Sunday, February 09, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

NEVADAN AT WORK: BILL THOMPSON -- Professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Equal-opportunity gaming critic derives opinions from study

University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor Bill Thompson pays the bills with his teaching assignments, but has also become a prominent gaming industry researcher and radio editorialist. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor Bill Thompson established himself as a casino expert the old-fashioned way: he worked at it.

He's an equal-opportunity critic for the industry, researching, teaching, commenting on and writing about it for nearly a quarter of a century.

Visiting his office is like looking through a window of his mind. It's a mad flurry of academic studies, papers prepared by students and curios from a varied past. Patterns are hard to find. A visitors' eye is drawn to a picture of Thompson and his wife with former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, even though he describes himself as a conservative who supports President Bush.

Thompson could be defined by his quirks. For example, marching to a definitely different drummer, he considers Warren G. Harding one of the greatest U.S. presidents.

Harding, he points out, went to Alabama in 1921 and proposed integration, pardoned Eugene V. Debs after Woodrow Wilson threw him in jail, created the Bureau of the Budget after Wilson vetoed it and convened the first world disarmament conference. Most of all, "when people around him were found to be crooked, he took it personally and died. We haven't seen that kind of responsibility in a very long time."

Thompson pays the bills with his teaching assignments, but his work is much more focused on gaming industry research and editorializing. In recent years, he has had 25 commentaries on KNPR-FM (89.5) and 30 on the history news network.

The author of eight books on gaming, he also writes studies on gaming, including papers on the social consequences of gambling such as the one he has one under way on Las Vegas in collaboration with Keith Schwer, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Center for Business and Economic Research.

Question: Do you have contracts with the industry that compromise your credibility?

Answer: I have, at the moment, only an expert witness retainer. I don't work for the Center, although I have done work on two or three contracts. I have been retained by Indian tribes in eight states for negotiations about whether casino gambling should be allowed. It doesn't cause a problem. I offer opinion to a wide variety of groups, those opposed to gaming and those who support it. But they get my opinion, not theirs. And you don't have to be two-faced to say some gaming is good and some is bad.

Question: What makes you an expert on the gaming industry?

Answer: I've studied it for 23 years. I wrote the Encyclopedia of Gaming in America, seven other published books and well over 200 articles including 50 academic studies. Anyhow, Jane Pauley called me a gaming expert on the "Today" show, so I guess I am. Often I feel it's a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. I don't claim to know everything. I'm a generalist in the realm of gambling studies.

Question: How did you get into gaming studies?

Answer: When you teach at academic Siberia, you might as well study polar bears. When I came in 1980, I started reading Nevada history and politics. One thing I learned early was that nobody here was studying gambling in a comprehensive way. So I took the broad view and found I was the only person doing it here. Bill Eadington was doing it in Reno. He put on conferences and I started presenting papers in 1984. Eadington's been very helpful because he does international conferences. I did a sabbatical in Europe 1986-87 and Eadington opened doors. They don't have a casino city. That made it harder. I drove 45,000 miles in just that year.

Question: What have you liked most about your career?

Answer: Change, the opportunity to be free to study anything. I like the freedom of the university and I like being at UNLV because it's exciting, I can be involved in academic fights. Maybe people aren't totally sophisticated here, but we can laugh at the snobs. And UNLV has grown from being a remote outpost to being in the mainstream of American academia.

Question: What's the best advice you ever got?

Answer: My Missouri State adviser said get the hell out of Southwest Missouri (where I was teaching) and start your Ph.D. Had I stayed as a person with a master's degree at a state college, all sorts of forces would have tugged me away from finishing my education. I could have gotten sucked into the idea of getting tenure at Southwest Missouri State College and that really was Siberia.

Question: What is the worst advice you ever got?

Answer: To go to law school. That was fatherly. He was a lawyer and wanted me to be one. It wasn't my personality. Intellectually, I was ready, but I couldn't be myself while here I can be me even though there's a level of tension that goes with it. I love discovering issues to research that people give a damn about.

Question: What is the biggest problem for the gaming industry?

Answer: For Las Vegas, it's the terrorism war. I'm in no way against George Bush. Nonetheless, war disrupts tourism. Terrorism disrupts tourism. People have to feel comfortable to vacation. Casinos started in Europe. Why didn't they develop there, but they did here? We're remote and we're isolated from international conflict and we're in the middle of a continent that's at peace. In Europe, casinos just become places locals go to.

Compulsive gambling is a long-run problem. It's going to be with us and we have to deal with it. I've devoted a lot of research to it. For Nevada, we have to constantly make sure we can differentiate our product. Gambling is everywhere, but we have to make sure we have distinct tourism offerings.

Question: What is the biggest opportunity?

Answer: Call it the age-lump factor. Every day, 10,000 Americans turn 50 years old. A lot of these people are children of the '60s who've never been exposed to gambling tourism. In the 1960s, they looked at gambling as decadent and everything that violated their value structures. Now, fortunately, they've gotten over it. And this is one thing they didn't indulge in at all. God knows they tried sex, drugs and living out of back packs. And now, this will be a new experience and for some it will take.