In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, join host Noah and Eric Anglero, Director of the LGBT Center at UPenn as they talk about multicultural centers. Oftentimes, the work of supporting marginalized students can fall solely on multicultural centers and identity centers but is that fair? What would it look like if all of a university, particularly Residence Life professionals, shared this responsibility to support and advocate for all students that call our campuses a home? Join Eric and Noah as they talk through these questions, share stories, and provide advice to Residence Life staff.
Guest: Eric Anglero (they/them), Director LGBT Center, University of Pennsylvania
Host: Noah Montague
Background music via https://www.FesliyanStudios.com
Listen to the Podcast:
Watch the Video:
Show Notes:
- Students’ Perceptions of Ethnic and Multicultural Centers
- Imagining a Trans* Epistemology: What Liberation Thinks Like in Postsecondary Education
- There Goes the Gayborhood?
- The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast is a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in residence life and college student housing. If you have a topic idea for an episode, let us know!
Transcript:
Noah Montague:
Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat Podcast, a platform to showcase people doing great work and talk about hot topics in Residence Life and college student housing. So my name is Noah Montague and I use he/him/his pronouns, and today I’m going to be your host.
So if you’ve been listening or watching or engaging with my episodes or content, you know that I like to say that I am a storyteller by trade, and the stories that I choose to center are those that center the college experience, my research, my practice, and of course our time here together centers those stories in every way that it can.
So today we’re going to be talking about, in that vein, the role of Residence Life and multicultural centers in supporting and advocating for the needs of marginalized students. Far too often that work can fall almost entirely, if not entirely on those centers, which becomes such an important role for Residence Life staff and for everyone on campus in that it is all of our jobs to support the students that call our campuses their home, which then becomes really the main point of conversation for today’s episode, which makes me all the more excited to welcome today’s guest into our space.
So Eric, if you’d like to start off by introducing yourself.
Eric Anglero:
Sure. Hi, my name is Eric. Thank you so much for having me.
Noah Montague:
Thanks for being here.
Eric Anglero:
I use they/them pronouns. Currently, the Director at University of Pennsylvania’s LGBT Center. Been here for about three years, but that’s just the beginning of my story as I like to say when I do these. I’m from Lakewood, New Jersey. So if you’ve been to Six Flags, New Jersey, you’ve been close to my hometown. I did the queer journey after high school of going into New York and went right into the nonprofit sector of LGBT youth services. I’ve done everything from HIV prevention work to education, to community-based work and found myself back in higher education, gosh, about nine years ago at Princeton University. Happy to be here in this particular moment.
I am so, so thankful every day I get to do this brand of work. I care deeply about queer and trans wellness, about holistic care, about their journey of growth. And just to be a part of a story, I’m just super happy to be here and I get to do that professionally for a living. So definitely feel honored and engaged to be in this space.
Noah Montague:
Thank you for being here, Eric. I knew I wanted to have you on here for so long too, so finally getting to have any kind of conversation is just so exciting. So thank you again for spending that time with us and for the work that you do in general. But kind of getting us started then thinking about these centers, thinking about multicultural centers, LGBTQ centers, combinations depending on the institution because they far so often get combined depending on the university, but what do you feel that people often misunderstand about the role of a multicultural center on a campus?
Eric Anglero:
Such a great lead of a question to think about multicultural centers role on campuses. For some contextualization too, I work particularly in LGBT center, but we’re part of sibling centers here, and that’s usually been the sort of module that we use at all the universities that I’ve had, that you’re one structure of a particular identity that services the whole university community but works in partnership with different identity-based organizations, identity-based groups, and more broadly the campus community.
When I think of the role of a multicultural center and what gets misrepresented or sometimes just misunderstood about it, is one, kind of where it’s situated. I think professionally in the big monstrosity that can sometimes be higher education, you sit in an institution where there’s 47 departments navigating a student’s journey through this place, oftentimes it’s thought of as like, oh, the multicultural center can be the one-stop-shop to help a student navigate this problem, deal with this particular residence story, deal with the bursar’s office, do these particular things like this.
So oftentimes in that misunderstanding, the multicultural center has to adjust to meet that need. So that’s an interesting part of when we find confusion about our role, we have to do our best to acclimate and service the community the best ways we can. So there’s a misunderstanding that’s led to opportunities for us to really create collaboration and partnerships. But sometimes it’s a really difficult part as a professional to be like, “I don’t know if we have that lever, but I’m going to do my best to find that for you.”
