Before Toni Morrison even took the stage at UNLV's Artemus W. Ham Concert Hall on April 6, her lecture was a great success. In the eyes, that is, of Las Vegas' tragic minority, its scholars and culturists. For not only is Morrison the sole American Nobel laureate who still possesses the breath to give a lecture, but she will no doubt be canonized as one of the 20th century's greatest writers, and thus leave a trail of prestige in every hall she passes through.
And so even if Morrison was not to prove to be as magical or moving of a lecturer as she is a writer—which is exactly what happened—it mattered little to those who, in the audience that Thursday night, celebrated her mere presence: the artists, such as Wole Soyinka and Russell Banks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and the scholars, such as Harriet Mayor Fulbright and UNLV's hard-working faculty. Yes, Morrison's presence alone was monumental. Especially for UNLV's president, Carol Harter, and the incipient organization which put on Morrison's lecture as a prelude to the big things it hopes to engender—the Black Mountain Institute, the latest endeavor to create, attract and foster prominent intellectual creativity in Southern Nevada.
Bringing in a venerable and world-renowned novelist like Toni Morrison, who has spent most of her life in both the back and front of classrooms, was a providential way for the Black Mountain Institute to lay down its groundwork as a think tank fueled and driven not by journalists and politicians, as most American think tanks are, but rather by artists and scholars.
It's a project that has Carol Harter excited—excited enough to redirect to the institute's mission the sweat and enthusiasm she undoubtedly lent to the president's office over the past 11 years—and it's a project bound by two strands: to provide refuge to writers silenced and persecuted in their respective homelands, in conjunction with the North American Network of Cities of Asylum; and to house writers of international reputation to argue world issues through both the written and spoken word, under the titular "Forum on Contemporary Cultures." As soon as President Harter steps down from her office this summer, she will become executive director of the Black Mountain Institute, which just received its christening in March from the Board of Regents and which will harvest $268,500 from the state over the next three years; and in her position with the literary think tank, Harter will strive to make the most out of her talents as a fund-raiser. (And the BMI is hoping she'll do well, for it is depending on fund-raisers, external from the university, to sustain itself.)
President Harter, in fact, was instrumental in bringing BMI to fruition. According to Richard Wiley, the institute's president and himself an acclaimed novelist, Harter got together with a man with the means to make things happen, Glenn Schaeffer, the former CEO of Mandalay Bay Resort Group who founded the International Institute of Modern Letters in Las Vegas at the turn of the millennium, and they spoke of their shared idea to evolve the IIML. They talked of bringing in fellows and guest lecturers—essayists, poets, novelists, playwrights—to UNLV, where they could have the time and space to write and discuss social issues pressing upon the world today.
But the one who in reality made this particular lecture on April 6 happen was Beverly Rogers, the philanthropic wife of university chancellor and local plutocrat Jim Rogers, who is known to have been the one to have forced President Harter into her announced resignation earlier this year from the office she has so embraced. Regardless, Beverly Rogers underwrote the event, and to her President Harter gave an ironic thank you during Toni Morrison's introduction on Thursday evening, for everyone in this country knows that money (not art nor academics; but money) makes the world go round.
In any case, there was no better way to introduce the Black Mountain Institute than to have Toni Morrison come to Ham Hall. And moreover, it was guaranteed to be a special event for President Harter, a Faulkner scholar and former English teacher, because Morrison is an avatar of those concentric circles that have surrounded Carol Harter for her entire adult life: literature, academia and feminine empowerment.
Yes, the lecture, a free event, was a success before it even started, and not just because the fund-raiser dinner party preceding Morrison's 20-minute address hosted some 150 attendees, with tables costing $5,000 each. Its tickets had been exhausted less than a week after they became available. "People walked away from the ticket booth disappointed," said Wiley. "That shows you the thirst for literary culture we have here." And on the faces of the 1,300 people who showed up for the April 6 lecture—many of whom were young black women—the triumph of seeing an icon walk to the rostrum in the flesh was undeniable.
Yet, the pre-eminent question is: a success of what significance? That is, for all the sweat and enthusiasm poured into the lecture, and the Black Mountain Institute in general, and other endeavors like it, and for all the intellectual and creative words to have come out of them, little has changed in either the culture or the dynamics of Las Vegas, where more than 1,300 people file in to a single nightclub any given weekend night. And it's no secret that Las Vegas—or as Morrison put it during her lecture, "the essence of the new world"—places importance on neither its artists nor its scholars, who have thus done little to change the climate of the city, or affect the social dilemmas over which the Black Mountain Institute seeks to have discourse. "Ours is an international endeavor," says Wiley. "And it's not politicians but artists who will solve problems." But the evidence is that it's been the Rogerses and the Glen Schaffers and even the George Bushes who have made things happen. So the burdening question for Wiley, Harter and the rest of the Black Mountain Institute's board is that same question which has been a calvary for all of the organization's American predecessors: So what?
That is, for all of the Black Mountain Institute's potential and ideal successes, as great or even greater than the Morrison lecture, how will it move this town or its people along even an inch?
Harter has stated that the Black Mountain Institute can one day lend itself to formal curriculum and special certificate or degree programs. And further, the institute, unlike other think tanks, will not bear esoteric fruits, but rather, documents and discourse not only translatable to common folk but also effective in raising consciousness from Las Vegas to every corner of the world.
But, of course, only time will tell.