Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
“One of my residents, Berto, came into my room, dressed as a Stormtrooper for Halloween. ‘There’s an alcohol poisoning,’ he said. I called Campo and told them that a Stormtrooper would meet them at the door and lead them to the situation. I went down and held a bag for the girl as she threw up. She got escorted, I mean transported, to the hospital,” Mike Salisbury, Oxy ’08 and former Resident Advisor (RA) in Haines and Braun said. He described the RA experience a “dichotomy of friend moments and emergency situations.” RAs are constantly reconciling their duties as policy enforcers and community builders.
The focus of this article is to explain this unique and often frustrating position. It was difficult to get people to talk about their opinion of Residence Life and Housing Services (RLHS or ResLife) candidly because being a quasi-administrator means that one must represent the school’s ResLife department in both his/her actions and responses to others’ actions. All of the 11 RAs with whom I spoke in order to write this article expressed varying degrees of doubt in talking to me. All shared things that they did not want printed.
“I feel like I have to be careful about what I say. I guess anyone in a professional context does,” Erdman RA Don Rowe (sophomore) said.
Part of this fear stems from the current controversies in the world of ResLife in the realms of policy enforcement and community building. These controversies include the discontinuation of training the safety position to ResLife student staff, the postponement of the Splatter dance, and last year’s struggle to provide Rangeview residents with doorstops.
When students arrive at Oxy, they quickly pick up a kind of paranoia of Resident Advisors and Hall Coordinators (HCs). Yeah, they can write you up (by the way, it’s now more delicately termed “documenting” a situation), but they need not be feared. To understand how policy enforcement works, it is important to first understand where RAs fall in the structure of ResLife.
Like any other bureaucratic organization, ResLife is structured with a hierarchy. This makes it very difficult to locate where decisions are made. RAs and HCs do not make policy, but are responsible for enforcing it. There are 37 RAs and seven HCs at Oxy, their hall appointments determined by hall size.
Next on the food chain is the pro staff. These are the people who actually make policy change. A level up from RAs and HCs are three Community Directors (CDs, known before as Area Coordinators) each in charge of a section on campus (lower, middle or upper), and one Assistant Community Director. These administrators meet with RAs and HCs every other week at Area Meetings to discuss concerns and funding for possible programs.
The CDs are supervised by two administrators, the Assistant Director of Living and Learning Communities, Maureen Regan and the Assistant Director of ResLife, Amanda Atkinson (who left at the beginning of this semester to take a position at the University of Southern California, and has yet to be replaced). The Assistant Dean of RLHS, Kecia Baker, is essentially the boss of ResLife. With this role Baker often shoulders the blame for problems that may arise within the ResLife department.
Though the current RAs I spoke with were, for the most part, wary about having their opinions of the ResLife administration quoted, Salisbury offered his judgment of the administration. “In my opinion, employee relations is where they’re [ResLife] failing massively. […] Kecia does have a lot on her plate, and she is always working,” he said.
ResLife Administrative Assistant Luisa Reyes explained that Baker often has her meeting time slots triple-booked so that she can see as many students as possible. Another RA had a more positive view of administration. “Our superiors make sure that we are well balanced and the program will reach as many people as possible,” Norris HC Haley Rosehill (senior) said.
A new addition to the ResLife team, Rachel Andersen (senior), also defended the administration. “I’ve had a change in perspective regarding the administration. No administration is ever going to be completely perfect and Oxy really does try its best for the most part,” Andersen said.
“And I really respect Kym [Duell, Middle Campus Community Director]. She explained that this year there would be repercussions for things that went unpunished last year, like burning chairs and throwing mattresses.”
Policy Enforcement
Policy enforcement is probably the most well-known of an RA’s responsibilities. Many RAs hear other students pointing out their authority as something to be feared. “In the Marketplace, when policy comes up, people ask ‘can’t you be lenient?'” Rowe said of his experience.
“The first week of class, I was in an elevator in Rangeview and some students were already inside. When I told them I was an RA, they said ‘Oh, I have to watch out for you.’ RAs become this ‘bad cop,'” Anderson said.
Many RAs are amenable to enforcing policies that keep their living communities respectful and healthy for all their residents. Assistant Community Director and alum Caroline Kim ’07, who was an RA for two years when she was still a student at Oxy, explained the importance of enforcing policy from her new perspective on the pro staff.
“We care about the place we live, and the people who live here,” she said. “So when you are extra loud in your room, it affects the other residents.” Noise complaints and alcohol use are common incidents that RAs have to handle every single week.
“Sometimes people forget how thin the walls are,” Rowe said, “but we can hear a lot through them.”
