STORIES
|
MOELLER HAS A REPUTATION FOR GETTING THE JOB DONE
By Margaret Leonard
Bill Moeller laughs at himself when he tells you that though he's a fourth generation American, he still calls himself a German.
But he's serious. The German parts of him, combined with his Catholicism and Jesuit education, might explain why he is devoted to responsibility, duty and service.
What if he'd been in Germany in the late '30s and early '40s, when the country was governed by evil?
"I would have had to leave," he responds quickly.
It's clear he would have been an outsider. Committed to life (against abortion and execution, as his church teaches), respect for every person he meets, and service where it's needed (he helps students, workers and the poor of any race), Moeller could not have survived his country's time under Hitler.
But in the United States, he has been able to reconcile his morals with his respect for the authority and the institutions. He has made a career of local government.
And he's earned a reputation as a man who can get a job done. With organization, persistence and a habit of deflecting credit onto other people, Moeller has made possible the Kids Voting in Leon County, the Odyssey Science Center and an army of college students engaged in their community.
His job now - as director of Florida State's Center for Civic Education and Service - is to help students find and perform the community service that suits them.
Moeller came to that mission from a childhood in Baltimore, where he grew up across the street from the all-black campus of Morgan State University, hanging out, making friends and playing basketball.
When he vacations, he goes back to the city; when he retires, he'll probably move back.
"I take something, and I keep it forever," he said. "I still read the Baltimore Sun. My best friend is from the third grade."
He watched his home city, like many other cities across the country, burn during the race riots of the '60s, and he helped rebuild it.
In his Jesuit high school, he worked in student government and the yearbook. At Loyola College in Baltimore, he was editor of the school newspaper, president of the Association of Student Organizations and president of the National Jesuit Honor Society. He stayed active while earning a master's in local government at the University of Pennsylvania.
While his style has always been to work from within - and do it with openness, humor and kindness - Moeller admires people who protest against what their principles tell them are the wrongs of the institutions.
He did it once himself. In the early 1980s, Moeller joined a few hundred demonstrators marching around the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee to protest the death penalty.
"I wondered why I'd never done it before," he said. "... I have a strong sense of duty, of responsibility, what's good, what's right, what's just."
Straight out of college, Moeller said, he was idealistic. He still is, but at age 53, he has added practicality and realism.
"Some problems will be with us for a long time," he said. "Many problems aren't going to get real good real fast."
One of his early experiences with a slowly solved problem was setting up the Manpower program in Baltimore.
"My strong belief is that people want to work," he says of the long struggle against unemployment and poverty. "Work is the essence of the human spirit. It was our job to reduce the barriers to people working."
In 1978, Moeller came to Tallahassee to organize FSU's Florida Center for Public Management, which consults and trains public managers. He's been here ever since, organizing projects on and off campus.
"He'll take an idea and put it into action, not just study it more," said Sherrill Ragans, Florida State's associate vice president for student affairs. "He's a good advocate, persistent about his ideas."