The transition from “RA” to “CA” has proven to be more than just a one-letter change.
Resident assistants became community assistants this year, and the new CAs now deal with the nitty-gritty of dorm social life in addition to enforcing Northwestern policy.
While still charged with enforcing housing policy, as RAs also were, CAs are trained to interact with dorm residents more like their peers and less like authority figures. They also try to create a community within a dorm by planning events on a weekly basis.
“The term ‘RA’ has an edge to it,” said Weinberg senior Michael Platt, senior CA of Foster-Walker Complex. “It has a stigma of discipline, but (CA) brings us down to the level of residents.”
Undergraduate Residential Life decided in November to make the change in an effort to strengthen communities within residential areas. The CA selection process was designed to give applicants more say in where they would be living.
Some of this year’s CAs are former RAs. Others were new applicants who wanted to try the position. All had to go through training to become CAs.
Platt, a former RA at Plex, said CAs were trained to communicate, not just to enforce policy.
“If a resident comes to me saying her neighbor is playing his music too loud, I’ll tell that resident to take up the issue with (the neighbor) herself,” Platt said, rather than dealing with the neighbor himself.
David Spett, Communications Residential College president, said his dorm did not need the extra community building that CAs are supposed to provide.
Spett, a Medill sophomore, said CRC already housed a socially active group of students and did not need someone to build community from scratch.
“The CAs asked everyone in the dorm if they wanted to hold meetings and create intramural teams, and these are things that are already handled by the executive board,” he said.
There were also problems during New Student Week and at the beginning of Fall Quarter when CAs were planning events that conflicted with the dorm government’s agenda, Spett said. The problems have since been worked out.
“We looked unprepared and unprofessional for the freshmen,” he said. “Changing the name from RA to CA is fine as long as they work with the dorm government.”
Platt said he had no problems in his own residence hall and viewed the change to CAs as a success.
Virginia Koch, the senior assistant director of Residential Life, said she was impressed with the transition to CAs.
“They’ve only been on the job for about five weeks and already we are noticing a difference in the kinds of interactions that they are having with their residents,” she said.
Reach Nitesh Srivastava at [email protected].
