It's a busy Friday afternoon, and Doug Unger stands in his office, pulling files from a box at a steady pace.
"The Turkey War was a wrong turn in Leaving the Land, and I came back to the idea later," he says, flipping through files in rapid succession. The files are from The Turkey War, his only book for which all the notes and drafts fit in a single, albeit fairly large, box. "I did a full first draft, then a second, a third, an edited fourth draft — there were more, " he trails off.
"Working on a novel is the marathon of writing. It's like an ongoing construction project. It takes years."
He is in a hurry. In the next half hour, he will meet with a student who is considering enrolling in the English department's master of fine arts program. The next several weeks will bring a flurry of meetings with the admissions committee and sessions with current graduate students about to defend their theses.
Once the school year ends, it would seem this activity would die down, but not for Unger and many of the university's other faculty. Classes may let out, but for these professors, it's time to rev up the other half of their work — their creative pursuits.
As UNLV works to elevate its status as a research university, it's probably clear how that applies to professors in the science colleges. They must demonstrate their excellence through continuing research in labs and in the field. But when it comes to those laboring in the fine and liberal arts, the idea of research might seem a bit vague to outsiders.
Jeff Koep, dean of the College of Fine Arts, says his faculty is evaluated along the same criteria as professors in any other college — just replace the word "research" with "creative activity."
"The creative activity for our faculty is a mirror of what is thought of as traditional research," he says. "If you're a scientist, you do research on an aspect of science to show that you know your craft and you're continuing to work at it. If you're a singer, you perform. It's the same with acting, or filming a movie, or creating visual art."
And if you're a creative writer, well, you write. Unger, for example, is the author of four novels, including Leaving the Land, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
"You get very busy sometimes and it's hard to balance," he says. "But it's important to have active, established artists working with developing artists — it's how we all learn and grow."
In the Eye
of the Beholder?
For Chris Hudgins, chair of the English
department, the value of professors like
Unger who have been successful at creative
activity is immense. He believes the most
accomplished professors will bring in great
crops of students. "They're the ones we want
teaching our next generation of writers,"
he says. "Their excellence will have a huge
impact when they're teaching in classrooms."
Koep stresses that the faculty's accomplishments are as diverse as the crafts they are constantly honing. When professors win major awards or are hired for a prestigious job against a national pool of applicants, they prove they know what they are doing.
"And that brings recognition and value to the university," he says.
For the university's practicing artists, the emphasis is on producing quality work. But how is the quality of an artistic endeavor measured?
Though each professor's work is unique, there's the prestige factor. Is the gallery, publisher, or theater company that exhibits or accepts the work or artist well-known, Hudgins and Koep ask. Reviews are another strong indicator. Was the professor's work noticed by a major publication? Did the reviewer says something positive?
When judging quality, Koep also considers the amount of time that went into the work. "It might take two years to turn out a book, and then we'll look at the publisher, and how many copies were printed," he says. "Based on that we can say, 'This is good, it accounts for two or three years' worth of work.'"
A perfect example, Hudgins says, is professor Richard Wiley's newest book, Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show. It was one of the first to be published in the new Michener Series at the University of Texas Press, and has already received a quality review in Publisher's Weekly, a leading trade publication for booksellers, publishing companies, and librarians.
Getting noticed does more than bring a professor esteem. It also heightens the department's reputation. In the end, it boils down to bringing in students. "And students want to go where the good faculty is," Koep says.
Wooing Students
Walking into a classroom without the
cachet that comes from playing would be
daunting to jazz bassist Tom Warrington.
"I wouldn't want to learn to do heart surgery
from a doctor who never operated,"
he says.
Warrington splits his time each week between teaching in Las Vegas and performing professionally in Los Angeles. Most of his live gigs are in Los Angeles, and Warrington said from time to time his students make a trip to California to hear a live performance. It's an experience that generally leaves both Warrington and the student invigorated. "You have to practice what you preach," the music professor says. "Students want to respect the people they study with, they want to hear you play. It's important that you keep growing and learning as a professor — that you stay hungry for knowledge."
For recent UNLV music education graduate Nick Waters, who now teaches band and percussion at Foothill High School, the professors who had the biggest impact on him continually passed along lessons learned through their own creative activities.
"When we played a piece that originated in Mexico, or somewhere else in the world, it helped that Dean (Gronemeier, director of percussion and assistant dean of fine arts) could share his worldly knowledge when he was teaching the piece," Waters says. "Because he's traveled so much to play percussion, he could tell us about where the music came from, different cultures, all of those aspects of music that go beyond notes on paper."
Tony LaBounty, associate director of bands, has been one of Waters' biggest influences. LaBounty's creative activities include conducting music clinics and judging competitions throughout the country. "Because (LaBounty) has so much experience teaching, he's got a lot in his bag of tricks that he uses to teach us to be better teachers, and that's very important," Waters says.
Francisco Menendez, chair of the department of film, says as part of his advanced directing workshop, students get the opportunity to work with professional actors and professional scripts. The students also participate in workshops where they direct scenes, then receive critical feedback and editing help.
Universities generally take a one-manband approach to student filmmaking, Menendez says, but in UNLV's film program, students work together with professors to create films as a group.
"The idea is for students to get to work with me and other professors and artists-inresidence to create real films," he says. "They work on every aspect of the film — from directing to editing to all the technical things — with professionals, so they see how films are made and they participate in the process."
Glenn Casale, head of directing in the theatre department, says every aspect of his professional work outside the university is beneficial because it's experience he can bring back to the classroom. Continually working on productions outside of the university allows him to see what's evolving in the ever-changing theater and entertainment businesses.
"By going out and seeing what's evolving out there, I can bring all of that fresh information back to my students," he says.
Graduate students sometimes accompany Casale when he leaves the university to direct a new production. The students work on the productions as interns, which allows them to leave the university with a degree as well as credit as an intern on a New York or international production.
"These aren't small productions," he says. "Most of the productions I work on are big shows with budgets of $2 (million) to $12 million, so they are getting serious professional experience."
Balancing Acts
Striking a balance between creative activity
and time in the classroom hasn't been hard
for Warrington. He just has to be willing
to say no to some things or be prepared to work harder to make up for time he spends
on creative activities.
"I try not to take on other things during the school year, unless it's something I think will pay dividends for the school," he says. For Casale, finding that balance also has been a smooth process, and one that has benefited his students.
"I've been directing for 20 years, so when I took the job teaching, I made it clear to all of those people I'd been working with professionally that if they wanted me to direct, summer and winter break would be the times I was available," he says.
Of course, Casale does take the occasional directing job during the school year, and in those cases, his graduate students end up with internships.
Claudia Keelan, the director of creative writing for the English department and editor of Interim, the university's annual literary review, says she's gotten used to writing whenever she can, so much so that interruption and working on the fly have become part of her creative activity.
"I write in the car at stoplights a lot," she says with a smile. "Everyone thinks poets need a lot of solitude to work. If that was true, I'd never write anything."
And as creative activity encourages the university's professors to function as working artists, that creativity, in and of itself, can also benefit students. Unger says he was influenced by both the creative activity and the creative atmosphere his professors provided as he worked on his graduate degree.
Now he hopes to create the same environment for his own students.
"When I work with the grad students, I make it very one-on-one, and I try to make it a workshop where everyone is equal by sometimes handing out a sample of something I'm working on for the students to critique," Unger says. "It's something I learned from John Irving when I was a student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and I think it worked. I think artists, whether they are new to their craft or established, thrive in an atmosphere where everyone feels they can be creative together."
