The Straw Inside the Man

On a rainy day in North Carolina, nothing outside is comfortable. Duke turns from gothic wonderland to soppy everglade, making a walk across campus worse than that moment after getting out of the shower, before the haven of a dry towel. Just off the quad, in a building tucked in a concealed corner beneath the glow of the Duke Chapel, Larry Moneta's office offers a bit more shelter from the storm. In a college of steel-eyed death, here is Dylan's man fighting to be warm.Just off the quad, in a building tucked in a concealed corner beneath the glow of the Duke Chapel, Larry Moneta's office offers a bit more shelter from the storm. In a college of steel-eyed death, here is Dylan's man fighting to be warm.

Just a solid oomph of the shoulder blade nudges open a door that reads, "Student Affairs: Office of the Vice President," but might as well encase a meat locker, unveiling catalog-fresh office products and alarmingly hip kitsch in a honey-mustard waiting room, empty save for a student secretary engrossed in a game of Snood. Around a few more corners and past a few more conference rooms, past a now refreshing mini-waterfall sitting atop a locked file cabinet and surely from the Sharper Image's Sound Soothers collection, and just a bit beyond a round coffee table that displays student publications stacked better than the Egyptian pyramids and a few business cards for the interior designer of this unnatural rest stop, stands another door, closed, as usual.

Inside, Moneta is drowned in e-mails, his fatherly reading glasses and perfect posture helping him try to reconnect after a "relatively good day" that saw him take in a presentation on "The New Standard in Alcohol Education" and interview administrative candidates behind that closed door, before and after two separate lunch dates. There's a little Boston in his matter-of-fact voice, a trace of the days when he started to first enjoy himself, as an anti-Vietnam War campus leader at the University of Massachussetts. Even though he's on his way out of the office, there's no sense of urgency in the way he speaks.

After all, being overextended is his biggest vice. Not a big fan of beer and certainly not a smoker with speech clear enough to do ads for that "AlcoholEdu" start-up, Moneta has his own "evil habit of taking on too many things. It's an occupational hazard and a personal hazard on my part," he says, "rarely saying 'no.'"

When offered the head college-life post at Duke almost two and a half years ago, he'd have to indulge the iniquity again, jumping from a lower position at Penn to one of the most enticing jobs in a student-life administrators community that is growing almost as steadily as students' distaste for it. After 30 years and over a dozen schools, Moneta had somehow become the self-proclaimed anarchist of the student affairs profession. Moneta's equivalent at Stanford described his reputation in the field as one based on his "creative vision" for blowing up the existing paradigm and forming a new one, but changes in dorms here and in a dining hall there had really built his record.

And doesn't he know it? "I am not a refinement person," he insists with his sharply slanted, small eyes dead ahead, but they might as well be rolled to the back of his sockets, he's said this so many times by now. He has a bag of lines, newspaper quotes--"I'm not trying to re-create a 1940s model of campus life," "I'm not naïve," "Students need to maximize their potential"--exuding enough politico atmosphere to keep his cynicism, his eye roll, in check.

But he's good at it. Moneta is so full of self-assurance that it's more charming than off-putting. His pristine presentation--and his supreme command of it--makes you wonder how anyone could have ever given him orders before he became his own boss at Duke. "I think as I got more into college and beyond, running my own show became more important to me," he says. "Part of that is being exposed to others, and at some point you say, 'I don't really want to work for anybody anymore. I want to do it myself.' I think increasingly I sought positions of higher authority where I could have more control and more opportunity to implement my own ideas rather than having to sell them to somebody else."

Before he could get ahead of himself, though, Moneta was sold a heap of old problems. With Duke's "strategic plan" already calling for vast residential and social life changes on campus, he was made the head juror without ever having been in the deliberation room, bearing the bad news of--and the brunt of the backlash from--a bed shortage for upperclassmen; a decrease in parking from a construction project to create living space for those upperclassmen; and, with the most cacophonous thrust of what one junior called "the administrative hammer of insanity," a crackdown on nightlife that saw fraternities driven off that main, soggy quad, kegs roll back into the once-friendly Budweiser trucks and Duke's biggest on-campus bar go under.

The new boss was taking control of fourteen different student life departments, leaving him easily and massively blamable--and often for things he hadn't done. Columnists for The Chronicle in particular enjoyed finding a face to condemn, even if it was for those projects he's inherited, hasn't yet finished or simply never had anything to do with: "Larry, thanks for everything: The construction at 7 a.m., an ugly WEL, Subway three months later, the debacle of the student village and the astounding success of the independent corridor. The only job left for you to screw up around here is the Durham police chief."