I think depending on the institution, another misunderstanding can be the relationship with the town and gown. Yeah, because I think oftentimes these universities are so infused to the town that sometimes it’s thought as the multicultural center is this sort of broad-based holistic services too. And I like to be realistic about what we can offer and what we can’t.
And I think this center has given me a real opportunity to be more intrinsically connected to the broader Philadelphia community and do the work at the University of Pennsylvania that’s been requested of me. But then sometimes it’s the limited scope of what you can provide, what you can do. So really it’s based on the institution of what that can meet the needs of.
So I think there’s definitely some things that are difficult conceptually to understand, but I think one thing that’s come up recently that I would really love to highlight is that multicultural centers and identity centers more broadly are, somehow you have to meet a barrier to entry, to show your queer card to come to the LGBT center. And that’s the one thing I’m like, “No, we can’t do this.”
We are in conversation with the entirety of a campus community to highlight the experiences and center culture and knowledge to really bring a space where there has been silence and there has been university history of not serving this community’s needs.
But essentially we want to do this with the entire university community. So I think that’s important too.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I completely agree too. And that sparked something for me in this moment that I was actually talking to one of my students yesterday and that she was having some pretty large reflections on bills that have passed and situations that have happened. And she was asked, and this is a straight white woman, was asked about her relationship to our university’s multicultural center prior to it being closed down. And what an interesting question to be asked to begin with, but she was asked that in an education space and she shared with me and with others that she had no idea how to answer that question because of this perceived barrier that you are talking about.
And that was not a space for me, as if our multicultural center wasn’t also our women’s center. So I think that that was a really interesting conversation to have and a misconception that kind of went into place for the student live in front of me, of her telling me, “I didn’t feel like I was allowed to go to this space that was also very clearly for me,” and it was a really interesting conversation to get to have that.
But the other aspect that I wanted to highlight that I think is really important in particular is this town and gown piece that you brought up. That isn’t something that I’ve thought about exponentially before until this year in that this is the first year at my institution since our multicultural center closed down.
And I chair the LGBTQ alumni board at my institution and we started getting reached out to by the city that I live in to ask, what is Miami doing or what is my institution doing to help the town? And that started to make me think about all of the things that fell onto our multicultural center to do things in the town of Oxford where I live, and just was that initially the responsibility of that office? No, of course not. And it became it and both the town and the university and the students were all better for it.
And I think that that was a really interesting misconception that became opportunity for some of the staff in that office, to your own point, of organizing these marches and organizing these events in town that unfortunately no longer happen because nobody took them over. And that became an even more interesting conversation due to that misunderstanding of who should be doing this labor. Now no one is doing it post that office closing.
And it’s unfortunate because it’s created such a… The multicultural office is who does this labor and no one has claimed it since because the misunderstanding and misconception of, they’re the only folks who can, then limited it happening when that was no longer an opportunity or an option. And I think that that’s what I’m thinking about coming out of your first thought.
Eric Anglero:
Yeah. And that’s really shown itself in this space. Working at such a historic center, that’s one of the oldest in the country on a college campus, seconds to only University of Michigan and I think Vassar, and there’s a few other places, where we situate ourself is that the city of Philadelphia also feels a sense of history with this particular space that has a level of importance and its service to a particular community and that it serves UPenn more broadly, the students who have come in here. I love that sort of conversation and community that can be created here. Right now we have a couple different high school groups running around, so if you hear noise in the background, it’s really wonderful.
Noah Montague:
There might be some high schoolers running around.
Eric Anglero:
There’s some high schoolers having a wonderful time in our building, and I truly love that. I love that relationship and I’m continually impressed that UPenn does this very intentionally to have that relationship, so I want to keep doing
Noah Montague:
Yeah. No, that’s so cool to get to have that with the local schools, and to that point, the opportunity that came from that misconception that now you’re getting that space to interact with those students in a different way, I think that’s so cool. But I think that that kind of gets us into the next thing I wanted to talk about here, and we’ve started to discuss this who is responsible for what becoming a conversation within the misunderstanding of what multicultural centers are for. But why do you think that that responsibility of supporting marginalized students so often gets concentrated into these centers?
Eric Anglero:
I think in a really great way, it’s centered on expertise. So I think a lot of folks are just looking for a level of expertise that comes with a level of cultural competency that certain identities have certain needs across different places and spaces. You think in particular with Res Life and servicing students and their residential needs, there’s different religious, gender-based, disability-based needs that come up that you need a level of competency to deal with. That’s why I’m always such a big fan of Res folks because I think they have to have levels of competencies across field and across institution that just situates them to better understand the sort of broader-based operations of an institution.
