Language RAs reassigned

The Dean of Students’ office will restructure the distribution of Residential Advisors (RA) for the 2010-11 academic year in order to achieve a more balanced ratio of RAs to the students they oversee.

Under the new system, the administration will retain the same number of RA positions. Many of the current language house RA positions will be spread throughout others parts of campus. The Spanish, French, German and Japanese houses will select RAs for the coming year. That reduced number of RAs will oversee the other language houses.

Senior Residence Advisor Lee Zerrilla said the decision was made to reassign RAs because of an imbalance in coverage across the College.

“Currently in the Dean of Students [domain] there are 997 residents and 32 RAs, which gives us an average of about 30 residents per RA,” Zerrilla said.

“While that number might seem manageable, the average doesn’t reflect the whole story. Many language house RAs supervise between four and six students, while some community RAs have far greater numbers. The RA in Atwater Hall A, for example, has 84 residents assigned to them.  Because of this disparity, very few locations on campus actually fall near the average.”

Among those set to lose a house RA is the Italian department.

Professor of Italian and Department Chair Thomas Van Order learned of the decision on March 4. The decision had already been made and the department had begun to solicit applications for the RA position for the following year.

Van Order said he understood the rationale for the decision, but objects to how it was made.

“There is a great deal of redundancy between the positions of RA and Teaching Assistant (TA), and in a language house with a total of six members, it is hard to justify two paid leadership positions,” he said.

“I think that it was wrong that the decision to eliminate the Italian RA was made with minimal input from the Italian department.”

Zerrilla emphasized that several RAs on campus currently oversee multiple small houses and said that those arrangements work well.

“RA responsibilities will be shared across multiple houses, much as they are now with the small house RAs that work with unaffiliated houses,” he said.

“Other portions of the RA role have been non-standardized among the academic interest houses. In some, TAs plan the bulk of language and cultural programming. In other cases, you have an RA who only needs to take care of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the housing operation for a handful of students.”

Van Order said having another RA in charge of the Italian House concerns him.

In spite of the concerns, Zerrilla said no cuts to the number of positions will be made and the new system will improve the residential system.

“This new system allows increased flexibility to hire and assign additional RAs in places on campus where they are needed most, to help alleviate the strain of some of those high numbers,” he said. “[It will] allow us to focus on serving students better.”