Saturday, May 31, 1997 | 11:09 a.m.
Three years into his tenure as president of the Community College of Southern Nevada, Richard Moore is still viewed as if through a haze.
Some see that horseman as Southern Nevada's own St. George, riding into town from Santa Monica, Calif., to slay our dragons.
Others see a dreaming Don Quixote, constantly tilting at windmills.
A few see him as Attila the Hun, pillaging and destroying a once-serene community.
But one thing is true: Richard Moore is a whirling dervish who creates a swirl of controversy wherever he goes.
By contrast, everything is crystal clear to Moore, who can track the entire school's comings and goings from his office's panoramic view on the Cheyenne Avenue campus.
On his wall hangs a blown-up aerial view of the city, a visual reminder of all that sandy land yet to be conquered.
On his desk is a hard hat labeled "Head Cowboy."
On his desk is a pen, ready to sign off on the lastest piece of expansion, a funding proposal for a new communications building.
On his way is Moore, off to approve the gutting of two classrooms to add windows.
The blue-suited administrator may not personally soil his hands, but a few decades in this business have given him a crash course in construction.
A builder at heart, Moore has been lured here by Nevada's affinity for the subject.
Even an infrastructure nightmare seems an opportunity to Moore: He heartily describes an earthquake that knocked out two-thirds of his Santa Monica campus, where he was president for 20 years.
"It was magnificent," he chortles. "A blessing. We got the campus built brand new -- $80 million. I never would have gotten that money.
"Outlook," instructs the 64-year-old. "It's how you look at things."
That outlook is what landed him the CCSN job over hundreds of applicants.
According to Chancellor Richard Jarvis, Moore was hired by the Board of Regents and entrusted with a two-pronged mandate: to raise the school's enrollment and its profile.
There is no doubt the swashbuckling Moore has conquered both tasks.
During his tenure, enrollment has jumped from 16,000 to 26,000, with predictions the school will top 50,000 soon after the turn of the century.
Moore has thrust CCSN into the spotlight with a publicist's knack, slapping on neon lights and blitzing the community with course catalogues, and landing his client the equivalent of a Vanity Fair profile -- the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
"He's a damn-the-torpedoes kind of guy," says Cram. "With him, it's 'it sounds good, let's do it.' You don't have to take a series of meetings, do lunch for about six months."
Dorothy Gallagher, a member of the Board of Regents, says the board has been pleased so far. "I'd like to clone him," she says. "I love his enthusiasm -- he has an idea a minute."
"I live in ideas. I like playing with ideas," admits Moore, who, like many executives, has a tendency to bombard his employees' e-mail boxes with his missives at 3 in the morning. "People only see maybe seven of the 200 you've been playing with this year."
Last fall, he made his priorities clear when, in a Newt Gingrich-like move, he handed out business guru Tom Peters' book "The Pursuit of Wow!" to everyone on staff: "Read this a little each night," he instructed them in a note. "You'll come up with new ideas every day."
"I'm trying to teach the organization that some chaos and movement and opposite direction might be rather interesting," says Moore.
While many staffers initially resisted his plan to offer mid-semester, four-week intensive classes, they were a popular success, drawing about 1,200 students, and will be expanded into future fall and spring semesters.
One of his favorite projects is Learning & Earning, a program that has "adopted" about 60 high-risk high school students and given them part-time jobs on campus, and branched out into 30 businesses.
Partnering with others is Moore's current pet project. "I'll be the partner of everybody, using everybody's properties, and save a heck of a lot of money," he says excitedly, pointing to his partnership with the Boys & Girls Club to provide afternoon day care for students, and his joint facility in Henderson that will be shared by the college and the Clark County School District.
"We use it in the night, they use it in the morning," explains Moore. "Sharing buildings -- that's never been done anywhere in America."
Moore is aware of the pitfalls of his own enthusiasm. "The problem with reading about good ideas in education is that I feel compelled in about 24 hours to go out and do it."
Sometimes, that can lead to disaster.
One of those included offering midnight classes. All the "rhetoric" of Las Vegas being a 24-hour town fooled him, Moore admits, and the 1 a.m. Security 101 class offered in a trial run last spring never found a market.
"If you sort out ideas as you go along, you'll sort out most of the good ones," says Moore. "You have to allow yourself to fall in love with not-so-very-good ideas."
If he can seem unwilling to let go of ideas, Cram defends that as the dreamer in him.
"I actually believe that Richard Moore is a perfect example of one person believing they can make a profound difference."
And no cause is too small for Moore to tackle.
For example, last fall, he dropped the "of" from the reincarnated "Community College Southern Nevada" for a hipper marketing sound, and recently upped the size of the word "Community" on his letterhead, after trolling the halls and finding that it was the students' shorthand for the school.
But Moore's real change comes not with tinkering with words, but redefining them completely.
Under Moore's leadership, students are now referred to as "customers," classes are now the "product," and scheduling is making the product "accessible."
In other words, it is business as usual for CCSN -- and that itself is unusual in academia.
"Richard Moore is one of the most unbureaucratic bureaucrats I've ever known," says Cram. "He understands the client. That's tough for some because bureaucracies are not known for service philosophy. He just operates from a different premise."
That premise includes removing academic advisers from their offices and moving them into the college's lobby. "We run this like a hotel," says Moore, proudly gazing down at his minions from a balcony.