But I think to first answer your question is, folks are looking for a level of expertise of, I have a particular question and I need to figure out a way to it, and this seems almost like the easiest path to an answer.
Noah Montague:
Oh, for sure.
Eric Anglero:
So I think that is in some ways really great. It’s a recognization of expertise. I also think sometimes it’s a lack of clear policy. Different institutions might not have the layers of very explicit policy that speaks towards these different identities so that folks might be a little confused on how they navigate them. Where there are services, again, on a campus where disability services clearly handles accommodations for the particularities of a classroom or a resident space. But if we’re talking about an identity-based in religious spaces, there’s the Office of Religious Life, and then we keep going down this list and sometimes it just gets a little bit confusing of what policy impacts what, what is covered on their institutional policy.
And as somebody who had many different iterations of a rights, rules and responsibility, it can be a really daunting task for folks to really understand, and sometimes it’s not even covered for what folks are looking for.
I had a lot of first year students who were coming this year over the summer, who were just coming for visits, and a lot of them came with questions. I think that re-centered how we approach this particular type of work. And with the changing federal landscape, there’s a lot of questions about gender inclusive housing, about queer and trans life on college campuses. The Campus Pride Index is not a resource that is readily available as it used to be back when I was starting off in this particular brand of work. So there’s lots more questions because of this confusing federal landscape that we find ourself in.
I think our job in the center to take those kind of confusions and where things are getting situated and just be the best answerers of these questions. Me and a cohort of directors across different institutions are really trying to scenario plan a lot of these things.
So we write the most specific questions of like, a trans student’s looking to change their name on their diploma, but not legally change their name and are looking to do it for this commencement. How do you do that? And I think those exercises help us figure out who’s in charge of what so that when folks come with those particular questions, I have an easier time of getting to those answers because this bureaucracy is even big for me, no matter how many years I’ve done this work.
Noah Montague:
No, and I think that that is so important, the expertise part of it all makes so much sense and I think about that often, largely in the opposite of that, in far too often I’m watching colleagues, I’m watching other professionals just be like, “The multicultural center can do it,” both from that experience base in that it is known, “Okay, if we’re unclear on an answer to a question related to equity, related to diversity inclusion, related to ‘insert identity here’, okay, let’s send that student to the multicultural center. That’s probably where they’re going to find the best resources.”
And I do think that that is a big part of it. And I also watch then other professionals in Residence Life and other offices not learn those same resources because they’re like, “Okay, we’re just going to send them over here.” And I think that that is also an unfortunate thing that happens, and that’s probably a whole other episode, a whole other 45-minute conversation as to why that happens.
Eric Anglero:
It’s important to [inaudible 00:15:18].
Noah Montague:
And it’s important.
Eric Anglero:
Yeah, because we get it a lot too, and speaking frankly about some of the frustrations about some of this, is that sometimes we’re being asked questions from folks who actually hold the answers. So that’s oftentimes some of the more frustrating, particularly like, “Well, I would love to help this student find new housing, but you know how much access I have to housing…” Because those are specialized systems and changing folks’… You’ve seen the maps of students residence. It’s a confusing software. I don’t have access to that. I don’t know what rooms are available. As much as I advocate for emergency housing, it’s not something that is readily available for me to hold the controls over.
So back in the first question, I talked about which levers I have. Oftentimes I’m like, “Well, you have the levers. If I can help you walk through it,” but it does, as you were speaking to, become a level of frustration of, “Well, you’re asking me for questions, but actually it’s actually easier for you in your advocacy point to do this.” And sometimes that’s our role in this center, is to be like, “Well, can we help you get to the lever so that the student has the best experience they can?”
Noah Montague:
Yeah, definitely. And I think all of that exists in that space because it’s one thing to be like, “Okay, I think that you, Eric, would be the best possible human to speak to the student for these reasons.” And it’s another one for me to be like, “Hey, can you put a label on the lever that I made that I don’t know when to pull?” I think that that is an unfortunate thing that I’ve watched happen.
Again, speaking to the changes and the complicated political landscape that we’re living in and the complicated landscape of particularly queer and trans student support right now, in when our multicultural office existed, I knew who to ask those more nuanced, complicated, “Hey, we’re living in a time where bathroom access is really complicated and scholarship access became very complicated,” because I had a trans man last year who could not receive a men’s scholarship within our university.
