When new Resident advisers are hired midway through the year the task of training them often falls on their fellow Resident advisers because administration frequently fails to provide them with the information necessary to perform their duties. This year, for over a month, an RA hired at the beginning of Winter Quarter was only provided with a pamphlet and was not given Behind Closed Doors training, a critical portion of understanding crisis management. This kind of negligence in training can lead to dangerous on-call situations for the new RA, the RA tasked with training them, and the residents in their community. Resident advisers are given no additional compensation to take on these training duties and are not prepared to educate other Resident advisers since we are never instructed on how to do so. We are demanding that the administration in University Residences take on the task of training these new Resident advisers fully in order to remove the burden they have placed on us.
The content of the trainings currently offered in Spring and pre-Fall do not adequately prepare us for the duties we are expected to complete, particularly in relation to issues of social justice and identity. These are topics that we are required to discuss with our residents despite our lack of training. We are not given enough training surrounding topics of race, ethnicity, religion, social values and queer identities. These issues impact student experiences on campus, particularly as students are coming to terms with these identities. Currently, the limited training we do receive is provided by Resident Directors who primarily have Master Degrees in Student Affairs. We are demanding that University Residences adequately prepare us for this conversation by bringing in support from Equal Opportunity Providers and Critical Race Scholars. Follow up trainings in Winter and Spring quarter should also be implemented as equity and diversity cannot be taught in a single training session.
Revise current training content to include education on social justice issues taught by professionals who specialize in having conversations surrounding identity.
Provide adequate and timely training to Resident Advisers who are hired in the middle of the academic year.
Resident advisers are required to complete a leadership class before our first year on the job. Despite being a requirement and, according to University Residences, relevant training for our job, this class is paid for by us, through our tuition, and deducts from the number of academic credits we can take. The content of the class focuses on leadership style and individual personalities, which is not relevant to our duties as Resident advisers. Contrarily, because the class reduces the number of credits we can take, it negatively impacts our academic experiences. University Residences espouses that we are “students first,” but their actions show that they do not value our time and money we spend furthering our academic success. By removing the mandatory spring class we can achieve more academically and in our jobs.
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Additionally, students have been denied RA positions because of conflicts with classes required for their major and the spring training class. Other Resident advisers, hired outside of the conventional timeline, were offered an alternative accelerated class which was not an option for the aforementioned students. We believe this system to be unfair and demand that it be removed as a requirement.