Moneta, in fact, had fast-tracked the completion of that independent corridor on Main West Campus, and the rest of the complaints weren't even in his purview anymore; he'd even decentralized many of Duke's student service areas, hiring a roster of subordinates to transform the Division of Student Affairs and give himself time for broader perspective. At a school where the biomedical engineers go from their eight problem sets to their eight-person tents so they can snag a basketball ticket, and where the country's future economists switch conversation topics from how hard their mid-term was to how "phat" last night's frat party was at the drop of mom and dad's dime, Moneta arrived at Duke knowing he wanted to stick to his oft-pronounced leadership motto: "Comfort the disturbed, disturb the comfortable."

Still, after he manages the career advising and psychological counseling for "the disturbed," it's not as if he's automatically putting up his dukes to the rest--those already comfortably rooted in what he calls "a monolithic form of student engagement." He understands the Duke of old--the pre-Moneta era--but, he insists, "I'm not going to cater to it. There's part that I don't agree with. The 'work hard-play hard,' which bifurcates the two, I don't support. My goal is that people really feel like they can work hard and play hard at the same time."

When he was a freshman at UMass, Moneta found himself on a couch drinking cider and eating cheese in his freshman commons room with presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, an experience that more than 30 years later elicits from him a "neat" and inspiration for his fifty-one-year-old self to push Duke in embracing more speakers than frat parties, more bowling alleys than boozing hours and more community interaction than forced isolation. His goal is to "force you--'force' isn't a good word--but to sort of encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and be exposed to things you might not have considered."

And no matter how much "catching shit" from the purist, comfortable students that provokes, he is compelled to push the norms precisely because he had such a defining experience at college himself, and it seems that Moneta's only redemption from his overflowing Fil-O-Fax is seeing a hint of the maturation he went through on the faces of kids now the age of his own.

And at some level he is V-neck sweaters, bifocals and all probably the closest thing the students have to a parent at Duke. But even if the line for cider and cheese with him wouldn't be around the block (let alone out the door), rather than be the abusive father, Moneta still wants desperately to be the cool uncle, one who signs his e-mails "L" and one with lots of money to spend.

"If I tell you this is how you're going to behave and you have no other choice, that'd be pretty parental," he says. "Or I could say, 'You've got a misguided belief that your only options are to go A to B to C to D to E. Then let me tell you something: You could actually go from A to F, and F to J, and J back to K. It's your call if you want to do it, but there are other ways that you could live your life.' And if all I do is enhance your exposure to alternatives, I'll stay the hell out of your way so you can make your decision."

If his work the last few months has been any indication, Moneta might make that exposure even more extreme than his collared shirts and, one hopes, less complicated than a jumbled alphabet. A still vague concept for renovating the Bryan Center (which he frequently likens to an airport), Flowers and the West Union Buildings and Page Auditorium into a massive student "Village" has been in the works since he brusquely shut down almost all development in the area shortly after his arrival at the school. His plan from then on was to envision the ideal "Village" (that's the name, alright, and don't forget the quotation marks) for a campus life beyond that "old fraternity crowd," and, shockingly, without the buildings themselves, making it even more amazing to think that Moneta considered himself a "follower" in high school.

And while he e-mails back the consulting firm for the project, he marvels about having created a metaphor for a discussion of the expanded ideal, even if the four buildings remain. As for what goes inside, Moneta sent out a survey to the student body looking for preferred alternatives, common spaces and favorite jeans-and-sweatshirt stores. But the final say is most certainly his, because he has an orientation toward the future, damnit, and he doesn't see the students having "Village" vision--they might just want one big rock climbing wall, he offers.

Outside the confines of Durham, student-life personnel around the country are, like Moneta, trying to match Duke at broadening students' horizons. The new approach abandons the in loco parentis motto of old, preferring to expand upon several fresh, futuristic options rather than keep watch of a single old, established, traditional one. "Our concerns about the health and safety of students may lead us to have a different perspective on some issues, like alcohol consumption, than some undergraduate students have," says Janet Dickerson, Moneta's predecessor at Duke, now at Princeton. "If there are trends in student life, I would say they are directed toward seeing students as assets, and seeing our role as giving students agency to make good decisions on their own."