We could not do it. So I called my colleague in the multicultural office and I was like, “How do I give him the scholarship?” And we were able to find a way within the system to be able to do that, and that was a very exciting moment to have that resource and have that knowledge that my colleague in the multicultural center had that I didn’t, to be able to get him to that resource that he deserved and needed and was qualified in every way for besides what the university put on his little marker.
And then we were actually able to figure out due to some other system how to change that marker. But without having that office, I’ve watched just not having that same expertise happen in such interesting ways.
Eric Anglero:
If there’s one thing I could say for this podcast and for all the work that the folks at your institution did at Miami, Ohio, and across Ohio, across Texas, many of our colleagues are looking at job realities that have shifted, changed. They’ve lost their jobs, done history work with LGBT communities. I think about them often. I think about the ways that they might be reentering the field in a very different capacity. They might be entering through Res Life and have lots of experience with an institution, and these ebbs and flows are happening in a way that I don’t want to forget about the hard work they poured into it.
One of my colleagues brought up this point, and I think about it often, is that for every one of those pages deleted, there was thousands of meetings. Those pages don’t go up on websites that talk about gender-inclusive housing off of a snap of a finger. Somebody poured into those websites existing.
Noah Montague:
Poured time and research and energy and-
Eric Anglero:
So much.
Noah Montague:
Arguments into the single page that’s gone.
Eric Anglero:
That’s gone. And their work, I want to acknowledge and remember that. I don’t want to forget about the labor that was poured into that. Sometimes employees who are not staffed for that, folks who sit in different departments who are like, “I just want this to be better for our students,” and poured in extra labor for it to exist. And then folks who just don’t have particular jobs no more or are in a field that is very different right now. So yeah, I think about that often and what we can do in the future to make this a more stable place for the employees as much as it is for students too.
Noah Montague:
Which I think becomes one of the main reasons I even wanted to have this conversation to begin with and talking about multicultural centers in the landscape we have now with how many have been closed or changed or altered, or staff moved around. And I imagine the labor looks significantly different than it used to, and I think that that makes this conversation so much more important and kind of gets me into where I want to go with this next in the shared responsibility of it all.
Some schools still have multicultural centers doing different kinds of work, some don’t anymore. And what do you think the shared responsibility for supporting these marginalized students looks like on a college campus especially now?
Eric Anglero:
Yeah, shared responsibility is interesting where we’re at right now. I’ve kind of come with this philosophy before this particular moment, but I hope it carries through really importantly in this moment, because of what we’re being called to do in this moment is that our work can’t exist just in the LGBT center. It wouldn’t function. LGBT students exist outside of this space. If we’re identifying between 21 and 29% of a college campus identify somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum, it varies between different institutions, some higher, some lower, but that is a significant part of a 38,000 to 50,000 student institution.
If we had thousands of students in here all the time, it’d be quite a busy center. I would love it, but I don’t think we have the capacity or space. Their life exists outside of these walls. Their life exists in their dorm and the elevator to their dorm and to their classrooms and to the restaurant they go to.
They are whole human beings who come into this space and experience a whole institution. They have to enroll, go through admissions, apply, do all the things that come with their own limited processes. So the shared responsibility is really for the folks who really believe in the essence of multicultural center work, about justice-based work and about that, and infusing that into those spaces will have much more of an impact than what I can do.
At Bursar’s office that understands their trans student population, that understands names and documentation might be different or differentiating, might be in a space of change, will help a student feel so much more comfortable about coming here. If they go through an admissions process and somebody knows to point to the gender-neutral bathrooms, to have the space of like, here’s where this dorm is and this is why it’s important to have a Res staff that wouldn’t bat an eye at like, “Yeah, you’re a trans guy student.
We’re going to have the coolest little space for you to make sure that it feels good and cozy for you.” And understand that it comes with nuance, that not every trans-masced, trans-femmed, non-binary person is going to experience the institution the same way. So bringing that nuance, bringing that care is the shared responsibility of the institution. I always said, if our work got eliminated, I believe that this work would continue in different places. I don’t think the essence of LGBT center work is just stuck in this space. I read this very interesting book, called There Goes the Gayborhood? Which is talking about this dissolution of gayborhoods that have vanished from city spaces, but also talks about disbursement of how this work has found its way into new spaces. So in this moment, the book talks about gentrification and the ways it sort of imploded the ways that we think about queer and trans life.
