He’ll leave a legacy of learning

Leila Navidi

Jeffrey Moskow, a professor at UNLV, has set aside $1 million to endow an annual speaker series.

By Charlotte Hsu (contact)

Thursday, Oct. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

When you discover you might have only a few months or years left to live, you begin thinking about what you’d like to leave behind in this world. You wonder what gifts, what lessons, you will pass on to generations to come.

For UNLV instructor Jeffrey Moskow, finding an answer didn’t take long.

After being diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer about a year ago, he set aside $1 million to endow an annual speaker series for UNLV’s College of Business that focuses on current events, the topic of a class he has taught for five years.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and TV critic Alessandra Stanley are scheduled to kick off the series today at the university, talking to staff, faculty members and students about issues that could include the media’s influence on the presidential race. The event is not open to the public.

“I didn’t want a name on a building,” said Moskow, 60. “That, to me, didn’t satisfy anything. If I could have people that would get students engaged, that meant a lot more to me.”

“I never married, didn’t have any kids, so I wanted something that would be around after I was,” he said. “And this was something that I feel strongly about — I love teaching current events.”

Moskow sees his donation as a way to share with young people the passion for news he inherited from his parents, whom he remembers as political junkies.

When he was a boy in West Los Angeles, his household was filled with newspapers and magazines. His mother and father, who ran an upholstery store, loved debating the events of the day.

In class, Moskow tells students that following the news is more than a hobby. He retired three years ago from his job as general manager of the Nevada branch of a national security company and said he was able to do so because of information he found in Forbes Magazine.

While perusing the publication’s list of best small businesses about 15 years ago, he learned of the Las Vegas company Shuffle Master, which had, he said, a monopoly on casino shuffle machines.

“I bought into that ... when it was first getting started, and made a whole lot of money,” said Moskow, who earned an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The lesson is simple: Keeping up to date on what’s happening in the world is key to making wise investments. And in Moskow’s eyes, learning how to manage money is particularly important for today’s students.

“I give the same speech the first day of class every time, that theirs is probably the first generation that realistically can’t count on Social Security,” Moskow said. “They’re not going to be able to count on pensions from the companies they work for. Their sole source of retirement is how well they handle their 401(k) or the IRA fund they set up.”

He hopes the events he is sponsoring will spark intellectual debate, encouraging students to share their views on current events, as he does in class.

UNLV College of Business Dean Paul Jarley said the speaker series will help young people understand “the relationship between business and wider society.”

“We need to recognize that business impacts the world and the world impacts business,” he said.

It’s these types of lessons that Moskow’s parents, Morris and Sylvia, shared with him when he was a boy. So it’s fitting that he named the speaker series after them.

After all, in years to come, when prominent figures visit UNLV to discuss the events of the day, their conversations might sound a lot like the ones Moskow and his parents had many years ago at home in West Los Angeles.