Some RAs explained that it is hard to enforce policies when they imagine their friends doing something for which they should be documented. “Some of my peers say ‘You would never write me up right?’ And I have to tell them ‘Don’t put me in that position,'” Andersen said.
The Safety Position
This year, the one week of intense RA training before the semester began included a brand new and very contentious policy change. Student ResLife staff members are no longer allowed to put residents in what they call the “safety position” or train any of their staff to do so. To put a person in the safety position is to lie an intoxicated person on their side in an attempt to avoid their choking on their own vomit.
Though HCs were taught by the Red Cross during this year’s HC training how to administer the safety position, the official ResLife student staff training for HCs and RAs did not include a demonstration of the position and forbade student staff from using it.
According to many current ResLife student staff members, in the past the safety position has been an essential part of ResLife student staff training at Oxy. When the HCs and returning RAs heard that they would not be teaching the safety position or administering it anymore, many were surprised.
“My first year as an RA, I was hired a few weeks into the semester. I was a little nervous, since I’d missed two full weeks of training, but Mike Salisbury, another RA in my building, assured me that he’d teach me everything I needed to know. He had me lay down on the floor, and he put me into the safety position. ‘That’s it,’ he told me. ‘That’s really all you missed.’ It’s interesting that two years ago, this was the most important piece of information learned at training, and now we’re not allowed to teach the position,” Bell-Young and Wylie HC Jessica Lobl (senior) said.
Baker explained that, as she understands it, the safety position was “more like a tradition that was passed down” by older RAs to the incoming RAs. “We never brought in professionals to train staff on the safety position. It was returning staff training new staff,” she said.
Starting this fall, however, ResLife’s policy change reflects a new stance regarding the safety position. As opposed to being a “tradition,” the safety position is now considered a liabilit
y.
“I had worked at five institutions before Oxy and I have never heard of the safety position. After finding out what the safety position was, it was determined that it would be a liability to put an intoxicated student in the safety position and leave them for the night. If a student is extremely intoxicated, medical and safety personnel should be called [. . .] I don’t want to have to call a parent to tell them that their child didn’t wake up because an RA placed them in the safety position. Medical and safety personnel should always be called. We always want to err on the side of extreme caution in those situations,” Baker said.
Though Assistant Community Director and alum Caroline Kim ’07 was not at the ResLife training, she explained that the official reason that the safety position is no longer used is that RAs are not properly trained to administer the safety position. “It’s a liability. We advise RAs to get in contact with people more able to handle situations, particularly situations that require medical attention,” she said. Kim did not refer to the training of HCs.
If one were to look for the “safety position” online, the search wouldn’t yield any relevant results. This is because the safety position is usually referred to as the Bacchus Maneuver (aptly named after the ancient Roman god of wine). In Red Cross First Aid Training medical professionals call it the Left Lateral Position.
The Bacchus Maneuver is used at many large schools like University of Texas and University of Virginia. The Alcohol Awareness seminar on campus last Wednesday also included a demonstration of the Bacchus Maneuver by Kaiser Permenente ER physician Julia Wang, M.D. Wang advised the audience to put their roommates in this position.
“I have used the safety position and I believe it was vital in maintaining the safety of the resident,” an RA who wished to remain anonymous said.
“I understand that we should be getting into contact with trained medical professionals, but we should have the basic skills to keep the person alive while we are waiting for professional help,” another RA who wished to remain anonymous said.
“I know I learned the safety position in my Red Cross lifeguard training, and I’ve definitely utilized it beyond just my role as an RA” Lobl said. “If my friends are ever sick, I make sure they’re positioned on their side, and in the position as much as possible. I think it would have been completely appropriate, useful, and smart for the safety position to be addressed during our training, even if it had to be presented with the disclaimer ‘Putting students in this position does not guarantee safety,’ but it’s a good first step.”
An RA who wanted to remain anonymous questioned the administration’s focus on liability: “When it comes to situations regarding inebriated or intoxicated students, ResLife is far too concerned with implications of being sued than doing the right thing.”
Community building
Community building is one of the key functions of RAs and HCs. Many ResLife student staff find that one of the more fun parts of the job is planning events and hallspread/floorspread activities.
Events are typically funded by ResLife in conjunction with the Residence Hall Association (RHA) and possibly another source, such as a co-sponsoring club. RHA consists of an executive board and representatives from every hall on campus; this group of students manages housing concerns and supports community events. RAs have to apply for funding and approval for each event they organize and run. Each RA is responsible for funding three active (or interactive) and two passive (e.g. informational bulletin boards) programs per semester.
“As a student staff (both RA and HC), I had the opportunity to put on many new programs. (That was my favorite part of the job, besides interacting with residents!) My favorite was organizing a snow trip for first-year students,” Oxy alum, former Assistant Area Coordinator and student staff member Rachel Kay ’07 wrote in an email interview.
