Editorial: Bringing global views to Vegas

Saturday, March 18, 2006 | 7:10 a.m.

The Nevada Board of Regents has approved a proposal by outgoing UNLV President Carol Harter to create a global think tank at UNLV within the Black Mountain Institute that Harter will run after she leaves her UNLV post in June.

According to a story in the Las Vegas Sun, the Black Mountain Institute will bring scholars, writers and artists to UNLV to research and write about contentious global issues in hopes of helping to find solutions.

UNLV English professor Richard Wiley, who is to head the institute's Forum on Contemporary Cultures, said the idea is to attract participants with "unlike minds" in hopes of shaking up the conventional approach to global cultural clashes.

"These problems aren't going to be solved by (President) George Bush," Wiley told the Sun, but rather by "a congress of human voices speaking in one way or another." And unlike many established think tanks, Harter said, the Black Mountain Institute will be using arts and literature, rather than political views, to inspire international change.

Harter, who leaves the UNLV post June 30 to serve as the institute's executive director, said the objective for these writers and artists will be to engage the general public in public policy debates and discussions and write articles in a manner that "laypeople can understand."

In her request Thursday, Harter asked for $268,000 in state money by the 2008-2009 school year. The rest of the institute's funding will come from private sources.

But even before making her pitch to the regents, Harter had included on the institute's board of directors some heavy academic hitters, including UNLV's Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; Harriet Fulbright, wife of the late Sen. William Fulbright; and Henry Louis Gates, director of the W.B.E. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. As a result of those connections, the institute's first fundraiser will feature Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning author of "Beloved."

Hopefully, this institute will receive the funding and public and private support it needs to become the kind of place where public policies can be examined and written about in a manner that engages not only the academic person but also all citizens in discussing the issues that divide our global community.