THEQuad
Getty Images
sure the monitors weren’t just enforcers K-VILLE: This year, tenters away from the dorm in a semester. Found but also the sort of people who’d hang out and line monitors fostered a to have been “intentionally deceiving” and play pickup soccer if the sun was shin- more communal atmosphere. around his plans to tent, he was fired from ing. “That gap between line monitors and his RA role, along with two tenting peers. tenters—it’s not something that will ever fully close,” says It turned out to be only a temporary firing: Bergamini and Hassey, “but I think that this year had the least animosity his colleague were reinstated after an appeals process (many between the two groups.” fellow students petitioned in his favor), and now he’s agitating to change the policy. After the tenting season was complete, Bergamini’s activism about K-Ville would continue—albeit on slightly It’s unfortunate, Bergamini starts to explain, that tenting different terms. The day after the Duke-UNC home game, caused such a situation, and then he stops talking abruptly: his resident coordinator asked whether he had “black”-tentThree people in his jackets had walked by. ed—the most intense, and time-intensive, iteration. Ber“I think taking RAs out of K-Ville would be a real gamini confessed he had, which definitionally put him shame,” Bergamini says, before ending on a familiar, if bittersweet, note. “I think we made real strides in terms of in violation of the Housing and Residential Life’s nightsbuilding community.”—Lucas Hubbard away policy that states RAs can only spend eight nights
DUKE MAGAZINE SPRING 2019
21