When staffing decisions are made, they should be objective and based primarily on the ability of the people in question to fulfill their duties honestly and completely. While this undoubtedly describes the hiring policy for most positions around campus, there seem to be serious issues with the staffing decisions made by the Office of Residence Life.
Late last month, Hall Hall was evacuated when the resource room began to fill with smoke, prompting someone to pull the fire alarm. The fumes were coming from a stored grill that still had charcoal in it from its earlier use. In the end, the two resident assistants who used the grill were fired for the accident, as there was a significant chance that many could have been seriously hurt, either by a fire or through carbon monoxide poisoning.
Having said that, the two RAs - Grand Marshal Carlos Perea and Red Army Chair Joe Petrowski, who is also a member of the Poly Editorial Board - certainly had no ill intentions and made an honest mistake that many would have also made. Cooking with charcoal is not a skill many in our generation are familiar with; thus, while their error was certainly clear, the fact that it was an honest mistake cannot be overlooked. In fact, during the countless hours of RA training that ResLife conducts prior to most students' arrival on campus, a great deal of time is spent on team building and other activities, but there is no training about how to operate the ResLife-owned charcoal grill.
We do not bring this up, though, just to say that this decision was a poor one. Rather, Residence Life has a systemic problem when it comes to making staffing decisions. Its hiring process consists of two interviews run by its student staff and one that includes the participation of a professional staff member. While students are instrumental in running clubs and organizations, ResLife is more than that. Unless great care is exercised, student-conducted interviews can ruin the selection process. It can become something based more on who people like than a valid vetting process, and in fact, the RAs constitute what many have called the "largest clique on campus." This type of hiring process inherently selects people liked by the current staff. Once hired, though, plenty of staff members get away with doing little or nothing more than the required paperwork. In addition, nearly all - there are a few exceptions - of the resident assistants under 21 drink, and in doing so, violate both New York State law and one of the rules they were hired to enforce. We bring this up solely to illustrate a simple point: Why, when many members of a staff break their own rules and get by with the bare minimum, do highly-involved employees get fired for an honest mistake?
