Humanism takes on politics

By Charlotte Hsu

Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007 | 1:49 a.m.

Talk to Martine Brownley, who runs a center for humanities at Emory University in Atlanta, and you'd think she had a side job doing long-distance public relations for UNLV's year-old Black Mountain Institute.

"What the Black Mountain Institute is doing is absolutely fabulous," said Brownley, founding director of Emory's Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. "I know of no other institute, humanity center, in this country that is doing this."

Black Mountain's mission, according to Executive Director Carol Harter, is to bring literary voices into discussions on global issues such as immigration and the Iraq war - discussions that politicians, journalists and nonhumanities academics typically dominate.

To that end, Black Mountain has quickly piled up a long list of accomplishments.

The institute has four writers in residence, published authors hailing from Croatia, Iran, Jamaica and Michigan.

Toni Morrison, author of "Beloved" and a Nobel laureate for literature, spoke at a Black Mountain event for $25,000, half her usual fee. Writer and dramatist Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate and institute senior fellow, will be a guest editor for Witness, a literary journal the institute recently purchased.

And this month George Packer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, joined other journalists to chat about election year politics. (Packer, Harter pointed out, is not merely a journalist but the author of books including a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

"They've got all this going," Brownley says, "and they've got it going in no time flat."

The institute launched formally in July 2006 and took over established programs such as City of Asylum Las Vegas, which hosts and provides a safe haven for writers who have been censored or threatened in their homelands.

No one factor can account for Black Mountain's early success.

The institute's Las Vegas location has been beneficial - counterintuitive, perhaps, given the city's image, which isn't exactly bookish.

But the region's thirst for an intellectual life was on display in 2006 when people snatched up 2,200 passes for Morrison's talk within 24 hours of the tickets' release.

Plus, visiting scholars, like travelers from other professions, can't resist the lure of one of the nation's top tourist destinations.

"It struck me that almost uniquely, perhaps aside from New York and L.A., Las Vegas has the ability and the convening power potentially to be a really significant place for bringing people together to address some critical issues," said Alex Jones, a member of Black Mountain's advisory board and director of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Richard Wiley, the institute's associate director, said, "The reason I'm able to make people come for cheap is because really, they secretly want to come."

But being in Las Vegas isn't Black Mountain's only asset.

Harter and Wiley, a longtime UNLV professor and author of books including "Soldiers in Hiding," which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for best American fiction, have leveraged professional and personal connections to strengthen Black Mountain.

Wiley called in favors from buddies Tim O'Brien and Robert Stone. Fiction writer O'Brien was a Pulitzer finalist for "The Things They Carried." Stone's books include the National Book Award-winning "Dog Soldiers." The two critically acclaimed writers sat on a Black Mountain panel for $5,000 apiece, well short of the fees they could command elsewhere. Morrison came on the cheap because she knew Soyinka.

"They grumblingly agree to some low amount because they're friends of ours," Harter said.

"I pay (speakers) as little as I can get away with paying them," Wiley joked, noting that Black Mountain has a tight budget. "We try not to go into five figures."

Black Mountain's yearly budget of about $1 million covers programs and pay for four staff members, including Harter and Wiley. Most of that money comes from private donors and other sources outside the university, Harter said.

Harter spends much of her time wooing donors, so the skills she built in her previous job as UNLV's president have benefited Black Mountain.

"She knows everybody in this town," Wiley said of Harter.

Wiley, who calls himself the institute's "literary executive," spends much of his time ruminating about programs such as Black Mountain's speaker series.

If the institute is to be successful, he said, its leaders need to be ambitious - but not overly so. A small but important example: The institute booked UNLV's 2,000-seat Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall for the Morrison talk but settled on cozier facilities for other events.

"We choose our venues so we're not embarrassed by the turnout," Wiley said.

Harter and Wiley believe Las Vegas should get some credit for Black Mountain's progress. In building the institute, Harter said, they haven't faced the hemming and hawing that would likely take place in East Coast cities already saturated with think tanks.

"It's an entrepreneurial town," Wiley said. "People want things to happen fast here."

Harter sought out Brownley this year hoping to chat with the Atlanta professor about her work at Emory.

"Frankly, before I talked to (Harter) I looked at the Web site, and when she told me they'd only been open for a year, I was shocked," Brownley said. "They have accomplished so much."

In Brownley's mind, Las Vegas is a place where everything is "larger than life." Though Black Mountain is young, she says, the institute and the idea behind it are no different from the city in which they were born.

"This is dazzling," Brownley said. "This is striking. This could make a real difference."