We are currently living in a time of great tension and fear, a time when safety concerns are at a fever pitch. Every day on my television, John Ashcroft is telling me that I need to be “on the highest alert” for the next boogeyman that’s out to get me. After being on a state of “highest alert” for about three months, I’m pretty exhausted. Meanwhile, it seems that members of Housing Services are taking Ashcroft’s message to heart-but, in my humble opinion, they seem to be taking it just a bit too far.
Early this semester, my roommate and I were written up for burning incense in our room. One problem: we don’t have incense. At any rate, we were cleared of the charges, and all of that is water under the bridge. If that had been the only incident between the Residence Life staff and me this semester, that would have been the end of it, and this column would never have been written.
But that has definitely not been the end of it.
The other night I was outside hanging out with my roommate. We were out in front of our building, in front of one of those doors that you’re not supposed to go through, basically because it’s conveniently placed in the building. What is the idea with that anyway? They can say what doors we’re supposed to use? Why is the door there in the first place, then?
Seriously, though, I know that students living in residence halls like to have guidance, structure, and rules. It can make them feel more comfortable being away from home knowing that someone else is looking out for them. And trust me, I’m grateful for that side of what ResLife does. But even my house at home, presided over my parents, who are definitely more concerned with my safety than an RA could ever be, has two entrances/exits, which I am free to use at any time. I just don’t get it.
We had propped the door open with a pebble so that we could get back in. Unfortunately, we seemed to have done so right under the nose of an RA. Which was stupid, I’ll admit. Not that we, and other residents in our living area, haven’t done the same thing dozens of times before. We just happened to get caught this time.
“Excuse me, do you have your IDs?” this RA asked us.
“No, sorry,” we said, wanting to negotiate as best we could. He asked us to go and get them. We did.
This is where the merely mundane, and then the merely unfortunate, becomes totally ludicrous. “Wow, I’m really surprised you guys came back,” snorted the RA when we returned. He then proceeded to start writing our information down.
Let me rephrase that a little. Without having given us any identification of his own to prove that he was an RA, or a name, or a floor he worked on, or even whether he was on duty at that time, this anonymous stranger began writing the names, room number, and student ID numbers of two young women down on a sheet of paper.
At this point, this seemed more threatening than whether or not I had used the wrong door – call me crazy.
When I asked him what he was doing, he reminded me that I had committed a housing violation. I never knew that that meant I had no right to be informed of what he was doing with all of my information.
Cutting to the chase, I said, “So, you’re going to write us up even though we went to get our IDs to prove that we live here.”
“Actually,” he replied coolly, “I asked you to go back upstairs to get your IDs so that I could write you up.”
So let me boil this down for you: because my roommate and I were honest with this RA, and because we went upstairs and trotted right back down with the identification he had asked for, he was subjecting us to disciplinary action. And, of course, there’s the flip side which is even more mind-boggling: he was basically telling us that if we had just run away from him, giggling, like the naughty little girls we were, and gone and hidden in our room and been completely deceitful, there wouldn’t have been a problem.
There is something seriously wrong here.
Maybe my issue is that, since I’m a senior, I may be getting too old for the type of pseudo-parenting that’s going on here. Maybe it’s an issue with the fact that most of these RAs exerting their authority over me are sometimes two or three years my junior. I don’t know.
But, being a senior, I have the perspective of four years of life in the residence halls, and I have never had an experience like the one I’ve had this semester. RAs seem to have become more vigilant and more precise in the details of their duties recently. While it’s great that they’re paying attention (I have had the experience of an absentee RA before, and that wasn’t pleasant either), there’s a fine line between being thorough in order to facilitate residence life, and being so picky that you make life harder on residents. So far, sad to say, my experience in the residence halls this year has definitely leaned toward the latter.
Still, if it had merely been these two incidents, I would have simply felt fortunate that these had been my only two bad experiences with Housing and moved on. But my trials with ResLife staff did not end with that incident, either, and my most recent RA run-in involved something so tiny, so seemingly insignificant, that I am left to wonder what I’ll be disciplined for next.
After the whole write-up debacle involving incense, I hung the notice of our acquittal on the outside of my door, so that any other RA passing by our room would know that, if they smelled incense in the hallway, it wasn’t our room.
Silly me! Trying to help them!
Recently, an RA on duty came by and knocked on our door. Quite pleasantly, but emphatically, she told me that she was offended by my posting of my notice on my door. She asked me, albeit politely, to take it down. I tried explaining my reasons for hanging the notice up, to no avail.
Tenser and tenser words were then spoken; eventually, I found myself defending my (I thought) basic right to post a simple piece of paper on the door of the room that is supposed to be my home, to a complete stranger at 11:30 at night. Is it just me, or is there something incredibly wrong with that picture?
Finally, I asked this RA if there was any rule saying that I had to take the notice down. She admitted that, no, there wasn’t. I thanked her for her input and told her that I would probably be keeping it up.
First Amendment or no, knowing my bad luck with Residence Life this year, I’m sure that’s probably not the end of that.
