Residential Life (ResLife) is a lifestyle more than it is a job. During my four years at Middlebury, I’ve been an Residential Assistant (RA) for three and I am the Head RA of Hepburn Hall this year. Legitimately, some of the kindest and most open-minded people I have met on campus have been those I have met through ResLife. It takes a special kind of person to be deeply invested in creating spaces where people can be held as themselves and supported through the shared experience of living with strangers, in a space more diverse and challenging than most incoming students have ever experienced. Reslife staff members are seen as the “last line of defense” in a system that creates an environment of student distress.
Apparently, “RA” has become a part of the way I am described to people. “Marlow, Senior, curly hair, ResLife?” This stressed me out for quite some time. I thought that people might see me as authoritative, patronizing or hypocritical. Then, one of my friends highlighted that some of the coolest people they’ve met on campus are RAs. Generally compassionate, altruistic, and genuine people, maintaining empathy as a core pillar of your 24/7 occupation, while also being a full-time student, is a huge level of responsibility, and takes a great deal of care.
Being an RA at Middlebury is incredibly different than it is at many of the large universities in the country. My good friend, who is an RA at Indiana University, and I bonded over our ResLife experience, and having made the majority of our friends during the incredible amount of training and long nights of duty. Her job, however, is much more focused on the policing, rule-enforcement, safety-patrol aspects of the position than RAs at Middlebury are encouraged to focus on. Instead, we primarily stress the importance of community, of checking in with residents and building relationships as well as providing a person a place of trust and a touchpoint in the whirlwind (that sometimes becomes a sinkhole) of Middlebury. To make sure that people don’t fall through the cracks, we are “the last line of defense.”
On a campus where mental health is a pervasive issue, and where many of us, as students as well, also struggle with our own well-being, the level of responsibility that many of us feel to keep our residents afloat is overwhelming and contributes to the mental load that we already deal with as members of this community where struggle is incredibly normalized. ResLife staff members and strong hall communities are not stand-ins for systems of student support and an environment that fosters student welfare. There is a lovely metaphor that I was introduced to by a beloved professor about babies being thrown in the river. It goes something like this:
“You’re sitting by a river, having a lovely little picnic with your friends, when suddenly you see a baby floating downstream. Obviously, you jump to action, trying to grab and save the baby. But, once you get into the water, you see more babies rushing toward you.”
How long do you spend tiring yourself out, hoisting babies out of the water, until you storm upstream to find the asshole throwing them in to begin with? How long can you rely on the incredible amount of passion, energy and emotional labor of bright young community members to care for one another in a system that repeatedly breaks them down?
ResLife has to be one of the pillars of driving change at this institution — we live together, whether we like it or not. How can we better build community, while knowing that this is not the only thing that we need to support student wellness on campus? How can we ask what is reasonable from students who are not mental health professionals, and also living their own lives?
During training this year, a new staff member who was my resident last year shared with me that they wished they had known how much ResLife staff actually do. We are not here to police you, or to slap you on the wrist. We do this work because we care about this community, and I can tell you that we are doing the best we can.
