Mandalay Resort Group funds UNLV graduate creative writing program

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, Sept. 13, 2000 | 11:52 a.m.

UNLV President Carol Harter announced a new partnership Tuesday with casino-giant Mandalay Resort Group to establish a post-graduate creative writing program with a $2 million endowed chair.

Wole Soyinka, Nigerian dramatist, poet and essayist, who earlier this year helped designate Las Vegas as an international asylum for oppressed writers, has agreed to serve as the program's first chairman. University officials believe Soyinka is the first Nobel laureate hired to a faculty position in Nevada.

"One of the things that is so delicious about this particular gift is that it allows us to create a center of excellence in the liberal and creative arts -- in some of the very disciplines that will seem to the outside world wholly unlikely places to attract private support from the culture in which we live and work," Harter told the crowd of more than 300 assembled on campus at Judy Bayley Theatre for her State of the University address.

Harter added that Soyinka's international reputation should help the university attract more faculty and students to not only the writing program, but also to other arts programs and the newly developed Afro-American studies program.

Glenn Schaeffer, president of Mandalay Resort Group and a 1976 graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop, said that a highly regarded liberal arts program is at the core of the reputation of almost every eminent university.

While Soyinka was hesitant to agree that his name and the new program would vault UNLV into the company of such writing programs as those at University of Iowa and Stanford University, he also didn't agree that the program had bloomed from a cultural vacuum.

"It's an augmentation. I want to avoid the sense of a dramatic beginning," Soyinka said. "It's not as if nothing artistic comes out of Las Vegas. It's too easy to be snobbish about the outer casements of a place like this."

But for most of the local dignitaries gathered Tuesday, the new program and Soyinka's appointment were dramatic revelations. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was one of those impressed by the announcement.

"It's bigger than big," Goodman said. "What do they say when you go from college football to the NFL? You're going to the next level? Las Vegas is going to the next level. It's a giant step toward a cultural revolution, and I feel lucky to be the mayor."