Questions by James A. Baumann
In recent years, several campus housing departments have put their resident assistant (RA) position descriptions, responsibilities, and system structure under the proverbial microscope. In many cases, the conclusion was, “There has got to be a better way.”
The next step was to begin implementing the new system, and while most reported positive change, many others reported a series of unexpected outcomes: not always good, not always bad, but unexpected. Once that first domino fell, the resulting cascade was felt throughout the department, requiring additional tweaks and course corrections.
Talking Stick gathered a selection of representatives from campuses that recently updated their RA position to discuss the good and bad of the resulting fallout. Casey Wall, director of residential life and housing at Binghamton University; Kate Baier, the executive director of residential life at New York University; Tiffany Bromfield, the associate director of residence life and inclusion at Buffalo State University; Leasa Ann Kowalski Evinger, the director of residential life at Clemson University; and Detric Robinson, the director of residential education at Denver University.
At its core, how have you modified your RA job description? What was the primary reason that spurred this choice?
Tiffany Bromfield: There were two reasons that spurred the decision. The first is that we knew the position needed to change as our student population has evolved. We felt that it was unfair to put all this responsibility on a single student staff member. The second was that we recognized that we had some student staff who came up with amazing programs but lacked student accountability and vice versa.
We took a strengths-based approach to fulfilling the student staff roles by allowing students to choose what position they were interested in. The resident assistant position at its core is the same. Resident assistants focus on crisis management, participate in an on-call rotation, and administrate accountability for residents in accordance with the student code of conduct. We removed the programming responsibilities from the RA position and created the community assistant position. Community assistants are primarily community builders; they are what I like to call our fun and fuzzies. They create bulletin boards, engage in intentional interactions, build community, and plan all programs under the direction of the graduate assistant. All student staff is trained to respond to incidents, although crisis management is primarily an RA’s responsibility.
Casey Wall: Overall, we took the RA position and divided it into multiple different student positions. We maintained live-in student staff positions, splitting that type of role in two while creating more than a handful of new hourly student positions. The goal was to create roles that were more manageable in scale and could be more defined according to a student’s area of interest, knowledge, and skill. This allowed for more focused training opportunities.
The primary reason for this change was the reported burnout of the current RA staff, coupled with the codependency that students were feeling towards their specific RA. Providing more student staff positions has allowed us to have more resources and support in place for the general resident population while also allowing student staff to focus on being students themselves.
Detric Robinson: Denver University’s RA job description continues to move towards the trajectory where they will serve as peer mentors and focus on community development but will have reduced involvement in high-stress incidents, thus mitigating the impact of primary and secondary trauma. While they currently have on-call responsibilities, RAs also respond to minor (low impact) incidents and needs such as minor alcohol concerns, noise complaints, and lockouts. When they become aware of issues of elevated concern, they refer to campus safety and the administrator-on-call for response. In instances where RAs have unexpectedly found themselves on-scene for more concerning issues, administrators-on-call respond to the scene, dismiss the RA, and take over the incident response. Our on-call protocols were adjusted to clarify roles and support this transition while we continue to benchmark other institutions and design distinct jobs for implementation starting in 2025.
As it relates to community building, we have restructured expectations to be more specific to the residential populations and have aligned RA classifications (first-year, second, etc.) to assigned resident classifications in order to encourage more peer mentorship. We will also be specifically replacing the RA position in the apartment areas with apartment manager positions that will focus more intentionally on adult living and transitions.
Leasa Ann Kowalski Evinger: We have shifted to a residential community mentor to prioritize and re-emphasize what has always been at the core of an RA role: relationship building and community building. We are also working to unravel the administrative and technical parts of the job. Responsibility for desk operations has moved to an area desk model/team, and we are still in the process of unraveling confrontation and on-call responsibilities, which we hope to complete in the next phase of re-envisioning this role. The primary reason for this is that the complexity of undergraduate staff positions had increased significantly over the last 10-20 years and we were not able to recruit, train, and supervise staff well in positions that exceeded any reasonable candidate’s capacity. We weren’t going to find better staff or work with them differently – in ways that really worked – without changing the position.
