In this episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat, Crystal connects with Dr. Zak Foste, Associate Professor of Higher Education Administration and Department Chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Kansas, and Dr. Lauren Irwin, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Drawing from their book and research, Zak and Lauren discuss how residence halls can disrupt, or recreate, racial separation and how housing assignments, pricing, amenities, and ideas of “comfort” shape who students meet, live with, and ultimately call their friends. The conversation offers practical insight into fostering cross-racial learning and creating more equitable residential communities.
Guests: Zak Foste (he/him), Associate Professor of Higher Education and Chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, the University of Kansas; and Lauren Irwin (she/her), Assistant professor of Higher Education Administration , University of Tennessee- Knoxville
Host: Crystal Lay
Background music via https://www.FesliyanStudios.com
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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:
Crystal Lay:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast where we highlight cool people who do cool things in residence life and college student housing, I’m your host, Crystal Lay and I use the she/her series pronouns. I’m very excited for our topic today, I actually had the opportunity to speak to these two folks not too long ago about this topic and we get to share it with you today. There’s a book that they wrote, it’s called Disrupting White Noise: Challenging Beliefs About Race on Campus, it’s a fantastic book and I had the opportunity to really zero in on one of the chapters that talked about race and identity in the residence halls and really think about are we perpetuating or reproducing racism or racist ideology in the residence halls and so I really wanted to take the opportunity to learn more and, again, share this with all of you.
So, I’m going to stop talking and I’m going to have our guests introduce themselves so they can tell us more.
Zak Foste:
Sure thing. Hi, Crystal, and thanks so much for having us. My name’s Zak Foste, I use he/him pronouns, I’m an associate professor of higher education administration and department chair of ed leadership and policy studies at the University of Kansas.
Lauren Irwin:
Hi, Crystal, thanks again for having us. My name is Lauren Irwin, I use she/her pronouns, I’m an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and really grateful to be on this podcast. My own career started in housing and residence life and so always having affinity and appreciation to go back to those roots and think about how we can make sure on-campus environments and spaces are great for students.
Crystal Lay:
Thank you both for being here with me. So, in the book, I want to be transparent, I had a lot of moments where I was reading then I put it down then I picked it back up because I’m like, “Oh, my gosh,” because I resonated so much with a lot of the concepts as someone who identifies as a Black woman. And so, my first question comes from this concept where you talk about racial proximity and I think it’s this idea or what I took away is this idea of growing up next to racial difference and then really thinking about how that can come up when you live on campus.
So, my question is what’s the difference between growing up near racial difference versus growing up meaningfully engaged with racial difference and then how might that shape a student’s experience when they live with people who are different on campus? Does that make sense?
Zak Foste:
Yeah, 100%. I can start and then, if Lauren wants to jump in and probably correct me, see if I capture most of these things here. So, in the book, we write a lot about how white college students, white undergraduates, those who live in residence halls across the country come to campus with a lifetime of racial socialization. And I think we often make the false assumption that because most white students come to campus from really racially homogenous segregated communities that they know nothing about race. But in the book what we try to establish, we call this the empty vessel hypothesis that, by virtue of growing up amidst a sea of white people, communities, schools, families, that white students know nothing about race. What we try to establish in the book is that white students know all sorts of things about race often via their white neighborhoods relative to neighborhoods predominantly populated by communities of color. So, they take cues about who lives where and who belongs in what spaces, who’s in their high school and who’s in other high schools and they absorb real messages about racial boundaries and people.
So, we try to make the argument in the book that white students come to college internalizing a lot of those messages even in the absence of either proactive messages about race from their parents and their teachers or a lot of visible racial diversity in their life, they still know a lot about race. And I think what we try to do in the book, and Lauren can probably expand on this, is think about how campus housing spaces often reproduce those dynamics even despite best intentions rather than disrupt them. So, the same dynamics of race in place that define their pre-college lives often play out in the housing assignments they get, the racial composition of their residence hall floors and we think that undercuts in some ways the transformative potential of what housing can be.
