With college professors and free speech in the news locally and nationally, I feel compelled to comment on a related issue regarding suspicious practices at UNLV. Not a case involving a professor being persecuted for expressing himself, but for one esteemed individual's nonpresence on campus.
If you were to flip through the November/December 2004 issue of Poets and Writers, the most popular publication for American scribes both established and aspiring, you would eventually come across an advertisement for the International Master's of Fine Arts Degree program (MFA) at UNLV. It points out the aspects that make the program uniquely "international" (a translation requirement, a semester abroad in a non-English-speaking country) and it lists the faculty, alphabetically, to imply equality, I assume. The permanent faculty at UNLV is listed as: Aliki Barnstone, Dave Hickey, Claudia Keelan, Wole Soyinka, Douglas Unger and Richard Wiley. It is that fourth name that concerns me.
Wole Soyinka is best known as that rarity of rarities, a winner of the Nobel Prize. And based on UNLV's advertisement, you would gather that Soyinka teaches in the MFA program at the university, wouldn't you?
Well, I'm in my third year in the program and I've seen the eminent Mr. Soyinka all of four times, and only one of those times was in a classroom. And unlike the other talented members of UNLV's permanent staff, Mr. Soyinka doesn't actually teach any classes at UNLV. Not a one.
Now, the rest of the faculty may not be Nobel Laureates but their résumés are certainly impressive: Wiley has won the Pen/Faulkner award, Unger was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Hickey is a public intellectual/social critic who's published in half the magazines in America, Keelan is a multiple prize-winning poet and Barnstone is a noted poet and the daughter of acclaimed poet and translator Willis Barnstone. Yet I actually see them, all of these accomplished individuals, on a regular basis. They greet each incoming class of MFAs. They hold regular office hours. They teach multiple classes per semester, to graduate students and undergraduates. But Soyinka, the best-known name on UNLV's roster, collects a check from the university, is given an office on the university's campus, yet he does no actual work for the university. Or does he?
He may not teach classes (while the grad students that UNLV's advertisements target teach two classes a semester at a wage equivalent to a temp secretary's) but surely he's earning his position somehow. Right?
Well, despite the fact that in my almost three years at the university he's given exactly one public lecture, a supposedly annual "Nobel Laureate Address," I can only assume that his purpose at UNLV is that of a hood ornament—to imply prestige, even if his presence at the university is, well, a nonpresence. This becomes all the more egregious an example of academic deception when you take into account Soyinka's own claims in the September 13, 2000, edition of the Review-Journal, in which the Nigerian author is quoted as saying, "All I know is I'm going to be doing what I'm very much accustomed to doing, being there for students."
Soyinka isn't here to help students or teach classes. He does neither. He's here in name only. What his presence does accomplish is this—it attracts the accolades of the intelligentsia and gives UNLV some much-needed literary cred (the university hasn't exactly produced a who's-who list of published authors) and, more importantly, Soyinka is surely viewed as a feather in the cap of supporters of UNLV's cultural exploits, supporters like Mandalay Resort Group president and arts-loving philanthropist Glenn Schaeffer, who donated $2 million to fund the creation of Soyinka's position five years ago.
The actual title of that job, by the way, according to the university website, is "endowed chair of creative writing in UNLV's International Institute of Modern Letters," a title so buried in Orwellian quasi-language that it reeks of illegitimacy. And this same website entices both MFA and Ph.D. candidates to enroll at UNLV under the auspices that Soyinka is a faculty member. Quoting from the website, http://liberalarts.unlv.edu/English/mfa/phdcreat.html, "The creative writing faculty includes noted poets Aliki Barnstone and Claudia Keelan, MacArthur award-winning critic and essayist Dave Hickey, celebrated novelists Douglas Unger and Richard Wiley and the Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Wole Soyinka."
To advertise Soyinka alongside the other permanent faculty at UNLV on the university website, as well as in a paid advertisement in a nationally distributed publication, is flat-out misleading; a lie that UNLV, and Soyinka himself, should be held accountable for.