Kate Baier: In 2021, we eliminated all RA responsibilities related to crisis response to and intervention in critical incidents and re-centered the role on community development and peer mentorship. We made this decision based on frequent feedback from RAs that they felt unprepared to handle the sorts of incidents they were encountering, even with professional staff involvement after the RA was the first responder to an incident and even when the RAs consistently reported high satisfaction with their training and onboarding.
In addition, the RAs revealed that responding to critical incidents – or even their fear about what they might encounter while on duty – was taking a toll on their well-being. When we took a step back and really looked at the sorts of situations managed by RAs or the frequent university suggestion to "just have the RAs do that," we began to feel that undergraduate students should not be expected to act as first responders to critical incidents. Instead, we professionalized after-hours crisis response and established a 10-person incident response team comprising full-time employees who work between 5 p.m. and 2:45 a.m. RAs are still on duty (we call it RA@Home), but they use that time to establish community presence, respond to low-level policy concerns, and handle lockouts. The residence hall directors and assistant directors still maintain an on-call rotation and respond as needed outside of incident response team (IRT) hours.
How have the RAs responded to these new positions and structures?
Wall: Change is hard, and this new direction was no different. As we moved from the idea into implementation, we heard feedback from a number of student staff that the narrower focus of their roles has been a positive shift for them. It allows them to focus on very specific parts of supporting their fellow students without needing to know everything. Of course there will be some adjustments, and we will continue to have annual assessments of the RA role. Meanwhile, we’ve continued to seek feedback from the resident directors as well as the student staff.
Evinger: I would say that we have been altering the position in “quarter turns.” Many of our staff might say that nothing has really changed since we still have a couple of turns to go, but they would also recognize that our training is different and that what they feel is important about their jobs has shifted. I can see the benefits of enhanced relationship building and community building in how we are engaging with students and how they are engaging with our communities.
Bromfield: Student staff have responded positively to the new structure, and we have seen an increase in engagement, involvement, and retention of our residential student population and staff. Plus our Benchworks data shows an increase in engagement and satisfaction of the student staff overall since implementing this change.
Baier: Response from the RAs (and, in fact, the university as a whole) has been very positive. There is widespread confidence in the incident response team and a level of comfort in knowing that there is a safety net of non-clinical, caring, and professional support for students at night.
The incident response team invests a lot of time in getting to know the RAs so that they feel some familiarity with the team. We have about 12,000 students and almost 270 RAs in 21 residence halls across lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The IRT visits RA team meetings once or twice a year and connects with each RA to complete a community walk every year.
Robinson: We conducted a snap poll this year to get an idea of the stressors in the RA roles and found that they felt most prepared for on-call duties, which is likely related to them having received more intentional training in that area, but felt frustrated by a larger number of lockout calls. In addition, we recognized that there has been less outreach this year to gather information about how RAs are being impacted by incidents.
We have been closely monitoring pressure and tension points between RAs and leadership (which led to unionization efforts) in order to ensure that we are being sensitive to the needs of our current student populations. Specifically, we are working to be responsive to situations that may cause trauma or emotional harm to the responding staff, considering compensation as it relates to the workload, and structuring the roles in a way that provides a little more specificity depending on student populations.
As these changes have been implemented, how have they changed the work of staff, particularly those who supervise the RAs?
Wall: Something we learned pretty early on was that as we began to shift from the traditional RA role, almost every aspect of the department needed to be thought through and considered as well. Pulling on the one thread caused the entire ball of yarn to begin to unravel. This also allowed us to think about the development of resident directors (the former RA supervisors), and we provided opportunities for them to gain a skill set and tangible experience in various areas of the department on an ongoing basis – thus providing them with a menu of functional areas they can focus on, so their role could expand beyond RA supervision. The resident directors can then maintain student staff supervision while also having the capacity to further their own growth and development.
Baier: When RAs were responding to incidents, the residence hall staff spent time not only responding to the actual incident but also supporting RAs who may have been affected by the situation. Now, the staff and the RAs can spend that time focusing on creating a community that supports student success and belonging. We know the impact of the re-centered focus on community and also of increased professionalized support. We’ve seen increases in the percentage of students who report that living on campus has had a positive impact on their success and their sense of belonging.
