This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “What is the future of the RD position and role?”
Guest Post by Ali Martin Scoufield, Residence Life Professional
I have…let’s call them ‘fond’ memories of participating in job placement. I completed speed-date style job interviews one after the other, sustaining myself for days on granola bars and idealism, while sharing an expensive conference hotel room with six of my closest graduate school friends. This was all in the hopes of securing my dream job: Resident Director (RD). Throughout the interviews, I hoped I was conveying my sincere desire to continue living in campus housing, while managing a facility, supervising Resident Assistants (RAs), and facilitating programs. I saw the RD position as a way to not only apply what I had learned in graduate school, save a little on expenses, and pay forward the help I had been given as an undergraduate. And maybe, I was hoping to extend my collegiate experience a bit longer.
I gratefully accepted an RD position in the early-aughts – think flip phones, dial-up internet, and MySpace. This is the glorious timeframe when I started my first fulltime job after graduate school. I felt so fortunate to begin my higher education career as a RD. Upon reflection, perhaps I was naïve about what the role entailed. Still, my RD experience was so positive that I shrugged off 24/7 work expectations, hunger-games style parking wars (may the odds be in your favor – because with a carload of groceries and three kids, I was much more President Snow than Katniss Everdeen), communal laundry, no-one-knows-how-to-microwave-popcorn fire alarms, and phallic graffiti showing up on any newly cleaned surface.
For me, the opportunities outshined the challenges. My RD role afforded me the opportunity to become an expert in university life. Where non-residence life positions tended to be more specialized, I was able to be a generalist across a variety of areas. Everyday brought something new, from creative ways students tried to push boundaries, to evolving ideas on staff training, to building relationships with people completely different from myself. RD life was never dull.
I ended up living on campus for sixteen years, adding a partner and children to my university provided housing. The majority of my career has been in residence life, and I know that my ability to advance in higher education has been due, at least in part, to those foundational and formational RD experiences. I also know I would not have lasted nearly as long as an RD in today’s climate.
RD expectations have morphed to nearly unattainable levels, requiring superhuman abilities and expertise in at least a dozen competency areas. RDs are asked to apply skills in budget, case management, conflict mediation, community building, compliance, counseling, equity, facilities administration, occupancy tracking, programming, project management, recruitment, retention,
restorative justice, risk assessment, and supervision. [Readers, this is the interactive portion of the blog where you add in all of the areas I have inadvertently left off. Surely, my list is incomplete.] And these are the standards pre-pandemic. During COVID-19, RDs must have become Dr. Who, because I can’t think of another way they could have accomplished it all, without their own personal Tardis.
While moderate progress has been made since my RD days around compensation, apartment amenities, inclusion, and balance, there is often still an overarching assumption that ‘if it’s after hours, the RD will handle it’ or ‘if the student lives on campus, the RD should take over’. This
antiquated belief contributes to the seemingly never-ending work for RDs and makes the position unsustainable. I hypothesize that if higher education does not address the unfair expectations placed on RDs, discussing the future of the RD role is a moot point. The current structure is chasing RDs into other positions or out of higher education all-together. If higher education continues on this trajectory – of ever-increasing expectations, low institutional power, and mediocre compensation – fewer and fewer professionals will choose the role. The RD role may be on the brink of extinction…
Wow.
Okay. Let’s pause for a moment.
That took a bit of a bleak turn.
Don’t worry. As we learned in Jurassic Park, there’s a bit of hope left frozen in amber. We just have to be willing to find it. Hope for the RD role could be:
- Admitting the RD role is valuable to institutional goals, yet unsustainable
- Involving, as an equal partner, residence life staff in the culture changes needed within university life
- Resourcing residence life like the vital part of the campus community that they are, understanding the role residence life plays in retention of students, in positive academic outcomes for students, in cultivating a sense of belonging
- Investing in real, actionable workplace supports for burnout, vicarious trauma, and fatigue AND promoting the use of these resources. Make selfcare the expectation
- Challenging harmful expectations that place RDs at the center of all student crisis
- Designing residential curriculums that work to promote growth and independence for residential students with opportunities to learn from mistakes and understand accountability as a community agreement
- Understanding what your institutional residence life brand is by clearly naming and claiming the mission and values. Narrow in on the residence life identity and share that broadly with all stakeholders to help establish realistic outputs. Residence life does not have to be everything to everyone
- Building sustainable collaborative measures across departments and leveraging relationships with off-campus resources. There are specialists being excluded while generalist RDs are expected to do it all
- Centering the student experience to help determine what their true needs are and adjust existing models accordingly
Being intentional about what the RD role should be can lead to real change. I also recognize the above list may be overly optimistic. I am not presuming any of these suggestions are easy, nor that all of them are ‘right’ for every institution. We are likely not be breaking into a song and dance number before flying away in a refurbished classic car anytime soon. Higher education is, frankly, grappling with too many questions about its future stability to simply sit back and ignore the RD issue.
