Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta may not be planning a monorail for his "student village," but he hopes that by the end of the spring, he will have a plan for enhancing, renovating and expanding student space on West Campus with a price tag to take to architects.
He has hired a consulting firm, the Washington, D.C.-based Brailsford and Dunlavey, to come up with a plan for what he has called the student village - a series of buildings that provide the bulk of West Campus student space, including the Bryan Center, the West Union Building, the Flowers Building and Page Auditorium.
By April, Moneta hopes to have a program statement with a tentative budget and space allocation for the student village to present to the Board of Trustees at its May meeting.
Last week, the consulting firm's representatives met with students in focus groups to begin planning. Moneta said a school-wide survey will be distributed later this week for students to provide input on the future of campus student space.
"We're not going to design the space or lay it out, but merely suggest what could be appropriate and whether it would fit," said Heidi Kaplan, a program coordinator for Brailsford and Dunlavey.
The consulting firm also helped plan both the new indoor practice field in the Yoh Football Center and the Wilson Recreation Center.
"There have been a lot of people who have said, 'I don't know why we can't do it ourselves,'" said Zoila Airall, assistant vice president for campus life. "There are a lot of views and so many stakeholders in the process, we need someone to help us come up with a broad plan."
Moneta said that as the spring progresses, the steering committee and the planning firm will begin to make sense of the competing ideas and hopes for West Campus student space.
"Everyone's coming out of the woodwork saying they need to be in the village," Moneta said. "Part of the process is deciding who's going to be there and who's not going to be there."
When Moneta arrived on campus in 2001, the Board of Trustees gave him control over all student space on West Campus.
Moneta said that among the most important aspects will be retail space, including food and stores. Currently, many West Campus food vendors and several stores occupy space in the Bryan Center and West Union. Moneta has suggested the possibility of placing all the retail vendors in one location, or building a separate facility for stores on campus.
"Some of the meetings we've had with the University architect [John Pearce] have been very positive, very upbeat," said Jim Wulforst, director of dining services. "[Moneta's] challenged me to ask, 'What should be in the Bryan Center and what should be in West Union? Should we have fast food locations or a more conventional dining in one place?'"
Moneta has said the process is designed to consider as many options as possible from the outset and that no group's space will go untouched. Kaplan said her firm will consider several factors in assigning space estimates for groups, although she noted Moneta would make the final call.
"It's not the first time we've done this," she said. "We'll look at how many students are active in the group on campus, how many meetings they have every week. We have some guidelines for how much space to assign."
Moneta has suggested several possibilities for social space in the form of an expanded Bryan Center walkway as a piazza, a possible bowling alley or game room, and a student pub.
Clifford Davison, Duke Student Government vice president for facilities and athletics, said the village should emphasize social space, as the scheduled Perkins Library renovations will provide enough study space.
"[Moneta's] notion of a piazza or a plaza would be really great," said President Nan Keohane. "There are places like that at other universities I'm familiar with, preeminently Stanford, where people gather. I was back there over the holidays, and it reminded me of how much people just hang out there in ways that no one can just hang out on the Bryan Center walkway."
The Bryan Center, in particular, may be set for the greatest renovations. Completed in 1982, the center was designed as a University union to foster social, cultural and recreational programming and emerged from a report issued under former president Terry Sanford in 1971.
The village will also provide expansion space for Student Affairs priorities like the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life, the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture and the Career Center. With an increased interest in non-greek, non-alcoholic cultural programming, performance space will also likely be a key aspect of the renovated space.
Jesse Panuccio, president of the Duke University Union, who has argued for better spaces for arts at Duke, said the village should be highly functional in its layout and make sense in how it allocates space, but it should not deviate in style too much from the rest of campus. For example, he said he wanted to see The Great Hall remain as a place where staff, students and faculty interact on a daily basis.
"I feel very strongly that it should feel like Duke," he said. "It should be welcoming and it should not feel like a Starbucks or a mall."
The project, which could take five to 10 years, will be competing with several other changes that will transform student life at Duke, including a planned overhaul of Central Campus and even sooner additions to the McClendon Tower in the newly-built West-Edens Link. In addition, the impending American Tobacco project and continued growth in downtown Durham will likely bolster off-campus options for a student body that has increasingly moved off campus for aspects of its social life.
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