Salisbury said he had planned a few failed events, though he planned successful ones as well. “When I was a junior, I tried to get approval for a stress-relief program during finals. It was a movie off-campus like Happy Feet or something. It was denied because only academic programs could get funding during finals,” he said.
Current Norris HC Rosehill suggested that ResLife allow the student staff to plan more stress-relief programs during finals.Splatter, one of the most popular dances at Oxy, is rumored to have been discontinued. Splatter is usually funded and planned by ResLife, specifically Lower Campus. Baker explained that ResLife will no longer be funding Splatter. Rather, ResLife will focus on small events in the residence halls and RHA will be in charge of Splatter. This dance has been postponed, and a large Halloween dance will take place on Oct. 31 instead.
Creating a vibrant community between a group of 100 residents who have different tastes, backgrounds and experiences is no small task. There have been many recent changes in residence halls in an attempt to forge community bonds more naturally: the Elements Program (an administrative program that plans and hosts events for each class year), first-year-only res halls (initiated in Fall 2007) and floorspread (a new variation of hallspread). Many of these changes reflect the building and renovation of residence halls on campus.
The decision to enact the floorspread schedule was based on ResLife student staff complaints of low turnout at hallspread, said Baker. Now, instead of having weekly hallspread, each floor meets together each Tuesday; on the last Tuesday of the month, the entire hall gets together for hallspread.
Though some RAs complained that they were told about this change at the very end of training, many residents and RAs really like this change.
“Personally, I think the change is awesome. RAs get to bond with their floor a little more and it allows hallspread to be more educational and worthwhile. With this shift, the hall staff is able to allocate more money to hallspread, which means better food and a lot more fun activities,” Rosehill said.
Rangeview Doorstops
Rangeview, though it offers more amenities than the rest of the residence halls on campus, presents a challenge for RAs in terms of creating a sense of community. “The problem with Rangeview is that there isn’t a big community feel to it,” Andersen said. “It’s hard to get to know your residents, and it’s hard for them to get to know each other.”
Last year, some of the RAs in Rangeview thought that making doorstops would promote an open door policy and thus improve community. (The doors in Rangeview are “fire doors” and very heavy, so they automatically close.) Taking the lead from colleagues in other residence halls, the Rangeview RAs proposed a program to decorate doorstops so that their residents could prop open their doors.
However, when the Rangeview RAs proposed this hallspread activity to the ResLife office to get funding, the office did not approve it. All of the RAs with whom I spoke said the decision had something to do with fire safety. One RA told me that at a series of Area Meetings last year, Area Coordinators had cited the official reason for not approving doorstop funding as fire safety. As the Residence Life and Housing Policies section of the Student Handbook states, “fire doors are not to be propped open or blocked.”
ResLife did, however, allow residents to buy their own materials to make doorstops themselves.
When I spoke with Baker about the doorstop decision, she did not justify the decision with fire safety and instead cited different reasons for not approving the doorstop program. She explained that doorstop use was a security concern, as students could use doorstops to prop exterior doors. Baker also cited “the higher probability of rodents entering student rooms due to propped doors due to the exposed courtyard.” Baker maintained that stud
ents are “free to prop their doors,” however “we [ResLife] would not be providing the materials to make doorstops. There are many other ways to build community in Rangeview other than making doorstops.” she said.
As an RA in another hall during this incident, Salisbury explained that some Rangeview RAs pressed this issue and wanted answers. Those who did press the issue declined to speak to me about this because they feared that they would face repercussions.
“It is my personal observation that those [RAs] who speak out against the administration get targeted,” he said. When Salisbury himself was applying for HC, he was the only returning RA who did not get the position. He believes it is because he was targeted as a dissenter.
Though being an RA is a very difficult and unique position, many RAs and former RAs speak positively about many of their RA experiences.
Andersen said that during training, “they really show you the support system [that’s available to students] at Oxy, and teach you how to listen to issues objectively, which is a skill that’s helpful in all of life.”
“I’ve learned a lot of professionalism from this job,” Salisbury said.
“RAs are the heartbeat of our community, a very valuable part. They work hard and they’re diligent,” Baker said. “The stipend could never be large enough to show the appreciation for the hard work they do.”Baker invites anyone with questions or complaints about policies to make an appointment or just drop by her office to talk to her. She also cited the importance of RHA. “RHA is a valuable way to address policy issues,” she said.
All of the Community Directors declined to be interviewed, though one of them, Middle Campus Community Director Kym Duell advised me to direct my questions to the ResLife office. Baker pointed out that “there could be many reasons to why CDs may not have responded. It is uncomfortable for me and I am nervous after each interview [with the Weekly staff], but I continue to give interviews,” she said.
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