Living With It: Arcadia Residence and Commuter Life, its Depleted Student Staff, and Why It Matters
“I have never heard someone be that disrespectful to me. You are so unprofessional. How dare you speak to me like that?”
Those were the final words Mia Kashuba, a junior and Arcadia University resident assistant, heard from her supervisor, Taryn Foy, during her time on the Residence and Commuter Life staff. Foy followed Mia out of their meeting and publicly berated her. It was the final straw, and Mia quit her job on the spot.
After the Spring 2019 semester, a quarter of the student staff members working as Resident Assistants (RAs) and Commuter Assistants (CAs) decided they would not be returning to or reapplying for their positions. To the outside — and especially to residential students on Arcadia’s campus who interact with their RAs rather frequently — all seemed well. When a scramble to find the last few staff members for the 2019–2020 began, what came to light was, instead, a culture of disrespect from the top down and abuse of power.
Residence and Commuter Life at Arcadia University is fueled by a small professional staff and a much larger group of student workers. The student positions require a 2.5 GPA as well as good academic and disciplinary standing. However, rather than completely subsidizing the housing costs the RAs face as they are required to live on campus, purchase a meal plan, and be a leader as well as disciplinarian for their peers as many other universities do, Arcadia only discounts those room and board rates. An outside consulting firm hired by the university recently suggested that Arcadia is vastly behind the times on this — and considering that other universities in the Greater Philadelphia Area subsidize RA housing at a much higher rate, that consultation is a bit damning.
However, without even those discounted rates, many of the students who apply for these positions, Mia Kashuba being one of them, would be unable to afford campus housing.
https://soundcloud.com/user-716459728/arcadia-res-life-interviews
Mia’s story is one of a rather large number of stories circulating concerning the mismanagement of and disrespect towards student labor from this particular campus department. Not only was there an issue recruiting students to take on upper leadership roles, but there was also an issue of placing more responsibilities onto these student workers without taking into account their needs or compensating with a higher discounted housing rate (which was formerly customary for students taking on Senior RA leadership positions.)
RAs in the Oak Summit apartments are not required to purchase a meal plan as their accommodations include cooking space. Meal plans cost thousands of dollars a semester — even the smallest ones — and can make or break a student worker’s financial ability to perform in that job when off campus, non-Arcadia housing options might be more cost effective.
After 2 years of accolades as an Oak Summit RA and after rescinding a leadership application for personal reasons, Mia was placed in a single room on campus in first year housing.
To many, the removal would seem like a slight on top of the financial issues it created. Mia expressed concerns to Foy and was met with backlash. She also chose that moment to express concern for her fellow staff members who identified as gender non-binary who had continuously been placed in binary enforcing halls, forcing a discomfort that had never been taken into account and would soon cause a number of them to quit.
“They end up losing a lot of people who care about the university because they don’t take personal considerations into account as much as they should.” Mia said of the department, which bled heavily with the loss of a quarter of its returning staff moving into the 2019–2020 year.
As Mia accounts, Foy followed her out of the Student Affairs office and proceeded to berate Mia in public and shout at her — a student — in front of a crowded area of her fellow students. For Mia, that was the end of that. After expressing professional concerns in a position she took because she wanted to help people, she was reduced to tears by a member of the professional staff.
“I do think there is a disrespect to student labor. As someone who is really passionate about labor rights, I saw every day my labor being taken advantage of as well as that of others. I saw ineffectiveness from those who are actually paid and us having to pick up the pieces.” Mia recounted.
This was not the first instance where she felt disrespected, a number of which she outlined in a recent meeting with Dean of Students Andrew Goretsky.
“A pro staff member told us once that they could train animals to do our jobs and replace us.” Mia recounted. “We had been told that we were expendable and there were always more people who would come, but, in fact, they struggled every year to hire enough staff members.”
Other students, as she and others recounted, had faced issues bordering on discrimination. Two thirds of the commuter assistants practiced Islam, and the entire staff was asked to identify any conflicts they might have for scheduling training dates, religious or otherwise. Professional staff chose to have the training day on Eid ul-Adha, a holiday within Islam, “meaning they were stuck there or they chose to go home and [professional staff] would not have to train CAs. We as RAs were disrespected, but the CAs were taken advantage of to a whole new degree.” Another commuter assistant was told during a training this summer that she would not be permitted to leave campus to attend mass on a Sunday or she might face termination.
While the meeting between Mia Kashuba and Dean Goretsky was short, it might be the first step to opening up a dialogue between Student Affairs and student workers who feel mistreated. When asked what she hoped might come out of that meeting, Mia replied “empathy.”
Students applying for these positions seek them out for a number of reasons. Many are looking for a way to manage their expenses and look to residence life as a means of making college more affordable. However, there are other ways to do this which don’t require taking on such a demanding position. A job within residence and commuter life is one that necessitates the kind of students who want to build a community with one another. They are, more often than not, students looking to create an environment for their fellow students that makes them feel safe and comfortable on their college campus. It’s not about narcing on underage drinkers or keeping the noise down during finals week, and, at Arcadia University, it certainly isn’t all about the money. It’s about making a safe home for residents, something which becomes increasingly more difficult when staff members who want to make a difference feel stifled by their supervisory team.
The university’s core values have been altered in the last few years, meant to reflect the changing culture of the times. The list goes as follows: adaptability, excellence, fearlessness, integrity, intellectual freedom, justice, respect, and responsibility. While listed in alphabetical order, it seems the last three are meant to hit closest to home. One might say that each department on a campus is meant to reflect the core values of a university, but the student staff — current and former — of Arcadia Residence and Commuter Life seem to have seen a bit of a discrepancy between those values and their work environment.