Bromfield: One of the driving factors of this change was to redistribute the supervision responsibility of live-in staff. Complex directors (full-time master’s-level staff) directly supervise the RAs and the assistant complex directors (graduate students), who supervise the community assistants to ensure that programming is consistent with the resident engagement model. Assistant complex directors also compile all intentional interaction data for reporting purposes and, along with the complex director, work to facilitate all staff meetings and support the department’s mission and vision.
Evinger: When we make the next turn, we will start to roll into changes in the graduate staff and then full-time staff roles. We have known that some things would “roll up.” I also have ideas about creating more specialized positions that will allow us to break the work into different pieces. Ultimately, we aren’t doing anything that doesn’t need to be done. It all needs a home somewhere.
Robinson: So far, the work of the staff who supervise RAs has not significantly changed.
What have been the one or two most unanticipated changes that have come with this decision?
Wall: I wouldn’t necessarily say this was unanticipated, but communication is even more important than it was before. With this many more student staff (we increased our student staff number by roughly 200 positions), communication is key: not only knowing what is going on in the department and what is coming up, but knowing what your fellow student staff member might be working on, or able to help you with because your roles are completely different. This is an area we are still working on quite actively and one we know we can improve.
Baier: I can't point to an unanticipated change. We carefully moved forward with this model anticipating many of the results we have actually experienced. I've been happily surprised that such a shift in RA roles and creation of a brand new late-night team has been implemented pretty seamlessly. We've been able to recruit the right people for the job, the RAs seem happier and less stressed in the role, and I'm comforted knowing that students receive high-quality and caring support when needed no matter the time of day.
Evinger: It is really hard to re-imagine something that is so cemented into practice. Even I have had to radically rethink things that I originally didn’t think would work, but at the end of the day, we had to acknowledge the need for something different and take a leap.
Bromfield: In the beginning, it was challenging to build staff synergy amongst the building teams as a lot of students gave the “That’s not my job” response, so we worked as best we could to build up the teams and redevelop the training schedule to be more in line with all student staff positions so that everyone is cross-trained. The shift has made it easier to tell the story of the work that the residence life office is doing and how this aligns with the university’s priorities. We have noticed the shift needed for apartment-style communities’ facilitation, so we are looking to address that in the coming academic year.
Robinson: We are still too early in the process to accurately assess this.
What have been the one or two pleasant surprises as this transition occurs?
Bromfield: One of the most pleasant surprises of the transition is the community that student staff have been able to build and their overall satisfaction in their positions. Accountability has become more manageable as job expectations are clear, follow-up is consistent, and students are active participants in the process. Next fall, we are raising the stipend for the first time since the inception of the RA position because of the changes in these roles, which I am personally excited about. The increase is significant even if it is not as high as I would like it to be. Progress is one step at a time.
Baird: The introduction of the incident response team has also reduced the volume of incidents that other professional staff on duty (the residence hall directors and residence hall assistant directors) are called to respond to. And, because after-hours incident response is coordinated by professional staff, the incident is much more stabilized when the residence hall director and assistant director arrive to work the next day, so their follow-up is often much less intense.
Wall: As we looked at the various live-in student positions and hourly student staff positions, I did not anticipate how some parts of the RA position were the “all the time” tasks while other parts were “very rarely” completed and how those things were really dependent on that specific RA. I suppose I knew this subconsciously, yet as we changed the student staffing model it really brought this to light and affirmed that making this change was beneficial to our student staff as well as our students.
Evinger: Giving people the freedom to ask questions and re-imagine something that is assumed to be the standard opens up the possibility to re-imagine everything. Every day I think, “What if we didn’t do it this way? What else would we or could we do?” I want Clemson to be a place on the cutting edge of truly moving us into a sustainable future. I want other colleagues to say, “We never thought of that. How did you come up with it?” I think we can do it.
James A. Baumann is the editor of Talking Stick.
