| Issue 3 | Volume 149 | Tuesday, February 6, 2018 | theavion.com |
Joshua Rosado/The Avion Newspaper
Forgetting the RA in ERAU
An Opinion and Response About the Leadership of Housing & Residence Life Anonymous Resident Advisor There is a significant amount of tension between the resident advisors and the Department of Housing and Residence Life. A majority of resident advisors want
change to happen in the department but are fearful if they voice their opinions, they will lose their jobs. I am not without fear, and as I write this, it is with anonymity. Speaking to the press as a resident advisor is against policy, and has the potential to result in job action, which encompasses suspension, ter-
What’s Inside
RA’s were asked multiple questions including if the increase in obligations was affecting their schoolwork.
mination, or any other kind of reprimand. "Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly." – Gandhi The tension originated from Fall 2017 resident advisor training when a mandatory, new program was introduced called community builders. The Housing and Residence Life staff created this program to gain quantitative data about the interactions that take place between resident advisors and their residents. A community builder is a record of a resident advisor intentionally interacting with his/her resident. The resident advisor can go out to dinner with their residents, offer to walk them to an event, or just initiate a conversation. The bottom line is that after this interaction, the resident advisors were required to log onto a Housing and Residence Life website and enter information about it, which included: the eagle card numbers of the students they interacted with, a summary of what was said, and the amount of time spent with the residents. When the department introduced the program, there was significant pushback from the resident advisors. Some arguments against it were the additional time requirements, and the artificial environment community builders would create. Resident advisors were required to do a certain number of community builders each month. Training ended, and community builders went forward and
William Shakespeare’s Othello
Honoring NASA’s Fallen Heroes
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continued throughout the Fall semester. At the beginning of the Spring 2018 semester, Housing and Residence Life staff stated that due to feedback from resident advisors, they planned on discontinuing community builders. The Housing and Residence Life staff declared that for the spring semester, contact hours would be replacing community builders. Contact hours were to be five hours each week that an RA must hold, similar to office hours of a professor. The resident advisors have been told to record the interactions they have with their residents during this time in the community builder form, on the website. The amount of pushback and uproar from the resident advisors was drastically more than that of the pushback from last semester. Contact hours were announced only a few days before the start of classes, and many resident advisors already had their schedules set. The Associate Director of Housing who was explaining contact hours stated they thought resident advisors should have had to do seven hours a week, but five was chosen by the Executive Director of Housing and Residence Life as a start. They made it seem like we got off easy. The department met all arguments with a response analogous to "RA's at other universities don't have the benefits you do, consider yourselves lucky this is all you have to do." Continued on A3 >>
Baseball Crushes Tusculum
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