Residence Life is touted by the University as a key component of creating a welcoming, inclusive campus living environment. For those within the ResLife hierarchy, being an RA is promoted as an outstanding opportunity, giving students the chance to contribute to the community while learning and growing as a leader.
However, when such an organization, no matter how benevolent its aims, is complicit in creating a culture of silence and paranoia among the population it is intended to protect, no amount of rosy explanations, euphemisms or half-truths can be expected to account, in all fairness, for the credibility gap that is created.
The Residence Life system is predicated upon a communal willingness to “turn in” one’s friends, neighbors, and classmates. Initiatives such as Silent Witness expedite and encourage this process. True, collective punishment schemes, including but not limited to the concept of “common damage” itself, can be said to benefit the public through potential reductions in disruptive behavior. But in the last analysis, these schemes are grounded in an “every man for himself” mentality that has nothing to do with community ideals: no infraction is considered too small to report, because the many will suffer along with the few if individual responsibility for an antisocial act cannot be determined.
One may think that the days of making “the class” suffer for the unruly acts of a single person or small group ended with recess and nap-time, but sadly, that is not the case. A recent event uncovered by The Minaret, in which the entire population of the Vaughn Center’s seventh floor was made to write “punishment lines” in response to an anonymous act of vandalism, would be almost comic if it did not send such an ominous message about ResLife’s culture of enforcement.
When such a scheme becomes the norm, responsibility for the actual bad act does not matter. Individual conscience, which might motivate voluntary acts of contrition, is removed from the equation. Conversely, those who scrupulously adhere to Residence Life and University policies are not rewarded: on the contrary, they are made to serve in the role of informants or allowed to suffer for their unwillingness to do so.
While Residence Life seems willing to use any means at its disposal to gather information, data about wrongdoing from Residence Life staff members is ruthlessly suppressed. Time and time again, it has been made clear to The Minaret that many campus residents would prefer to remain silent rather than challenge the presumed rightness and authority of Resident Assistants that helps to insulate them from legitimate complaints.
A single unethical Resident Assistant is able to wreak havoc on a resident’s on-campus experience in a number of ways, subtle and overt, and the demand for openness and transparency in residents’ behavior rarely seems to apply in quite the same way to the acts of Residence Life staff, particularly senior staff.
Recently, The Minaret was privy to a rumor, corroborated by several sources, that during a recent RA training session, ranking members of the Residence Life hierarchy made it clear that RAs were not to speak to The Minaret without prior permission from their supervisor.
Clearly, this restriction on free speech would amount to a death sentence for legitimate observations and complaints that may not be welcome or seriously entertained inside the Residence Life bureaucracy itself.
This speaks volumes to Residence Life’s commitment to centralized control and conformity in every aspect of a Resident Assistant’s life – a stance which is bound to color his or her relationship to residents, both in an enforcement capacity and in roles as a mentor and, as Residence Life is quick to point out, friend.
Residence Life sets a bad precedent by creating a situation in which some are above the law and everyone else is guilty until proven innocent – or guilty even when proven innocent. A culture of silence does not benefit the public good, but only those people who are most apt to commit their self-serving acts quietly.
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