<p>And for all any of us know, the Residence Director for this particular housing facility may also have been released from his/her 1-year at will contract…</p>
<p>
I don’t think this is a comparable situation.</p>
<ul>
<li>They showed up for work, heck they live where they work.</li>
<li>They are not supervising children, they are dealing with adults. They are not really supervising anything. They are dealing with conflicts, providing recreational opportunities, looking for infractions, etc.</li>
<li>They have many responsibilities.</li>
</ul>
<p>They failed to fully carry out one particular area of their responsibilities, one which according to the article has been widely flouted for years with no repercussion. It certainly gives the appearance that the management didn’t seem to find it particularly important.</p>
<p>Until… one day it suddenly became important, and people were fired. It seems antithetical to a university environment, where you are there to learn and should be able to make a mistake without the hammer falling.</p>
<p>Maybe missing some rounds is so egregious that they deserved it, or something happened to make it so, although it is hard to believe that one incident would have affected 7 RAs. Hopefully more information comes out.</p>
<p>Do we know that they “showed up for work”. Do we know that they were even in the building during those hours? Just because you live in one of the buildings where you work, doesn’t mean that you were present and available during your working hours. </p>
<p>As far as it being different because it’s young adults, yes and no. Clearly the rules are different. There are no ratios, and policies about sight and sound supervision to worry about with adults, and the risks of being absent are different. Having said that, RA’s are hired because, rightly or wrongly, the university has concerns about student behavior, and student safety, and wants to provide some light supervision. That’s why the RA’s are there, and why there are policies that require them to move around, and not just sit and wait for people to bring problems to them. I guess you could argue that that supervision isn’t necessary, but if someone signs a contract saying that they’ll provide it, then they should abide by the contract.</p>
<p>One thing I love about this forum is how when a parent asks for help with their college student’s problem - the replies all say the student is over 18, they are an adult and should take care of things themselves. Then when these same aged students are fired from a job - the replies are full of they are just students, only young adults, they should be treated different from real adults.</p>
<p>“Until… one day it suddenly became important, and people were fired. It seems antithetical to a university environment, where you are there to learn and should be able to make a mistake without the hammer falling.”</p>
<p>It may not be antithetical to the university environment at all. University lawyers and risk managers are not stupid people: they are highly trained professionals and, while they can make mistakes, they didn’t take this step without lots of discussion and consideration. It creates a huge headache for them, but obviously less of a headache than they believed they would have if they didn’t take this action.</p>
<p>I feel like this is a lot like speeding, the speed limit (in this case rounds requirement) is always there. If you choose not to follow it you might get it caught today or you might not. But you’re still taking that risk every time you speed. Each one of these RAs took a risk and didn’t complete rounds. They now have to deal with the consequences.</p>
<p>Honestly, I doubt that’s what it is about at all.</p>
<p>Large companies make an announcement one fine morning and say they are laying off 7-8% all the time. 7 out of every hundred is not a big deal until you convert it to 7% of 350,000 and come out with 25,000. </p>
<p>7 out 180 people losing housing for 6 weeks is a drop in the ocean. Harvard cut something like 8% staff in the downturn a couple of years ago?</p>
<p>Im surprised that the RAs were responsible for more than one building.
At Ds school, they had an RA for every fifteen students.</p>
<p>Me too! At DS school, RA’s had one floor of the dorm. Don’t believe making the rounds of other buildings was required. Doesn’t the school have security guards doing the building checks?</p>
<p>It kinda reminds me of when I was in Girl Scouts, I think I was nine & we were on a camp out. It wasnt a very friendly troop & I was assigned a real whinger as a partner at bedtime. This meant if she had to go outside to the outhouse, I had to go with her. ( this was in fall- in the puget sound, so cold/raining)</p>
<p>Of course she waited until it was the middle of the night to go & I couldnt wake myself up. ( not that I was trying very hard) I absolutely refused to go with her, even when she went & got one of the leaders to try & make me. I didn’t see why we didnt have an old coffee can in the cabin, like my parents had in our big canvas tent in the middle of the night.
So the leader had to take her out, grumbling all the way.
It actually was great, because then the next morning she avoided me, instead of acting like we should be best friends.</p>
<p>Im reminded of it, because ultimately it is the schools responsibility to insure safety of the buildings, ( or of the leaders for the scouts) and it sounds like they may have cut back on security officers because they thought students could perform the same service.
Students arent security officers, & while the students needed to perform the duties of their position, I daresay many accepted it knowing that it was not enforced.
