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I would like to take this opportunity to say goodbye to all the most decent and hard-working RAs on this campus. Also, to respectfully say goodbye to our student leaders. Goodbye Priyanth Chandrasekar, Amanda Brown and anyone else who has ever held a student leadership position while also being an RA.
The organization known as ResLife is taking charge of the RA staff and preventing them from holding a student leadership position. People like Priyanth or Amanda will never have the opportunity to flourish to their full potential because of yet another change Tara Loomis of ResLife is making.
After talking to many RAs and residents alike, I got the feel of how discontented everyone truly is with this. No RA wanted to speak on the record for fear of losing their privileged positions, but off the record they showed strong dissatisfaction with these changes.
All of the blame, however, cannot be put on Loomis. If anything, she should be praised for allowing RAs to hold these leadership positions for the last two years. Her predecessor, Barbara Smith, did not allow this for 25 years because she felt it was a conflict to allow anyone to be in Student Government and also in ResLife. Thankfully Loomis did allow for this, but she now feels there is a reason for change due to the fact that as university employees, RAs who also serve in student leadership positions have a conflict of interest.
So this leads to what? How will students be affected by this? Well, it is a matter of zero-sum games at this point. Either we will have amazing RAs like we currently do, yet suffer serious losses in these student leadership positions, or we will lose these great RAs to the student organizations. This is crippling the campus. Either the dorms are going to have really good or really bad RAs and our leadership organizations will have either really good or really bad people filling the positions.
This issue should be handled on a case-by-case basis. The people who have held both positions have always managed to do so effectively. No one should take away anyone’s right to perform to their full potential. I just want to help bring ResLife back down to a controllable level. I don’t blame Loomis for this, but I believe we need to work with her and show her that before she makes decisions that will affect thousands of people, she should discuss it first.
With all these changes occurring, runaway totalitarian rule can ensue – according to my political science teachers, anyway! We need to instill a system of checks and balances by the students for a change. For now, that’s it. Keep a weather eye toward the near future for any changes.
Abtin Mehdizadegan is a first-year political science major.
