Resident Assistant roles distributed

The conventional Resident Assistant role of earlier days has become so complicated that institutions such as Binghamton University are breaking it up into separate functions and hourly employment. The Binghamton model defines a community assistant, student support assistant, and other hourly jobs related to management and targeted functions. Higher education has relied on RAs for a long time as a cheap way to manage and program residence halls but, with the growing complexity of student demographics and needs, it seems inevitable that the RA functions would have to be segmented in order to reduce stress and probably effectiveness of those who hold these roles.

The question is, how will the new segmented roles relate to one another and what does supervision by professional staff look like under this model? The idea of addressing the wholistic needs of students could get lost in translation and that would not be in students' best interest. I hope that student affairs educators involved in residence life positions are thinking this through carefully. Distributing functions could improve attention to important issues but it might also mean losing a sense of how all the pieces fit together to fulfill the core purpose of student learning and development.