Duke hires new campus life leader. She’ll replace official who was at center of rap song dispute.
Mary Pat McMahon, a Tufts University’s dean of student affairs, will be the new vice provost/vice president for campus life at Duke University, the school announced Friday. She’ll replace the retiring Larry Moneta, who was at the center of a controversy a year ago over a campus coffee shop’s rap music.
McMahon will begin work July 8.
Moneta, who is retiring after 18 years as vice president for student affairs, objected to rap music that was playing when he stopped in the former Joe Van Gogh coffee shop on campus one morning in May 2018.
The song, Young Dolph’s “Get Paid,” includes the N-word and profanity. When Moneta complained about it, a young black woman who was working in the shop at the time was fired, along with a white coworker. The owner of the coffee shop later decided to close the campus business.
According to Duke Today, the campus online news site, McMahon has been dean of student affairs for Tufts’ Schools of Arts and Sciences and Engineering since 2014.
“I am delighted to welcome Mary Pat McMahon to Duke,” said Vincent E. Price, the university’s president, on the website. “Her leadership in every part of student affairs — from residential life to wellness to the important work of inclusion, identity and culture — will contribute to our goal of having the most vibrant and dynamic university community. Mary Pat will be a wise and enthusiastic partner for students and faculty, and I look forward to working with her.”
In her new role, Duke said, McMahon will have responsibility for residential and dining services, many student extracurricular organizations, the career center, student wellness services, parent and family programs and other student services.
Like other universities, Duke has had issues with minority students feeling unwelcome on campus. Shortly after the coffee shop incident, someone scrawled a racist epithet on a sign outside the university’s Center for Black Culture.
In January, Duke’s Office for Institutional Equity said it will review the “learning environment” at the school’s Masters of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics department after an administrator warned international students to strive always to speak English while in their main research building on campus and in “any other professional setting.” The students were Chinese.
McMahon said in the Duke Today story that she is “absolutely thrilled to be joining the Duke community.”
She holds a bachelor of arts in history from Yale and a master’s in the history of international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
She is married to Ken Templeton, a middle school English teacher. They have two children in elementary school and, according to the website, hope to camp in as many national parks as possible in the next five years.
This story was originally published April 12, 2019 at 5:03 PM.