It did talk about this work has dispersed itself throughout the community. So I think about that too, is that as much as this space is important and I love this work and I will continue doing it, my work is just part of a piece of a puzzle.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, I completely agree with you for one. And for me, thinking about shared responsibility in the way that I do comes into a point that you made a little bit earlier, in that Residence Life staff, and that that is my functional area, have to know a little bit about everything to be able to guide students to the answers to the best of our ability.
And in talking with another colleague of both of ours, April Callis, she talks about something that they called breadcrumbing, in how do we show students that we have the knowledge and the care and the support through these little moments that we, one, know what we’re doing, and two, that this is going to be an affirming space for them. What would it look like, to your own point, for admissions to be trans-inclusive and using proper names and properly referring to their students?
What would it look like for Residence Life to put a little extra work into getting to know their students’ names?
What would that look like? And I think that the little bits and little things that, and I’m using the word little and then reflecting on that, maybe that’s not the right word either that I should be using in… I have had students come into my office and a student from Ghana who to my face said, “You are the only employee at this school who has ever tried to pronounce my name.”
And those moments of giving anything to students, and for me, that shared responsibility in a perfect world would be every staff member showing that level of care to try, to know where the gender-inclusive bathrooms are, to know, “Oh, this student is a Muslim student looking to get more involved in that space,” to have knowledge of where they could go. And I think that that for me is what that shared responsibility looks like, is showing that care to students and showing up even in those small ways.
Eric Anglero:
I so resonate with so much of that, and what I think is also, it came to my mind as you were speaking through, is that part of the shared responsibility is also accountability, and not in the sense that it’s become this moment of policing, because we can see the harm that can happen from just this solidifying policing as a sort of methodology.
I think about the folks who hold their coworkers to account in a situation and how impactful that is. So one of the things I love doing personally is working on fatness, and in particular, body size diversity and talking about fat phobia, beyond my sort of work. I like doing this as consulting work. I’ve done it for different institutions. And in some of this labor, it’s really about deconstructing and decontextualizing how this infuses itself into spaces and asking folks to have this level of shared responsibility to hold coworkers to account.
So when somebody says, they say a morality about a food, “I’ve eaten so bad this week,” what does it look like for a coworker who’s not maybe inside of a fat space or even in the space to be like, “Well, there’s no morality to food.” To have that little pushback moment is the ways you set up the infrastructure for this to exist, that shared responsibility becomes a community thing. I think of accountability as a language of love. I don’t think of it as-
Noah Montague:
You and me both.
Eric Anglero:
Where if I spend the emotional energy to be like, “I want you to be held accountable so that you could serve students better,” it’s because I care about the work and I believe in it, and I believe in you to do it. So there’s this real emphasis on it being something that can really be part of our language of care and shared responsibility, is that if we need to hold each other to the spaces to make it better.
Noah Montague:
Because I wouldn’t be attempting to hold you accountable if I didn’t think, one, you could handle it, and if I didn’t think that you could be better, or that we’ve developed a relationship that is important enough to me where I want to have a real conversation with you about this.
And I think that that gets lost in accountability spaces a lot, that with my grad student this last year, I framed feedback for them in, “We are having this conversation because I’ve seen what you can do, and there are areas where I think you can be better in these specific ways.” And I watched it be a more meaningful conversation, when framed in that way as well, and did take on that shared responsibility of, “We are all responsible for these students. Let’s talk about it, please. Please, let’s talk about it.”
I guess then getting into, because we’ve started talking about Residence Life specifically a bit now as well, but thinking about the unique role of Residence Life in student success and working with marginalized students, what opportunities do you think exist within Residence Life, within that unique role that we play to support marginalized students?
Eric Anglero:
I love this. I love this question. It’s one I’ve been pondering, I think, since I’ve started higher ed, because Res Life is such a huge part of a college experience. It’s the one you see in the movies, there’s a reason why, like Res, and sometimes it’s more about partying than the actual institution, but-
Noah Montague:
Occasionally.
Eric Anglero:
Yeah, right, right, but it is-
Noah Montague:
There might be an RA character in the background.
Eric Anglero:
Right, right. There’s an RA, there’s somebody, but it is such an important part of the college experience that it is one of those quintessential things that you think about when you’re entering the space. So it is really tantamount to an experience. So there’s lots of opportunities for there. And some institutions have built in some really great infrastructure pieces to highlight those, like live and learn communities. I think it’s a space for community conversation, for cultural relevancy, for things to exist in the residence hall, again, because it can exist all in the multicultural center.