Lauren Irwin:
Yeah, thanks for that, Zak. I think just building on that I think about how, for many students, especially white students, we assume that the college environment is this really novel, new, idealistically diverse place. And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this a lot more but what we’ve found is that, at least for many white students, their experiences on campus didn’t look that meaningfully different than their pre-college neighborhoods. And so, thinking about students who might come to campus with maybe a smaller toolkit, particularly for white students, and skills for engaging across racial difference might then use those minimal tools in ways that are harmful or those tools themselves might be relying on stereotypes and harmful ideas.
And so, what we found was that a lot of students, whether intentional or not, were often enacting racist harm on students of color in the residence halls and a lot of that is learned through their pre-college experience. And so, I think we’ll have a chance to chat more about ways we might disrupt that or other patterns but it was really striking and upsetting for many of us.
Crystal Lay:
Thank you for sharing that. So, I think my next question is so students are coming to campus with these pre-experiences, we know that, and so now I’m really questioning how does housing influence who students meet, who they live with and ultimately who they call their friends?
Lauren Irwin:
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of ways. I think, especially for those of us who have worked in housing, it can probably still feel that there are ways that we feel like our residence halls should be these ideal laboratories for difference. I know something that was really prized in my experience as a resident assistant and later a hall director was programming and different initiatives that can help students build relationships and connect across difference and I think some of that relies on an assumption or existence of relative diversity either at the floor or hall level. And what we found is that there were actually a lot of things that seemed colorblind or race evasive at face value that often had really strong racialized consequences.
And so, for anybody who has ever maybe lived on campus or worked in campus housing, you’re probably very familiar with ideas of housing deposits and housing assignments and that room selection process and so, when you have several hundred or several thousand students or tens of thousands of students who want to live on campus, we know that campuses need to put policies in place to help manage that process. And so, what we found is that often students who were more affluent were able to put a housing deposit down sooner which often meant, if your campus works on a first come, first served basis, that they might have the first chance to pick their residence hall. And we also know on any given campus not all of our halls are the same age, they might not all have the same amenities and so, disproportionately, these affluent students who also tended to be predominantly white were able to access the halls that were either newer, had the best amenities.
And what we saw was, essentially on every single campus, there was a hall or a dorm known as the white dorm that people, including students, would identify and then halls that would often be known as predominantly halls where folks of color lived that on most campuses they would use terms like the ghetto to refer to them and they were often not as well resourced, the amenities were not as good. And so, despite this hope that our residence halls can be this laboratory for difference, we saw face value colorblind policies and processes leading to degrees of racial segregation that then became really hard to disrupt. And so, either at the floor or hall level, we would often see pretty homogenous patterns of either mostly students of color or mostly white students. I’m sure Zak has more to share about that.
Zak Foste:
The white dorm language I think is really powerful imagery in a lot of ways that Lauren just offered and, in the larger study, we saw this across all campuses, there was always this reference point of the premier living option on campuses. Typically, it was the newer building, it had the most high-end amenities, the most customization and it was more private in some sense, less shared amenities with the community and what we try to do in the book is show how those arrangements often mirror the same dynamics of race and place in students’ pre-college life. And so, in students’ pre-college life, they often talk about the safe, desirable, familiar white communities, often suburban or rural for the most part vis-a-vis their understanding of other more unfamiliar places that are predominantly populated by Black communities.
And we single out blackness not because we want to diminish other groups of people but because the white students we interview almost always invoke blackness, Black people in Black communities and Black spaces in their interview accounts so there’s something about the hyper visibility of blackness and Black bodies to a lot of these students, I think, that’s really noteworthy. So, the same rules that govern spaces and pre-college life, where you go, where you don’t go, where it’s safe to be at night, where you should spend your time, where you can hang out, where you’re not allowed to, what’s the good high school, what’s the bad high school, all of these racially coded notions of race and space similarly play out in these residence hall arrangements.
