — housing, transit, the neighborhoods around the campus — is a standing item of Reno civic business.
November finds the university at full stride: the fall semester's final third, the Mackay Stadium home stretch, admissions season for next fall's class, and the research calendar in its grant-year rhythm. For thousands of Reno families, the university is also the household ladder — the first-generation students of the Truckee Meadows climbing it in public.
This newsroom will cover UNR as the civic institution it is: regents and budgets in plain language, research translated, admissions and enrollment as economic news, and the Pack as the city's team. The university on the hill is not a separate city. It is Reno, thinking.