I think of Res Hall sometimes as the place where you can turn off for a little bit because at college sometimes you have to feel like you have to be on all the time. Particularly working at the institutions that I’ve had, it feels like the students are always giving me the best interview face and I’m like, “You don’t have to do that here.” I hope that they can do that in their dorm spaces, because that turnoff is a chance to breathe, to think about the things you need to sustain yourself.
It’s to plug into the charger. It’s to really find that momentary, that solace, that silence, maybe even boredom. I think boredom is restorative. But yeah, so I think of the really essential roles of live and learn communities. But if I’m thinking about opportunities across Res Life, I think it happens in multi-stages. I think the first time the student walks into the space is the first opportunity, and it’s one that I think is missed by a lot of institutions, but it’s probably the most important because the communication off the bat is going to tell a student what is priority, what is cared about, what is held, and what the institution has for them.
There are so many students who have been at institutions I’ve worked with who have been here for five years and like, “I didn’t know there was an LGBT center.” And I’m like, my mouth, I was like, “How have you spent so much time here and not known this was a thing?” And oftentimes I think there was the communication points in the beginning that may have been lost, that they may have not thought of as a priority, that it was for them, that it was a resource that they could utilize and use.
So I think that first bucket is like when folks come into the institution, Res Life can communicate what the institutional priorities are. And I often say this when I work with different medical institutions and things, I was like, “The receptionist actually holds a ton of power in this,” because that first interaction can make me feel cozy. It can make me feel like this is an accomplishable thing. And the res advisors, the staff, the RAs, my gosh, are they important for college students to feel like they’re wanted, needed, held in a way that feels like really commendable, really honorable work. I think about it, pay them as much as we can.
Institutions pay… Because I care deeply about that work of a student feeling like, “Oh, this person who knows this place cares about me.” So that’s the first bucket of opportunity that exists, is in that introductory space.
And then there’s the meat and potatoes phase, even if you don’t eat meat, tofu and potatoes phase. We can have these moments of, between sophomore and junior year where there’s just so much of the institution happening that sometimes you forget about what you need. There’s usually changing in residential spaces, they’re changing in your living accommodations expectations, your major is shifting. All these big things are happening. In particular, this is also when we see a lot of queer and trans students come out. So on top of these big massive changes that are happening, you’ll see lots more really out students that are figuring out their identity and having the space to find that.
So there is that opportunity moment for folks who are in those middle stages of higher education, to realize and have the identity fulfillment and engagement, to have those levels of conversation, whether in the resident spaces or beyond, to make sure it’s comfortable, to make sure that there’s literature that speaks towards these particular things.
All of these are levels of opportunity to build upon, but essentially just gives them the space to have that amoeba and amorphous shape to really find what they need. And then senior year is a chance to celebrate them for doing it. I think all of those find their ways to be opportunity points for the Res spaces in particular because of how important their role is here. I think about even in moments of conflict, Res has an incredible space of that. I’ve heard so many roommate conflicts where RAs care so deeply that they come to me first and they’re like, “Okay, I have this person using slurs on a video game and it was overheard by a trans student and I need to talk through this. I want to serve those students right and I want to make sure that this is correct.”
And that makes me so passionate to continue to do this work because I’m like, “You care enough about this to take this video game moment and bring it to a place of resolution.” I think that’s a model for society.
I think that’s a model for accountability. So I think as much as I can talk about the opportunities, I think folks in your life, your Res spaces are sometimes the clearest arbiters of where those opportunities are and sometimes with way more knowledge than me. So also listen to your folks who are there because sometimes they know. There’s a lot of queer and trans folks who work in Res spaces who know the needs of the institution. So just because they’re a starting employee doesn’t mean that they don’t have cool and amazing knowledge to bring to the space. So find ways to infuse their voice into it, I think is also an opportunity too.
Noah Montague:
No, I couldn’t agree with you more. And something that you said is really sticking with me in that outside of orientation, when students meet their orientation leaders or go through any kind of orientation process, the Residence Life staff usually are the first university staff that a student meets when they start their college experience, when they are moving in, where will they meet? And that is a tremendous responsibility to me in, are we going to be affirming? Are we going to be welcoming?
And something I think about often is that one of the main goals of my department specifically, one of our pillars of education is this idea of creating safe and healthy homes for our students in that we are acknowledging that while they are living with us, a part of our job is to create an environment that is safe for them and that is a home for them.
And those are very huge terms and very big questions to ask when we’re talking about marginalized students and what does safety look like for our marginalized students in what is designed to be their home? And then that becomes our job. And that’s a massive job to undertake and it’s a massive thing to think about, in how do I make all of these people that are coming from different experiences and different identities and to your own point, might learn that they have new identities the longer they’re here?
