Res Life

When I first entered college in the late 1960s, freshmen were generally required to live on campus. We had rules to follow in dorm life that were intended to help us focus on our studies and avoid some of the stupider situations in which college kids sometimes find themselves. Things loosened up dramatically shortly thereafter as Universities dropped their in loco parentis role.

But the new “residential life” folks have stepped into the vacuum and instituted a far more onerous regimen. The National Association of Scholars brings this news from the conference of The American College Personnel Assn (ACPA) in an article subtitled “A Report on the Wanna-Be Revolutionaries of College Residential Life Programs.”

The conference as a whole was a reverberation of a “revolution” in campus student life that began in the early 1990s. In the fall of 1993, the president of ACPA, Charles Schroeder, convened a committee called the Student Learning Project “to examine how student affairs educators could enhance student learning and personal development. . . .”

In essence, The Student Learning Imperative calls on residence life officials to redefine themselves as educators. . . . Via residence life, students, for example, should learn “an understanding and appreciation of human differences,” and develop “a coherent integrated sense of identity, self-esteem, confidence, integrity, aesthetic sensibilities, and civic responsibility.”

It is not clear that residence life officials possess any particular expertise in these areas, many of which involve cultivating the judgment of students. A key question that The Student Learning Imperative never addresses is, “Why should students look to resident life officials for guidance about who they are and who they should become?”

What follows is depressingly predictable. The Residential Life branch of the University has declared itself an equal partner with the academic side of the University and embarked on an effort to “educate” students in their everyday lives.

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) reported some particularly egregious facts last year about the University of Delaware’s res life program. The Delaware program was canceled shortly thereafter.

One Delaware student described his experiences as a RA:

The Delaware RA hiring process is very slanted towards people who profess the same beliefs as the residence life (Reslife) administration. If your opinions on topics such as diversity, homosexual rights (and more subtly, politics) differ from the university, you are not likely to be hired. Once employed, RAs are put through intensive, mind numbing training for a few weeks during the summer and at least once later in the year.

Often there was a greater emphasis on the re-education programs than actually helping the residents have a successful and enjoyable college career. Usually, only freshmen residents are gullible enough to easily get to attend these programs, but particularly zealous RAs will use various forms of coercion such as disciplinary favoritism. Usually the less-than-zealous RAs are weeded out over the course of the year.

I had no idea what my RA thought about politics or social issues. I recall him giving us advice about going to class and keeping up with our studies, and occasionally he had to mediate a dispute on the floor. That was a useful role and he earned our respect.

The dorm should be a student’s home, a makeshift own perhaps, but a place nonetheless where a person has some inviolable space. The res life people seem intent on invading that small corner of refuge and making it an intellectual hell.