But some academics cringe at the thought of running the college like a Hilton.
"He runs this place like it's a private enterprise, but we have to answer to the people of Nevada," says foreign language Professor Elfie Manning. "If he wants to go have his own company, fine.
"I'm not against change," she adds, "but the changes are too fast, they are not thought through."
"He tries to create the image that he's democratic and even-handed," says English teacher John Esperian. "But he's a control guy. He's very autocratic."
At Moore's three-year contract renewal last winter, the 11-member Board of Regents warned him he needed to work on relationships and communication with his faculty.
"He gets way ahead of his faculty," Dorothy Gallagher admits. "He is very entreprenurial -- that isn't normally the case in academia."
But while all the rhetoric -- and even sometimes Moore himself -- would imply that he is some corporate shark, the truth is that never in his life has he been a Company Man -- he has devoted his entire career to academia.
Still, some professors dismiss him as an educator, and fear his mission to raise the school's profile and enrollment is mostly about "smoke and mirrors" and "razzle dazzle."
"With numbers, numbers, numbers, there is an indiscriminate attitude toward quality," says Esperian.
And as the enrollment numbers keep rising, faculty say morale is dropping.
In a March '96 survey of members of the Nevada Faculty Association, 51 percent of the CCSN faculty described "master planning" as "needs work" or "is a disaster," commenting there has been "too much growth too fast."
Others go so far as to say a climate of McCarthy-era fear has gripped the campus. Fearful to use their e-mail or even reluctant to discuss it over the phone, in person, they'll toss around descriptions of Moore -- in professor-speak -- such as "self-aggrandizing," "egotist" and "megalomanic."
"Dictatorship. Moore Moore Moore," wrote one. Another noted "there seems to be an atmosphere of intimidation."
The soft-spoken Moore seems well aware of the criticism, but perhaps not of the degree to which he is demonized.
"They can be scared, but that doesn't mean that's the reality," he defends mildly. "The faculty here have academic freedom -- the license to say whatever they want, and that's a pretty good deal. But a critic has to be willing to listen to the information that is a response."
He dismisses their criticisms as simple consumer resistance to change.
"People are nervous about any change you make," he says. "When you make a change, you get scrutinized by everybody. If you don't make any changes, you can do whatever you want -- nobody will care."
Moore turns to books for his solace, tuning out his aggravation by reading about struggles of other misunderstood leaders. He is currently devouring not one but two Thomas Jefferson biographies.
"Jefferson has struggles with his vice president, Aaron Burr -- a first-class jerk -- and he had pictures of his (allegedly) illegitimate children on the front cover of the newspapers," he says.
"What gives me comfort is that the struggles we go through today are very small, in comparison."
While his life's work is concerned with the period of youth, he is not especially forthcoming with memories from his own.
Suffice it to say that he ended up merging the careers of his parents -- his father, a businessman, and his mother, a part-time substitute teacher.
Far from a community college education, he received a bachelor's degree in economics from Claremont College, a master's in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley, and his doctorate in economics from Claremont.
His wife, Susan, is equally well-educated, with a doctorate of her own in education from Pepperdine, and is working as a distance education program coordinator for the Desert Research Institute.
The family lives in the northwest with their two daughters, Betsy, 12, and Parker, 10. They have a couple of cats and a new litter of kittens up for adoption.
The two met, says Moore, when Susan applied for a job as a counselor at Santa Monica. Despite the fact she was pregnant with Jeff, now 21, and would soon need a leave of absence, she was the best person for the job, and he insisted on hiring her.
Years later, when the two were divorced from their respective spouses, they married after a hurried courtship.
"Now," he notes, "I'm raising that son."
Combined with the three daughters from his first marriage, Moore has fathered enough daughters to found his own CCSN women's basketball team.
"I had to figure out some way to get a boy," he jokes.
The one thing Moore misses most from his old life -- the ocean -- he couldn't bring with him to Las Vegas. So he re-created what he could -- an NPR affiliate on his campus and his weekly radio show, "Ideas in the Air."
To hear KNPR Program Director Phil Burger tell it, the idea to grant Moore the forum just spontaneously combusted before them.
The fact that the college has cozily donated land on its West Charleston Boulevard campus and will absorb utility bills for the station's new site may have served as some inspiration.
While the program may seem an exercise in egoism, Moore actually goes too far downplaying his involvement with many of the guests. At times, he disingenuously omits his own participation in the topics they discuss.
"I don't think the show is for me to be a star or say what I'm doing," he said. "I'm just trying to get that person featured."
While it is waiting for its new $4.5 million site donated by a grant by the Donrey Foundation, KNPR (surely the nation's only public radio station broadcast from a casino parking lot) sits in limbo, in a rapidly dilapidating building.
So when Moore blew into the studio to tape his first show a few weeks ago, the parched host found only a building that has seen better days, with uncomfortable chairs and a nonfunctional water cooler.
Lukewarm tap water was not acceptable for the parched host -- or his new colleagues.
"You must have a water cooler," said Moore, somehow disbelievingly and commandingly all at once.
"Get them a water cooler," he said, turning to his associate.
Three days later, the Sparklettes delivery truck pulled up.
Moore's reputation must have preceded him: No one at the station was exactly surprised.
"It's a good example," Burger agreed, "that when Richard decides something needs to get done -- it gets done."
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