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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Too Much for Students to Handle? Why One University Decided to Do Away With RAs
By Katherine Mangan
February 25, 2021
During his first semester as a resident adviser at George Washington
University, Drew Amstutz comforted foreign students struggling with
culture shock, reassured freshmen panicking over failing grades, wrote
some students up for underage drinking, and found a referral for
another who thought she’d been slipped a date-rape drug at a party.
Keeping students masked and six feet apart might have been added to his
duties, had the university not paused its RA program this year.
An RA was expected to be “a jack-of-all-trades,” Amstutz said. “You had
to be everything to everyone, from counselor to academic adviser” to
social director and rules enforcer. “Absolutely no one can meet all of
those demands and be excellent in all of them.”
Since Covid-19 broke out, the stresses of the RA job have hit a
breaking point at campuses across the country. The role, which
traditionally comes with free room and board, had already grown to
include responding to crises, from sexual assault to mental breakdowns,
at all hours of the day and night. Now, in a deadly pandemic, George
Washington decided it was time to pull the plug.
The university announced on Thursday that professional, live-in staff
members will take on the first-responder role that RAs have filled in
the past. Instead of the 140 RAs it had last year, George Washington
will hire around 200 students for hourly, part-time work like mediating
peer conflicts, manning front desks in residence halls, helping
students move in and out, and communicating through emails and social
media. The university hopes to serve as a model for other colleges
looking to alleviate the pressures on RAs.
“There’s a lot of stuff students are packing and bringing to
college that I don’t think 18- to 19-year-olds are prepared to unpack,”
said M.L. (Cissy) Petty, vice president for student affairs and dean of
students. “Covid was a wake-up call.”
Last fall, with only three of the campus’s 26 residence halls housing
about 500 students, “we had time to think about what this role had
turned into and what we wanted to change.” The university assigned a
dozen paid staff members to the six dorms that had opened by spring, an
approach that it will expand in the fall.
Petty said the decision to eliminate the all-encompassing role of an RA
reflects “a philosophical shift to a more robust professional staffing
model.”
Each dormitory will have at least one professional staff person living
there to be the first point of contact for students. Because of their
training, education, and experience, these staff members will be better
suited, the university concluded, to handle parts of the job like
safety compliance and behavioral intervention that many RAs found
challenging and unfulfilling.
Charlotte McLoud-Whitaker, director of residential education, lives
with her husband in a campus residence hall and is looking forward to
having more professional staff joining her.
As the senior administrator on call in her building, she helped oversee
some of the communication and planning during a tumultuous year upended
by Covid-19 and racist attacks on the Capitol. When armed National
Guard troops and military-style vehicles were stationed just outside
the campus, in the heart of the Washington, D.C., her staff helped
communicate with worried parents and students, letting them know where
to get groceries and how to stay safe. The shift in residential-hall
staffing, she said, “will allow the staff to build closer personal
relationships with students” and make sure their needs are met.
Peter Galloway, president of the Association of College and University
Housing Officers-International, said he’s not aware of any other
campuses doing what George Washington is planning, but he’s heard of
others that are looking at ways to take some of the responsibilities
off resident advisers’ plates.
Galloway, who is also assistant dean of students at West Chester
University of Pennsylvania, said more students are coming to campus
with mental-health challenges, worries about sexual harassment or
assault, and parents who call their RAs to check up on their well-being.
“The magnitude of issues they have to deal with has increased
significantly,” Galloway said. “Depending on the institution, it could
get to the point where it’s too much for a trained but still
undergraduate student to handle.”
He said some campuses are delegating the enforcement part of the job to
professional staff members who patrol the halls, checking for students
who are violating drinking or other rules. When RAs are also expected
to be enforcers, “it makes their position difficult because they’re
trying to create community, but the next day, they could be documenting
a student for some kind of inappropriate behavior,” Galloway said.
Since George Washington’s program overhaul has been largely kept under
wraps until Thursday, it’s unclear how those who were hoping to become
RAs, with the accompanying room-and-board perks, will respond. Over the
past few years, some of the university’s RAs objected to a university
decision to overhaul their responsibilities, requiring them to walk the
halls to check for parties and misconduct.
The goal was to make it easier for RAs to check in with their students,
but some complained that it strained those relationships. The demands
of the job have caused relationships between RAs and the administration
to be strained as well.
With cellphones and social media providing nonstop connectivity, the
role of an RA has become a 24/7 job, said Stewart Robinette, an
assistant student dean at George Washington who focuses on campus
living and residential education. “It was getting to the point where it
was pervading all aspects of students’ lives.”
As mandatory reporters in Title IX cases, RAs are required to report
concerns about sexual abuse, putting them in uncomfortable positions
when one of their residents wants to confide in them but isn’t ready to
report. Campus safety became a troubling worry after the 2007 shooting
deaths of 32 students and faculty members at Virginia Tech. And with
Covid-19, on-duty RAs faced threats to their own health.
“The only good thing to come out of the pandemic is that it has put the
world on pause and allowed us to re-evaluate the way we’re doing
things,’ said Amstutz, the George Washington student and former RA.
Amstutz is looking forward to applying for a new role — possibly in
program planning or social media — for this fall. He likes that he’d be
able to clock in and out, focusing on what he’s most excited about. “I
was good at events with residents and used to really enjoy
Thursday-night dinners, pre-Covid of course, in my room. All of the
paperwork and reporting I didn’t find as much fun.”
If he’s hired in a more targeted role, “I’ll be able to go all in on
planning programs,” he said, “knowing that someone else will handle
Title IX issues” and answer the middle-of-the-night calls.
Manvitha Kapireddy, a senior who serves as president of the
university’s Residence Hall Association, said she understands that not
everyone will immediately buy in to the changes.
“This is uncharted territory,” she said. “When you think of college,
RAs are a staple of that experience. What’s going to happen to the
sense of community when you remove them?”
But she believes that having 200 students involved in roles, including
peer mediators, that are more carefully tailored to their interests and
strengths should help alleviate that worry. It could also, she said,
help avoid student burnout. “With an hourly student position, you can
clock in and out with a predetermined set of hours. It’s a good way to
prevent students from being overly burdened with issues that are above
their pay grade.”
Read this and other articles at The Chronicle of Higher Education
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