My Brush With Communism
When I started college I had a few small scholarships. While they helped offset initial costs, I knew my parents were struggling to keep up with the bills. Halfway through my second semester, I got a job working for a professor, which I continued my sophomore year. That job paid for my food and basic necessities so that my parents could stop paying for the college meal plan. But it wasn’t enough. Halfway through my sophomore year, my mom informed me that something had to change. They couldn’t afford to keep paying for me to live on campus, and I might have to move home and commute an hour both ways or just figure out a different educational plan altogether.
Thankfully, a friend told me that a Resident Advisor position at the campus apartments had opened up. He recommended me (he was an R.A. there) and I got the job. It was like a dream come true. It gave me free housing, a meal plan, and a small stipend, which meant I could stop living off discount dented cans of soup and clearance aisle, almost-out-of date crackers.
The job had a bit of a steep learning curve at first since I was brought in mid-semester and received no official training, but the staff was great and our Resident Director, a black woman, was respectful to the R.A.s and had reasonable expectations.
When my junior year rolled around, I was excited at the thought of finally going through training. I hoped it would give me a better picture of how to carry out my duties and serve my residents. But training was a lot different than I expected. Our R.D. from the year before had gone on to bigger and better things, and rumor had it that her replacement was a young white woman who had managed another dorm and was very demanding. I wasn’t too worried and just chalked it up to paranoia.
Training started, but instead of info sessions on the things I’d hoped to learn, it was essentially “Wokeness 101.” In one exercise we were given “identities” like “Gay Latino Male” or “White Female” and then sent around to the various stations that represented things like banks and apartments. If you had been given a straight, white “identity” everyone was nice to you. If you had been given any other identity, the people at the station would tell you they didn’t have anything for you, mock you, and even yell at you. Our extremely diverse group of R.A.s, who had never experienced anything like this in the actual real world (we talked about it), was told that this was how the world works.
After that exercise, we were made to line up beside each other and were asked a series of questions. If the answer was “yes,” we were to step forward. The questions began innocuously enough. I learned that most of us came from backgrounds where our families were barely getting by, where we faced different economic and social challenges. All except for our new R.D., who had grown up in a privileged background in a family with money to spare. Then the questions became more and more personal, and delved into areas that I felt were inappropriate for college students to be forced to divulge in front of each other. But peer pressure being what it was, and since it was mandatory training for our jobs, we answered honestly about painful and sensitive realities in our lives.
Being an R.A. in college apartments was very different from the dorms. The students were mostly upper-classmen, were busy in their schoolwork, and already had established friend groups. Very few were ever interested in attending programs, even when they were just us desperately trying to hand out pizza and get residents to mingle as some diversity movie played in the background so that we could count it as one of the many mandatory programs that the new R.D. had added to our requirements.
Her push though, was for programs that often went against the value systems of many of our R.A.s, and I often thought that most parents would be angry if they knew the kinds of things their kids were being taught, not in their classrooms, but by University Housing. Her ever-increasing requirements began to take more and more of our time as R.A.s and take over more of our lives. We were all stressed and our grades even started to suffer.
We were constantly told that we needed to spend more money on programs because the money in our bank account was piling up and that, if we didn’t spend it, the university wouldn’t give us more money. Being a fiscal conservative, that reasoning didn’t make much sense to me and I wondered why we didn’t just charge students less in fees if we had all this money to blow.
As R.A.s, we were forced to participate in a “date auction” to raise money for some cause I can’t remember anymore. Our R.D. was extremely competitive with the other R.D.s and pushed us to advertise ourselves so we could raise the most money. I remember nervously standing at the front of the room during the date auction, being bid on by guys who I had noticed leering at me around the apartments and who I would never have willingly gone out with. I wondered what fate I was going to meet and why this was somehow ok.
Finally, just before Christmas, we had a staff meeting. Our R.D. informed us that they were making some changes to our time off. Normally, we were required to stay in our apartments, even on weekends, except for certain school holidays. For some smaller holidays we were required to take turns staying on campus so we could maintain an R.A. presence. R.A.s always got large holidays, like winter break, off. This was the R.A. policy for all of campus.
At that meeting, our R.D. told us that they were requiring us to stay at the apartments for winter break, and that we would be allowed to sign up for different shifts on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For a group of college kids who don’t have the freedom to go home on weekends, dying to see their families for Christmas, many who didn’t live close enough to drive back and forth in that amount of time, it was a huge blow. We were all baffled. We suggested several different strategies to keep the apartments staffed while giving us the break we had been promised, but our R.D. argued that, since we had studio apartments instead of dorm rooms, they felt it was fair to expect us to see them as our “home base.” We protested, reminding her that this was not what we signed up for. But she told us that it was perfectly legal because the paperwork we had signed said that they were able to amend the contract.
That’s when it really hit me. If people control your housing, your food, and your job, they can do absolutely anything they want to you. You have no way out. This was life under communism. Most of us were in this job precisely because we came from backgrounds where we couldn’t afford college without it. It seemed like the answer to all of our problems.
I talked to my parents, who were livid, and they told me to quit. Most of my friends simply couldn’t afford to. During my exit interview, my R.D. informed me that she had noted in my file that I was leaving angry. I was confused, since I thought I had maintained a respectful attitude during the process. Then she read from my file where she had asked me in the contentious meeting whether it made me angry that we were losing our winter break and I replied, “Of course it makes me angry.” I sat there stunned, thinking that she was a master of manipulation.
I moved off campus to a less-than-glamorous apartment with some friends. Despite the persistent roach problem and the shooting the happened in the neighboring small apartment complex, it worked out fine for a few months, until the real estate company assigned us a new roommate who was selling drugs and herself out of our apartment. My other roommates and I tried to get out of our lease because we were terrified of the druggies and grown men being brought in every night to our shared living space, but the rental company wouldn’t let us out unless our roommate’s activities had been documented by the cops. So, I spent the rest of my senior year living on my brother’s couch while still paying thousands of dollars for an apartment I was no longer living in that had been turned into a drug house.
What baffled me about my time as an R.A., was that this woke white woman, who lectured the rest of us (quite the diverse group in every way but economic) about having empathy for people’s plights in life, couldn’t see that she was preying on the very people she was purporting to care about.
