Ashley N. Robinson
May 1, 2020
Citations
0
Influential Citations
0
Citations
Journal
About Campus: Enriching the Student Learning Experience
Abstract
I DISTINCTLY RECALL ONE troubling Sunday afternoon during my second year as a full-time residence hall director. I had just spent a weekend off-campus visiting family, and as I pulled into the parking lot of my residential complex, I was overcome by a complete sense of dread at the prospect of venturing inside to my apartment. I sat weeping in my car. Through tears, I watched students playing volleyball in the quad on that sunny afternoon. No crisis was in sight, I was not oncall, yet I was overwhelmed with the idea that by going back to the residence hall, I might be needed, and I would certainly be seen. I would be seen publicly as a role model, supervisor, advisor, and care worker. Though most days in my live-in career I did not sit in the parking lot and cry, spending the better part of a decade as a live-in residential staff member immeasurably shaped my identity and way of being in the world. Living-in always affected my decisions: Was I expected to invite or to not invite students into my apartment? Was it reasonable for my employer to indicate that I needed to adhere to the campus housing contract and limit the amount of alcohol in my kitchen? What did it look like to have friends over? What did it look like to have romantic partners visit? Was overwork and exploitation a necessary sacrifice for having a decent place to live? When was I working? When was I not working (was I ever not working)? During those years and the following ones in which I supervised live-in residential staff, I often lacked a framework for understanding my own and others’ experiences of residential life work as it related to the experience of living-in. Given the professionalization of the field of housing and residential life over the past several decades and the high numbers of live-in residential staff in US colleges and universities, frameworks for considering the live-in experience are necessary and important. Live-in residential staff are undergraduate and graduate students and full-time staff who, as a condition of and as partial or full compensation for their employment, live in an on-campus residence hall. Such staff members’ responsibilities vary, often including on-call emergency and crisis response, programing and education, advising and counseling students, ensuring compliance with safety and behavioral policies, and more. As of 2017, the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International (ACUHO-I) reported that of their member organizations, most campuses had five or more full-time live in professional staff (ACUHO-I, 2018). In the same year, 2,155 US higher education institutions provided on-campus housing with the capacity to house 3.2 million students (ACUHO-I, 2018). Thousands of live-in professional residential staff and countless more part-time graduate and undergraduate live-in residential staff serve and educate millions of residential students in US higher education institutions. Meanwhile, scholars and practitioners in higher education have