Dealing with the world’s woes

By Christina Littlefield

Thursday, March 16, 2006 | 6:49 a.m.

UNLV officials are attempting to harness the power of the pen with a new think tank that will let authors and poets take a stab at some of the world's greatest problems.

The proposed Black Mountain Institute would bring together scholars, writers and artists to research and write about global issues, such as the breakdown between Eastern Islamic and Western, Judeo-Christian worldviews.

The goal is "to break the logjam of entrenchment," by recruiting people of "unlike minds" to UNLV to tackle a topic at a time, said English professor Richard Wiley, who will be heading the institute's Forum on Contemporary Cultures.

"These problems aren't going to be solved by George Bush," Wiley said. "They're going to be solved by a congress of human voices speaking in one way or another, and if we can become a part of that congress, it's a contribution rather than just saying the problem is too huge to deal with."

What will set the UNLV institute apart from such think tanks as the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard is a focus on literature and the arts as a way to evoke international change in public policy, UNLV President Carol Harter said. Most think tanks address public policy from particular political viewpoints and tend to lean left or right.

Harter is leaving the UNLV presidency June 30 to serve as executive director of the Black Mountain Institute. A proposal to make the institute a reality goes before the state Board of Regents on Thursday.

Harter hopes to raise enough money to bring in high profile writers of the same stature of UNLV's Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka to engage students, professors and community members and write articles in a way that "laypeople can understand."

"It will not be just scholars talking academic talk to each other, but scholars and artists and writers who can translate those ideas to the public at large and engage the public at large in major public policy debates and discussions," Harter said.

How many scholars and artists Harter rounds up depends on the amount of money she raises from private sources.

She already has lined up an impressive list of people to serve on Black Mountain Institute's board of directors, including Soyinka; Harriet Fulbright, wife of the late Sen. William Fulbright; Henry Louis Gates, director of the W.B.E. Du Bois Institute at Harvard; and Russell Banks, president of the North American Network for Cities of Asylum, which will be folded in under Black Mountain.

Those kind of connections already helped Harter land Nobel prize winning "Beloved" author Toni Morrison to kick off the institute's first fundraiser April 6 with a free public lecture at UNLV, followed by a tickets-only dinner event with tables starting at $5,000.

It takes a Nobel Laureate to get a Nobel Laureate, Harter said, and the support of people like Fulbright and Gates will be critical in bringing in funds and recruiting top writers.

"Our foreign policy is far more important now than it has ever been before," Fulbright said. "Writers of that ilk and university leaders make a huge difference, and I am really very pleased that they have banded together and are going to be doing the kind of work they have outlined."

The proposal to the regents would include $268,000 in state money to the Black Mountain Institute by the 2008-2009 school year. Harter will strive to raise another half-million dollars.

The North American Network for cities of Asylum will be self-funded and serve as a major fundraiser for the Black Mountain Institute because of its national prestige, Harter said. Through the work of Fontainebleau Resorts President Glenn Schaeffer, Las Vegas was the first U.S. city to offer asylum to persecuted writers.

Schaeffer's work with the asylum led him then to invest in UNLV's Master of Fine Arts program, bringing UNLV national claim by paying for scholars such as Soyinka to teach at the university. He also founded the nonprofit International Institute of Modern Letters, which helps support persecuted foreign writers and translate and publish their work into English.

Schaeffer has said that he saw literature as the stimulus to promoting a free democracy of ideas.

That interest led Schaeffer to develop the idea for the Black Mountain Institute, Harter said. It is based on the Black Mountain College experiment in North Carolina. That now-defunct college, owned and operated by its faculty, was a breeding ground for some of America's most famous postmodern artists between the 1930s and the 1950s.

The small community of scholars encouraged collaboration between students and professors. Among those present were composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, "Projective Verse" poet Charles Olson, architect and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, pop artist Robert Rauschenberg and abstract painter Willem De Kooning.

Artist Joseph Albers also took refuge at the college after the Nazis forced him and his wife Anni to flee the Bauhausschool in Germany.

"A new kind of art came out of that," said Douglas Unger, who founded UNLV's Master of Fine Arts program and handles grants and acquisitions for the Institute of Modern Letters.

"And I think the idea of the Black Mountain Institute is to do that in Las Vegas - trade ideas, do scholarship, write, do high-profile events for the university, bring the university and the community together and provide a resource for the students."

Initial plans had called for the Modern Letters Institute also to fall under Black Mountain's umbrella, executive director Eric Olsen said. But the Modern Letters Institute has since decided to leave the university in July to focus on its publishing work.

The change is part of the Modern Letters Institute's natural evolution as a nonprofit. Its publishing work has been its most successful venture, Olsen said. But he also said that the institute's university affiliations had not worked as well as he had hoped.

Schaeffer also will not be as involved in developing the Black Mountain Institute as he originally intended because of his new work with Fontainebleau, Harter said. She denied rumors of a rift between her and Schaeffer, saying he was still looking at a founding gift for the institute and that he had called Chancellor Jim Rogers to say he was glad Harter would be coming on as executive director.

Harter, who is retiring as president because of management conflicts with Rogers, said she saw the move to Black Mountain as very fitting.

Schaeffer did not return numerous phone calls from the Sun over the last month.

"This is my natural intellectual roots," said Harter, whose doctorate dissertation in English focused on the works of Nobel Prize winning Mississippi novelist William Faulkner.

"It is where I started, so it's kind of a nice cycle to come back around."