At last week’s Spring Town Meeting, President Shirley Ann Jackson presented plans to restructure many of the services encompassed by Student Life. While this was unsurprising—it had been alluded to in the recent Student Life Performance Plan—the details of the plan had not previously been fully disclosed.
This plan includes the addition of cluster deans to live in selected residence halls, and these individuals would each be responsible for a group of them. Deans for off-campus students and those living in fraternities and sororities would also be added. We have several concerns about the success of such a program, especially with regard to implementation and usage.
The addition of the professional staff members would undoubtedly add a great deal of support to staff and residents by bringing experience and 24-hour availability. Students who live in residence halls already have dedicated resident assistants and directors, and so we are worried that these deans could potentially be seen as babysitters or parental figures, acting as Big Brother and reducing the college experience by reducing young students’ independence. Professional staff members would be skilled and knowledgeable in certain areas, but much of the success of the current Residence Life system is built on the ability of residents to relate to their peer RAs and RDs.
As this new plan continues to evolve, extra care should be taken to not duplicate the jobs of the RAs and RDs or those of other offices around campus such as the Counseling Center. If some functionality already exists in another capacity, we should not supplant that current service, but complement it with the new one. These professional staff members should be used primarily by RAs and RDs, but kept aloof from most students, while remaining accessible.
The current student staff is not always knowledgeable enough or capable of dealing with several highly emotional or delicate situations that may face them in their building, thus these deans have the opportunity to be tremendous resources to the Residence Life staff. For these reasons, we hope they will serve mainly to strengthen and provide direction for support services and programming.