Labeling a residence hall as the ghetto or the hood or the slums which are all verbatim quotes from students, it says something not only about the nature of the building but then it’s assumed to also describe the people who inhabit it. So, it’s not just that the building is the ghetto but then that says something about who lives there. And one of the things we reckon with in the book I think is, if housing is supposed to be an educational good, something that contributes to the educational mission of the institution, we really have to trouble, I think, what it says then that the building students inhabit impart racialized labels on them, if that makes sense.
Crystal Lay:
I just got chills and I say that because I think the work we do in housing there’s this idea that residence halls have the ability to disrupt those pre-college racial stereotypes and it sounds like we’re maybe helping to recreate it depending on our policies, our structures and people’s access to housing and then also how students label them and whether or not staff are also labeling them in that way. And so, I’m curious about that piece about are we disrupting or recreating. But in addition, I think we’re getting into this idea of comfort and what does comfort mean in a residence hall setting, who are we trying to make comfortable and, ultimately, are we recreating spaces that protect this idea of white racial comfort. There’s a lot there but that’s what came to my head.
Zak Foste:
Yeah, and it is a super important topic to drill down on. Laura and I had a lot of these conversations and implicated in much of it ourselves as white folks who came up through student affairs and housing spaces of for whom is comfort and safety and belonging and expectation and something that folks feel entitled to. So, there’s something that emerged out of the study, I don’t know, when you do these types of studies, there’s always these interactions that sit with you forever and interviews you vividly remember. And there’s a student in the study, his name is Kelvin, he’s a Black RA and he talks about how, this is really at the height of Black Lives Matter, 2020 time, and he talks about how on his floor he wanted to do a program about structural racism and how that historical notions of white supremacy shape matters today, today being the height of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd and those movements.
And he takes it to his supervisor who’s a white woman and she says, “You can’t do that, that’s going to make people feel uncomfortable, it’s going to make people upset. How about instead,” they proposed, “A diversity cupcakes program,” which I was very unfamiliar with diversity cupcakes but, every time we talk about this, some folks in the room seem to nod their head as if, yeah, this is a thing. And what I learned is it is an exercise where everyone gets a cupcake and they use various sprinkles and frostings to illustrate the inherent diversity of human beings, this was totally at odds with what Kelvin wanted to do. Kelvin wanted to have, and actually a pretty supportive way to his white residents, a real discussion about structural racism and the lingering tensions of our history but instead he’s told you can’t do that because that’s going to make these folks uncomfortable. The white students on the floor are prioritized as customers who deserve to feel comfortable and not have any sense of … You don’t want to induce too much dissonance for these students, just keep them happy and comfortable.
And that takes a real toll on Kelvin, the Black RA who wants to do this program, but it also just speaks to this larger idea of how a lot of particularly white folks who are in the study spoke about diversity work in the halls, that you don’t want to make folks too uncomfortable, it should largely be about we’re all different, let’s get along, let’s celebrate diversity, that’s fundamentally different than what Kelvin was trying to do. And something that always sticks with me, I think, on this note is that, Lauren and I agree, I think she talked about this too, housing folks are some of the folks on campus most committed to this work. We will teach in grad prep programs, the housing folks are often the ones on the front lines responding to racist incidents, trying to do this programming so this isn’t meant to be an indictment of housing.
But when we talk to a lot of administrators, particularly white administrators, senior administrators, they would recall their really fond memories of being an undergraduate in primarily white residential environments and residence halls and talk about how they wanted to recreate that. That’s why housing is this laboratory that’s so embraced as a space to engage difference because these white administrators would say, “I remember what it was like living with difference under one roof and how transformative that was.” Well, for students of color, as we talk about in the book, engagement with difference isn’t really an option, it is a necessity to move through a world organized around whiteness. And so, I often think about that, these comments from a lot of white administrators that seemingly their own positive exposure to racial difference in the halls as a white undergraduate 20, 30 years ago leads them to think about housing as this transformative space. But for students like Kelvin who want to do a program on Black Lives Matter and white supremacy, they’re redirected towards diversity cupcakes, I think that’s just a really powerful juxtaposition.
