When you think about student self-governance at the University, Student Council or the Honor Committee might come to mind — but not Housing and Residence Life. I too was struck by this as a new Resident advisor because it seemed to me that student self-governance was similarly intrinsic to the organization of HRL as it is for Student Council. During my first week of orientation training this summer, co-chairs and vice chairs of HRL were the ones at the front of the room, students who infused their RA experiences into their presentations. The importance of these student leaders to the program was further emphasized by a Virginia Magazine article which introduced HRL’s two co-chairs alongside other major student leaders like Student Council president. Nevertheless, what I had experienced and what I had heard from returning RAs contradicted the public emphasis on the self-governing structures of HRL.
As an organization, HRL aims to create residential spaces that empower student leaders, following the University’s greater aspiration to give students the power to change both our community and our world. In this way, student self-governance is embedded in the mission statement of HRL. Towards this end, HRL has engineered an extensive hierarchy in which student RAs are encouraged to build a community — or a home — out of the dorm experience. And although this branding uplifts an aspirational view of the relationship between HRL and student self-governance, the reality is more complicated. Instead, HRL has failed to embody the principles of student self-governance — a failure which necessitates immediate reappraisal of the organization’s structures and policies.
Let me be clear — after serving one semester as an RA, I have nothing but positive things to share about my association and the student leadership I have encountered. This past month, prospective RAs received their offers to join Resident Staff — with no hesitation would I encourage them to accept. Being an RA is grueling, complicated and undoubtedly my favorite part of my University experience. And it is my love for this role that necessitates my critical engagement with the imperfections of HRL. Without a doubt, student self-governance — and the struggle for RAs to identify with its implementation — is one of these issues with which I must engage.
Of course, there is natural trepidation for many around the idea that HRL should embrace student self-governance. RAs manage significant crises such as medical emergencies or bias incidents, so adult oversight seems necessary. RAs are currently supported by professional staff, made up of residence life coordinators, associate and assistant deans and directors. However, while professional and adult support is reasonable, it must be balanced with student leadership. Despite, HRL’s rhetorical aspirations to student self-governance, this balance does not currently exist.
While higher-level student roles like CCs take an active role in the processes of HRL, RAs individually experience limitations in their ability to act autonomously, something which damages the efficacy of HRL as a whole. Consider that the RA position is one which is founded upon the mutual exchange of accumulated student knowledge — returning staffers guide new staffers on a wide range of issues including resident crises and Promotions. This is not knowledge which can be shared by professional staff, commonly referred to as ProStaff. In fact, it could be argued that ProStaff implicitly and problematically dilute student self-governance.
Transparency, perhaps above all else, powers student self-governance because students are able to actively learn about and participate in the structures which surround them. However, understanding the structure of HRL is a hefty task for those outside of the organization — much of the information about HRL structures is not publicly accessible. Large swaths of information about processes in HRL and opportunities for leadership are hidden behind a NetBadge login, solely accessible to the people already within the organization. Certainly, non-RAs do not need access to HRL’s resources on incident response. Yet, hindering the ability for prospective RAs and students alike to learn more about HRL as an organization undermines the transparency necessary for student self-governance to thrive.
So for the sake of transparency, let me demystify the HRL hierarchy. The hierarchy begins with the RA, whose responsibility is to develop a community within their hall. This is a role which unambiguously embodies student self-governance because RAs are tasked with developing leadership amongst their residents and acting as upstanding role models. Overseeing this work is a Senior Resident, who manages a staff of RAs and is similarly responsible for serving as a model to RAs. Continuing up the ladder are the VCs, who lead an HRL process such as Selections or Accountability. In their role, they also chair RA committees — an exercise of student self-governance which allows RAs to control the direction of certain organizational processes. Finally, above the VCs are the two CCs, students who directly correspond with the ProStaff of HRL and determine standards across HRL.
Within this hierarchy, all the systems of student self-governance are technically present — students direct the training and affairs of other students in the organization. RA committees, for example, do important work to represent Resident Staff’s voices in conversations about HRL’s direction. SRs, for their part, create and lead in-service training for RAs throughout the year. Orientation week is led by presentations from the VCs and CCs alongside ProStaff. And if an RA is brought to the Accountability Council, the measures against them are decided by a jury of their peers — four SRs and two RAs alongside a VC, the CCs, and a set of ProStaff. Through these systems, student leadership is plausibly upheld, but this does not mean that HRL has entirely lived up to the values of student self-governance. Instead, top-down control by ProStaff has complicated these processes.