How do we create a home for that population of students? And for me, that starts with listening and talking to them about what they need while they’re living there. What does it look like to unwind after a day of, to your own point, again, having their best interview face on? Are they performing in some spaces? Can they just come home and go to bed?
And how do we make this a safe enough place that they can do that? And that might be teaching RAs about how to handle roommate conflicts as they come up with these kinds of issues, with how do we help folks live together who disagree? And those conversations come into play with, and I’m so happy to hear that RAs are coming to you to talk about it as well at your institution. I think that is so telling, both of the perceived expertise and work that you have, and the trust that is being built through that shared responsibility that we’ve been talking about this whole time, Res Life staff going when they’re like, “I know that I want to do this thing. I want to have this conversation. I want a little bit more guidance on how to do it.”
And I think that in general, that would probably be a piece of advice that I would even give to other Residence Life professionals, is to learn the systems that we have and be able to talk about them with students.
Because when a student asks a Res Life professional, when a student asks an RA, “Is there an LGBTQ center?” And they don’t know the answer to that question, that tells a queer student, that tells a trans student a lot about whether or not this is going to be able to be a home for them.
And having that knowledge becomes such a huge opportunity to Res Life staff that is arguably a little bit unique for us and that we are some of the first people they meet, and they live here, they kind of can’t avoid us. Their RA lives next door to them. And is that someone they feel safe talking to? Is that someone who’s going to be affirming? Becomes our opportunity, and in a lot of ways our responsibility there as well. But I think about that often.
Eric Anglero:
And I think Res Life also situates the staff and students with this really unique perspective on the importance of networking in and caring about this cultural connection piece. I would say utilize those skills. For newer professionals, I usually have this conversation of the coffee and team meetings are going to be your best friends and they’re going to be [inaudible 00:39:14].
Noah Montague:
A thousand percent.
Eric Anglero:
So, so, so much they have helped me with this particular space. Again, UPenn has 38,000 students. I cannot know every department and every staff member who works in this space, particularly because-
Noah Montague:
You can’t possibly.
Eric Anglero:
No, there’s the hospital system, there’s a dental system. It’s massive. So I have taken out faculty members, student group leaders to coffee, to different spaces, to just hear about what they want to do here. So to your example there of knowing the institution just a little bit better makes less stops for the student to have, which is again, so crucial for them to feel like they’re being heard in a situation. Because if I can go to you, Noah, and be like, “I’m having this issue,” and you’re like, “Don’t worry, I know the perfect person to go to.”
Noah Montague:
I know the perfect person, not the perfect office.
Eric Anglero:
That’s right, that’s right. The person.
Noah Montague:
“I think you should go and talk to Eric. I know them and this is an area that I think they could really help you. I will go with you if that would be helpful.” I think that there’s so much more power in humanizing the work for these students as well. And that’s something that we can do because we’re generalists. We have to be in those ways. And I think that I love that you’re bringing that in here because I think about that often too and knowing the people of it all.
Eric Anglero:
Yeah, because the LGBT center has to be situated as a thing that ties students to resources. I often think about what are the tangible things we can give students? So we have disability services in our center, we have counseling services, we have HIV and STI testing, we have legal name change services. We try to have tangible things that students can grab and have here, so those resources. And then for the things that we can’t, I want to make sure that I have found the most competent person in the department who can make their journey a little bit easier.
So knowing somebody in the School of Arts and Sciences who understands trans identities, who actually identifies as trans, is going to be an amazing connection to have so that I can’t move SAS, but this person can. So I think about if I don’t have the tangible resource, I want to make sure that I know the network enough that I feel like I still have a lot of autonomy on how this can go next, and that is a helpful part of it.
Noah Montague:
A thousand percent. And I think that that really gets me into my last question for you today, Eric, and we’ve kind of already started giving some advice as well, but if you wanted a new professional, new Residence Life professional, maybe a seasoned Residence Life professional to take away one piece of advice from this conversation, what would that be?
Eric Anglero:
Oh my goodness.
Noah Montague:
I know. I’ve ended it on a big one.
Eric Anglero:
I know, it’s a big question. It’s like I’m the type of person that struggles to answer what’s your favorite movie and not give-
Noah Montague:
You and me both.
