Monday, November 11, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Keep watching the skies

The bounds of academic inquiry should not be limited by the prejudices of the mob, of course. Packing a wound with bread mold sounded absurd till Fleming demonstrated the usefulness of penicillin.

But it's not necessarily an assault on the freedom of private inquiry to point out that -- when it comes to the allocation of limited resources at a tax-funded university -- UNLV's patron taxpayers expect the school's main focus to be the provision of undergraduates with traditional, well-established skills and knowledge likely to have some pragmatic application in their post-graduate careers.

Furthermore, while it would be arrogant to pretend there remain no "unexplained phenomena," a few years away from the turnip truck are sufficient to convince most of us that the vast majority of folks who make their livings touting psychic phenomena and the like are, in fact, frauds, bunko hucksters and glorified carny pitchmen.

What is a university to do, then, when a donor like real estate developer Robert Bigelow pledges $3.7 million to create and support a Consciousness Studies program, with the proviso that chairs be endowed for "afterlife expert" Ray Moody (best-selling author of the book "Life After Life") and the likes of Charles Tart, a purported expert on extrasensory perception, clairvoyance and telepathy?

What the university did, back in 1997, was declare the enterprise "definitely a prize for UNLV," making room for the department by evicting more established departments like -- oh, English Composition -- to makeshift trailers set up in the parking lot.

Alas, no more. Mr. Moody's contract having expired -- along with the run of Scully and Mulder on Fox Television's "X Files," coincidentally enough -- UNLV has quietly announced that the school's Consciousness Studies program has, well ... crossed over. Mr. Bigelow "decided, and the university agreed, that he would just as soon direct the funds ... to scholarships instead," said a UNLV spokesman.

The briefest moment of silence -- accompanied by the mournful wail of the theremin -- will suffice for the interment of UNLV's Department of Extrasensory Perception.