Indeed, the culture of these administrators seems decidedly plastic-surgery-smile cheery, with Moneta and Dickerson only two of 8,000 members within the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), a group whose trademarks of memo-writing enthusiasm, board-of-director-election intensity and members-only insurance benefits resemble those of a pre-economic downturn media corporation. Even if the lingo of these student-life junkies emphasizes phrases like "Who are the Key Players and Stakeholders?" and "Identify the Issues," the most common question in their rule book is somehow the most confusing for them: "What is the Communication Plan?"

Moneta by now knows better than anyone that communication can't be as precise or consistent as his golf swing at the Washington Duke, where he likes to play the front nine before heading to the office in the morning. When he had protesting the war in Vietnam a bit higher on his list than not being able to drink in his dorm room, he thought UMass' dean of students was "the most repressive, rule-bound dictator ever." Sure, he's great friends with the tyrant these days, but he wasn't then.

Today, the scholarship surrounding the student affairs profession advocates making personal contacts with students as part of the communication plan. Moneta strives to communicate that students should take the college years to grow, particularly through challenges of the "plus-one" variety--that's scientific, he says, for one more set of options, one more step out of the comfort zone, one more step to the "future."

But pushing students to grow is fraught with difficulties, and more often than seeing them grow he hears of students call the "Village" a debacle and blame him for "the systematic elimination of any fun on campus."

When he stepped out of his office and came back to the school at nine o'clock at night to meet the voices with his own in a town meeting early this month, Moneta was by himself at the front of a lecture hall before a few dozen very concerned students. That morning, he wasn't even sure anyone would show up, but when barking frat boys were pleading for a return to the old Duke, he started passing off the scorching questions to his administrative team and two Durham police officers in the back of the room.

When he answered for himself, his bag of future-oriented, NASPA-tuned lines couldn't even save him; "We're struggling to find common ground here" was what he came up with, and the half hour he wanted to save for solutions rather than complaints ended up as nothing more than an unproductive six-and-a-half minutes.

At his desk, Moneta can barely hear the rain tap just below his window, the logic of his unpopularity obvious in his mind, a mind so busy but locked tighter than his file cabinet. "My generation was the generation that essentially challenged every policy and practice on campus, and violated them all. We were the free sex, drugs..." he trails off after swinging a loafered foot effortlessly over his other knee. "So these are our kids. So we've bred the generation of kids for whom administration is not necessarily a good thing, the cynicism about American government and the lack of civic participation, which is on the decline. So that bothers me, not because it bothers me personally, but it bothers me because we can't afford to have generations of students graduate with pure cynicism about governance," says the former war protester.

The ones who embrace his governance--or at least who acknowledge it--are his favorites. He keeps Duke's student leaders, full of optimism and without even his subtle cynicism, close. Moneta reels these do-gooders off, literally counting every registered Blue Devil with whom he considers himself friends. And he promises that he checks his own e-mail. And anyone's free to come and meet with him, he advertises. And he... walks around the Bryan Center, er, the airport. But now he's sniffing, searching for more to promote, and then suddenly shifting back to an administrator's answer, back to the bag of tricks.

But what about out in the rain, on the quad?

"Well I've never seen the guy, but all I know is parties suck and my room sucks, so I'm not a fan," spits another junior waiting for the bus. "Clear enough?"

"There is not one good thing about that man," a sophomore proclaims, with a venom expressed in some form by many students, rummaging this way and that, never knowing where their long lost uncle sits--and it's only a couple hundred feet away.

Moneta pauses when he hears that slam, sinking his chin, gently raising his eyebrows and rubbing the rim of his glasses between his fingers. "Well," he says faintly, and then--deflated--tries, "I don't know how to answer that." But he bucks up. "I do believe that that's just immature lemmingism. If the only place you have to draw conclusions is from The Chronicle, then you can draw simplistic conclusions. The Chronicle has me controlling the weather when it rains here. What control do I have over that?" He's on one of his rulebook rolls now, the pitch increasing in his voice. "I typically don't put any energy into worrying about my public relations image. My own experience has been that there's no value in protesting."

He gathers himself to say, "You know, I've got a tip for my staff: 'I'm okay. If I've got to be the bad guy, and you guys come across as the good guys, that's okay with me.'

"Long ago, I accepted the adage, 'It's amazing what you can get done when you don't worry about who takes credit for it,'" he manages, quoting legendary House Speaker Sam Rayburn and number nine on Col. Henry W. "Kodak" Horton's "Thirteen Traits of Effective Leaders," a set of guidelines not on his office shelves. "I... you know... uuhh... I just don't... I don't worry about it." His perfect posture breaks just as his perfect English had--probably for the first time in a while. "Maybe I should. I don't know."