Eric Anglero:
… 11 movies as my answer. What I would say in terms of the relationship of my work at the LGBT Center to Res staff, a bit of advice I’d give is engage. Just engage. Go to the events, be there, be present. I think that has such an impact on the professional staff that work there. They’re like, “Oh, that’s our person. We know this person is human and they’re a cool contact for us.” So there’s this sort of staff to staff relationship that can be incredibly critical for future iterations. And it’s just also just a way to know what’s happening in your campus community.
When I’m doing this work, I can walk into a middle school training and those students will teach me new things about identity. There’s a humbleness that comes with LGBT center work that you are not going to be the expert of every single part of the identity spaces, of the places, that some students are going to know more. And then this conversation is always ebbing and flowing. There’s different points of emphasis, different identities that are priority on campus. I think of this year, one of our most engaged groups on campus was Penn Queer and Asian, huge group across campus. And they had very particular cultural needs. They wanted to have lots of different events with the Pan-Asian American Cultural House. They wanted to make sure that there was a lot of infusion of work. So to meet their needs, it often meant that us as professional staff had to ebb and flow.
So to give that advice to a new professional is find out what those needs are by being as connected as you possibly can be. And when there’s an opportunity to be a part of an LGBTQ committee, like a health committee, a university wide committee, do it and do it. It’s so helpful to have Res voices in those spaces because sometimes they’re left out because all these folks in senior leadership are like, “Don’t worry, we understand.”
And I was like, “If the folks in housing aren’t in the room, you’re missing about 45% of the student’s experience on campus.” So your expertise is valued and I think it would be a great spot for listening and learning too.
Noah Montague:
Truly being involved in those spaces, and I’m going to second your advice entirely in that it was partially what I was going to say too, chairing the committee that I chair and being a part of those spaces not only has made me more visible to that community in that I’m one of 30 hall directors on campus, and students see when I am the only Residence Life staff member at our Trans Day of Remembrance vigil, students see that and then they reach out to me.
And that’s maybe a sad example, but it’s an example that really hits home to me in that our students are smart and they learn very quickly who is going to be a resource for them. And showing up in these spaces and advocating and being with them in the hard moments, in the fun moments, in the joyous spaces matters exponentially.
And to your own point, a Res Life staff member going to an event that your office is running then gives you a name to send that student to who has a Residence Life question because you’re like, “Oh, this is someone who cares about this information, who cares about this knowledge, who wants to be able to breadcrumb a little bit more to our students.”
Eric Anglero:
And I think too to that, it’s such a beautiful moment of caring, and just know that your queer and trans community, the community I have the expertise on, but just generally across multicultural centers and spaces, many of these communities are at a level because of federal policy and because of the ebbs and flowing of institutions and just because of the realities that we find ourselves in, they find themselves at a space of hypervigilance.
Noah Montague:
For sure.
Eric Anglero:
And that causes their nervous system to be really sort of tensed up. I think of the pressure on the shoulders for trans students right now to walk through an institution, is to think about the ways others are perceiving you, to think of the institution, if the place and space is going to be accommodating, to think if I’m going to face levels of violence. All of these things don’t turn off in ways that is part of being part of a marginalized community. So the students, your staff are coming in with this level of hypervigilance that sometimes can make you feel kind of paranoid.
Am I overreacting to the situation? The nervous system is firing really intensely because of a thing that’s happening on the institution. So for folks who are acting in a professional space, coming from a space of allyship or really just caring about multicultural center work is that part of that cultural fluency is understanding those realities, those moments, those things in the news that are going to make those nervous systems feel really impacted.
When we had students who lost their IDs and documentation because of the Kansas law with ID, they felt disjointed from college. They were like, “I don’t have a driver’s license anymore.” There’s a reality that we had to sit with and meet those students’ needs. And not that it’ll lead to too much advice, but just care about the folks who are going through these moments and just extension of care looks like understanding that hypervigilance and that sometimes the reaction that the person’s having is not necessarily a reflection on the work or the things that you’re doing, but use that as an impetus to try to change, to grow, to modulate, to know that folks are going through that in this moment and care needs to be really intentional so that folks feel a space of safety again.
Noah Montague:
Yeah, definitely. I don’t think I could have said that better. That just about wraps us up today, Eric. But thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you had a good time.
Eric Anglero:
Yeah, I did.
Noah Montague:
And thank you all for listening, for watching, for engaging on this episode of ResEdChat. If you have an idea or a topic that you would like us to discuss or even a person that you would like to have join us, please feel free to reach out to Roompact. But for now, keep taking care of each other and we’ll see you next time. Bye-bye.