But the school, IMO, is the one responsible for security, not the students, no matter what the RA description says.</p>
<p>In reply to Mini at 37 </p>
<p>“Because the audit was precipitated by another event that we don’t yet know anything about, but which scared the university administration, its lawyers, and its risk management team so much that they felt drastic action - including the flak they would take from it - was absolutely worth it, not only justifiable, but necessary?”</p>
<p>A. The News article does not reference this incident – Is this just speculation on your part?</p>
<p>B. Even if there were an incident, the 7 were fired for missing rounds, it is likely many others missed rounds, so how could the head of ResLIfe, fire the 7 before the audit was completed and he knew whether others did the same thing? Are the others going to get a free pass on the same behaivor?</p>
<p>Texaspg, the article says the audit is not complete. Only one group is complete. The article said the head of Reslife has emailed the others that they are being audited. It isn’t as if 7 out of 188 were fired. Its 7 out of a sample of 14 were fired, and the other 174 are theoretically under audit.</p>
<p>Texaspg, if you worked in an organization with 188 employees performing the same function, reporting to the same department head, at the same general location (albeit with different low-level supervisor) would you do this? Examine 14 for non-performance, fire half, and then continue looking at the others? Now, since apparently the fired ones were not told how many rounds they missed, and there is a total lack of transparency on this, it may not be clear if the other 174 are held to the same standard. There are only two possibilities, either the head of Reslife is an idiot, or he intends to hold the other 174 to a different standard. </p>
<p>I hope someone ABOVE the head of ResLife looks at how these policies were applied, because it stinks to me.</p>
<p>Firing sounds justified. </p>
<p>The master move would be to resinstate the RAs with consent agreement for a financial penalty for each missed round for all RAs. That should apply to all RAs, those fired and those not fired. This way there is no need to find and train new RAs, and you can be sure future rounds will be completed, all of them. </p>
<p>No sympathy on the financial penalty, they didn’t do part of the job they were compensated for. They owe.</p>
<p>I can’t think of a better outcome.</p>
<p>We had an RA for each floor of each wing, but that doesn’t mean they were only responsible for their floor - otherwise they would have to be on duty every night. They were the person you went to if you were having issues with a roommate, or something that didn’t need an immediate response. In our building freshman year, there were 4 wings with 3 floors each, so 12 RA’s, plus one Resident Associate, who was in charge of the building as a whole - if your RA couldn’t work something out, he was brought in. Those 12 people rotated on-call duty overnight, so if something needed immediate attention at 3am, you went to that person, not your own RA.</p>
<p>It sounds like the RA they profiled was one of 2 in her building, but 14 in the group - so maybe 6 or 7 smaller buildings with 2 RAs per building. Either they alternate nights on call within their building, or they make rounds for all 6 or 7 buildings - it doesn’t sound to me like we’re talking about 6 or 7 huge buildings.</p>
<p>I don’t know if this affects RA assignment, but it’s worth noting that Northeastern has few traditional dorms. Every dorm that is not a freshmen dorm has apartment-style rooms, and some freshmen dorms do as well. I’m pretty sure I had an assigned RA my sophomore year but I don’t remember if I ever spoke to her. It just ends up being much more insular. Combine that with students working 9-5 on co-op, (hopefully) cleaning their own bathrooms, and maybe cooking for themselves, and it just becomes much more like independent living. Of course, there is still an RA to mediate disputes if necessary, but I think I mostly forgot that person existed. My freshman year, we were all in and out of each other’s rooms, including the RA’s. My sophomore year, I can’t remember having a conversation with the RA. Is it worth noting that my roommate’s friend lived with us for at least a month and nobody noticed? So I’m not certain of the policy, but I’m wondering if NU might spread RA’s out a bit more than some schools and that would explain the duties in multiple dorms.</p>
<p>I’m still thinking that there might be more to the story, but even if not, I’m not going to protest firing somebody who failed to do their job. RA jobs can be quite competitive these people got selected, and they are essentially being paid by their fellow students (or their parents) – do they really want to be providing their classmates with a single for free if they’re not performing the duties they’re supposed to be?</p>
<p>Classic Rock – so if firing sounds justified, should the Head of ResLife have to publicly disclose how many missed rounds result in being fired, and should every RA be subject to that policy, and should the application be audited by someone outside of ResLife?</p>
<p>A lot of places do spot checks on things. If you get caught on one of those, it’s really just too bad that you did and others don’t. I tend to agree with Mini that there is something else in the picture, but, yes, a small group can get targetted for transgressions that “everyone” is doing, fired or otherwise disciplined to give a big “whack” in terms of notice to everyone else. it does not have to be a fair process. </p>
<p>There was pilfering (really downright stealing) at a known eatery that got out of hand, and the owner used that to get rid of some workers he did not want anyways. He targeted them, rather than a random group, and did not focuse on everyone. Everyone took notice and the pilfering stopped or slowed down significantly as a result and he also put in some other measures to keep it from getting out of hand like it did. But the fact that most all of the employees had a hand in it (literally) but only a few were caught and fired is just a fact of life. That state trooper does not have to catch every single speeder on the roadway, to justify ticketing you. </p>
<p>However, I agree this whole thing was not well done and there is a lot of NEU negligence apparent. But my guess is that there was reason that those let go were on a short list already, and they just made it easy to get fired by not doing their jobs on something that is documentable. I’ll bet the RAs are now all doing their patrols and logging in as they were supposed to be doing all along.</p>
<p>But I really don’t know where anyone gets the idea that any institution, group, enforcement goes after every single transgressor in an enforcement swoop. Just speed down the express way and you’ll see what I mean, when you give the “everyone does” argument to the judge and how you do it all the time, after finally getting caught.</p>
<p>I think a better comparison would be a trooper holds out a radar gun, and only pulls over certain people (we can all guess who). The article indicates that the rest of the RAs are under audit. Is NEU prepared to apply the SAME standards to all RAs? Even if half the RAs end up getting fired? Maybe that is what NEU wants? Or will the ones that head of ResLife favors only get fired a week before they are leaving anyway. This is uneven punishment to fire some earlier than others if the same offense is involved (which seems likely).</p>
<p>They do not have to apply the same standards to all RA’s. They don’t have to be even be auditing all of them and not the same way. There is no fairness to any of this and there does not need to be. It’s really more akin to having a business and having some employees you want to fire but the process to do so is really a pain in the neck, but you can nail them for cause on certain things that are an auto dismissal. So you check their expense records more carefully and Voila, find some real proof of cheating. That a lot of others do it is no defense, and a company does not have to check every single person that way. Checks do not have to be random, you know, and often are not. You suspect someone of something, you will watch that person more carefully. </p>
<p>The whole thing is that the same standards do not have to be applied and are not in real life. When ou don’t do your job, you risk getting caught and that someone is watching your more carefully or that everyone is skimping is not a defense. Sometimes in some quarters it does bring a wholesale purge, but usually not.</p>