For some RAs, the overreach of ProStaff is exemplified in the process of event programming. An RA’s event has to be approved by their SR and ProStaff before they are able to purchase event materials. Bureaucratic oversight like this can disturb an RA’s self-governing capabilities and undermine their ability to effectively lead and mentor their halls. RAs should be entrusted with the expertise about what events their halls need in order to thrive, but this significant level of oversight and expectations makes such trust impossible, making RAs feel more like undermined employees than student leaders.
Similarly, while the Selections process — responsible for selecting new RAs each year — may seem like a protected extension of student-self governance in HRL, the opacity of the committee complicates its impact. Committee members produce standardized interview questions for RAs to use during their interviews with prospective candidates, create packets for RAs to score candidates and calculate scores to select their new class. Letting the committee develop standardized questions for RAs is a fantastic concept in theory. This empowers current RAs to reflect on their knowledge of the skills inherent to a strong RA, while steering them away from bias through standardized questions. Yet, ProStaff’s involvement in Selections is glaringly apparent and constitutes a sort of purposeless micromanagement.
For example, this past year, one interview tasked RAs to ask candidates a question about their interest in their role — and irrelevantly grade them on whether they mentioned the HRL mission statement in their response. Not only did this trick question distract from the personalized response of the candidate, but this arbitrary standardization removed the expertise of RAs themselves from the scoring process. Situations like these support the idea that the talents of RAs can be standardized out — that a candidate who can parrot a standardized, HRL-endorsed statement is stronger than one who can articulate what personally drew them to the RA role. By upholding the existing system over new ideas that current RAs bring into the Selections process, the principles of student self-governance are once again undermined.
Another major decision by HRL earlier this year also exemplified the organization’s inability to live up to its commitment of student self-governance — pre-assignment. Previously, SRs selected their staffers each year through a draft, a process which HRL permitted and which upheld student self-governance. This process encouraged greater staff cohesion between SRs and RAs, as they had the entire year to preemptively get to know each other as staffers before agreeing to join a staff. While this system may have been imperfect, it upheld the autonomy of SRs as well as the relative self-selection of RAs. However, for the 2024-25 academic year, instead of this accepted system, 25 percent of returning RAs were not allowed into the draft system of dorm selection.
Not only was HRL’s decision to pre-assign 25 percent of RAs cloaked in a lack of transparency, but it also thoroughly violated HRL’s purported values of student self-governance. RAs and SRs signed the program agreement with the expectation of the system that had been all but formalized for many decades of HRL — this eleventh-hour change breached this expectation. Through HRL’s lack of transparency, Resident Staff lost an integral element of independence and self-governance in their position. No accountability has been taken for this policy. And as a result of this top-down secrecy, SRs continue to be unsure whether their autonomy will continue to be undermined this year.
Without a doubt, any semblance of student self-governance is directly threatened by this fear — that ProStaff can suddenly make a decision which sidesteps student leadership without being held accountable to the people who are affected by the decision. Pre-assignment could possibly impact retention of returning RAs, which in turn negatively impacts the institutional knowledge and empowerment of each association staff. Without hesitation, HRL should restore SR’s autonomy by putting a permanent end to pre-assignment — this is the bare minimum. But beyond this, HRL must stop structurally undermining its students and the values of student self-governance which it seeks to uphold.
The most obvious and necessary remedy for HRL going forward is coincidentally one of the greatest tools on any Resident Staff across Grounds — communication. HRL must take further steps to advertise and expand the paths of student self-governance in the organization. HRL has the existing structure, tools and energy to make Resident Staff a truly student, self-governed entity. It has carved out a system with a massive amount of potential, potential which is unfairly squandered by choices which favor professional voices over broader discourse. It is up to the people in current positions of power in HRL to recognize the faults of the system’s structure. And it is up to our new class of RAs, as well as HRL’s current Promotions applicants, to understand just how necessary student leadership is to the mission of HRL. Housing does not feel like home, until the amenities and the decorations represent those inhabiting it.
Scarlett Sullivan is the Executive Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the authors alone.
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