This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “What is the future of the RD position and role?”
Guest Post by Zachary Wiberg, Residence Life Professional
In the time spent in my previous role as a Resident Director at a mid-size semi-rural public institution and from discussing the role with peers across different campuses, I’d be hard-pressed to say what the definitive and singular future of the RD role looks like. Every institution has its own student body, campus culture, and academic focus that would necessitate countless different approaches to the role of any on-campus staff members, especially those who are often the first point of contact for many of our students. Rather than answer the question with a broad approach aimed at a generalized idea of what a Resident Director is, I’d like to propose a fairly radical approach to what the concept of a Resident Director could potentially become.
The exact job description of what a Resident Director does can vary wildly across institutions, and other similar roles such as Residence Life Coordinator or Residence Hall Director can make it even harder to explain what exactly it is we do here. For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s summarize the role as a “live-on staff member who oversees some amount of on-campus students”.
As a consequence of this proximity to working where our students live, this staff member is often the first person that a residential student will go to when they have a question and don’t already know who on campus can best help them. Because of this, the Resident Director often takes the role of what I’d describe as a reverse funnel: one person taking these student questions and concerns regarding a wide range of topics and directing that student out to any number of offices that can best help them. As a Resident Director, I cannot directly add a student to a class or provide a psychological evaluation of what they’re going through, but I should know where I can send them to. The main obstacle to this approach is that in our potentially siloed departments, we often don’t personally know the staff member we’re directing a student towards.
My potential future of the RD role helps to eliminate this separation of interdependent offices; I suggest a future where the RD role is entirely decentralized and embedded across the offices most sought out by our on-campus students. In this model, some number of student-facing offices on-campus would have 1-2 of their staff members live-on and split their job functions between the supervision of residential students along with responsibilities related to their core department (e.g. a Campus Recreation RD, a Career Services RD, and Counseling Center RD, etc). These Resident Directors would work within each of their separate offices while also working with each other as a residential staff. While typical RD positions call for entry to mid-level professionals, this version of the RD could range from entry-level coordinators up through senior staff at the director level. In this model, any time an RD has to recommend a student to another office, they have built-in a direct relationship with someone in that office.
It’s worth mentioning that this model couldn’t work across all styles of campus or at all types of institutions, so stakeholders would have to carefully consider if it would benefit their specific situation. For example, this would effectively give a hard limit to the size of on-campus residence halls and would require a campus with space for multiple smaller living spaces; an RD operating under this model couldn’t oversee a building large enough to require their full working time and attention since they’re still sharing their time with the office they’re embedded within. Of course another thing to consider before implementing anything like this is the reaction of current staff; any campus used to the standard RD model would likely see reasonable pushback from staff members who specifically sought work outside of Residential Education and life off-campus suddenly being told some of them have to move into campus housing and start mediating petty roommate conflicts. It’s because of issues like this that I specify this is not a singular future for the role overall, but one of many potential futures we could see this role evolve into.
No one knows exactly what the RD role is going to look like in the future, and it certainly won’t look exactly the same across every school. I don’t think any of the roles we work in can truly fall under a one size fits all description, especially one as unpredictable on a day to day basis as being a Resident Director. Having said that, most of us in the field would agree that it feels like we’re approaching a time of potentially big shifts and necessary adaptations to widespread evolving trends in the field of Higher Education, so it would benefit any institution to think about not only how they’ve been serving their students in the current model, but how they could serve their students in a future that requires a drastically different approach.