Lauren Irwin:
I think too, building on that piece of comfort, I think we talk a lot and think a lot about comfort as both psychological but also physical, so am I emotionally and intellectually safe. And so, in the story of Kelvin, it seems like a lot of the concern is that white residents will probably be uncomfortable or made to be uncomfortable mostly intellectually. But I think the cruel irony or the really horrific contradiction was also in the multiple stories we had of Black residents who, for lack of a better term, were evicted from their halls or spaces because it was not only psychologically unsafe but physically unsafe.
And so, a story that comes to mind is an RA known as Tiffany in the study, she’s a Black woman, she is hired as an RA in one of these white dorms and so she’s one of few students of color in the white dorm. And in this residence hall, she either still has a suite mate or a roommate, there’s still some shared space and the folks that she shares that space with are white and she recounts stories of eventually things getting so bad that she’s either staying in the library till midnight or 1:00 a.m., sometimes sleeping in her car because, when she goes back to the room, especially when her white roommate’s friends are there, they’re making really horrific racist comments and jokes and it is to a point that it’s so extreme that she does not feel like she can go back to her home, she is effectively made to be homeless at this time.
And I think about what that means for any resident experiencing that, that’s the opposite of what we say we want and hope for students. That has a toll on her ability to get good sleep and show up at class, to have a place that’s a safe, comfortable sanctuary to rest and recharge and connect with friends. And I don’t think anyone who works in housing and residence life on that campus would want to or be glad that that’s happening, that’s not what we’re saying at all. And I think a lot of these interactions are probably happening whether we recognize it or not when our approach to fostering difference is, well, as long as people who are different are together, it’s going to be this great laboratory and they’re going to figure it out. And the stakes of that are a lot higher and the risk is a lot higher particularly for students of color when white students are only allowed to engage with things around diversity cupcakes and lack a understanding of the power differential.
Crystal Lay:
I remember being uncomfortable a lot in my undergraduate experience and so those are the pick up and put down moments for me with the book, it’s just … And then I think about how I carry that with me as a house professional now and so how do we train our staff and how do we ask questions of our staff and students to really get a sense for what is their experience, how do we define belonging and persistence for all of our students and how do we go deeper and that really stood out for me. And so, it really sounds like there could be students who are also student leaders, because I think we make an assumption that things are going great, they’re in 10 organizations, they’re fine but it sounds like there could be experiences where folks are really struggling and questioning their value every day and so how do we dig into that more.
Now, I’m wondering now, we want … You use the term laboratory and so how do we foster that environment or create cross-cultural learning across difference without making students of color be responsible for educating white students?
Zak Foste:
Lauren, do you want to start or do you want me to take this one first? This is, I think, probably the million-dollar question in these types of discussions, how do you … Because one of the arguments in the book is white students come to campus from really racially segregated communities, they live really racially insulated lives, the logical response to that is you want white students to engage in more meaningful, humanized relationships across racial difference. The unfortunate reality of that is it often becomes a form of racial capitalism where the students of color on the floor take on value insofar as or only because of their racial identities and that association with the one Black student on the floor carries some credibility or exchange value later in life.
So, my fear is when … Well, Lauren and I wrote down something she said, she said you’re going to put white students in these environments with students of color and they’re just going to figure it out, that’s the working assumption of this idea of it being a laboratory for difference but that discounts all of the racial socialization that white students absorb in the years preceding college.
And this isn’t meant to be an attack or an indictment on white students, it’s not to say, oh, all these white students come to campus as racist bigots, that is not the takeaway here but it is to say they internalize a lot of messages about who belongs in what spaces, what … Tiffany’s account in the book is really interesting because she is one of the only Black students in the most expensive residence hall on campus only because she was placed there by the housing department to be the resident assistant on one of the floors.
So, the question becomes are there ways you find programs or initiatives that emphasize a shared sense of humanity that you review with an eye towards is this a mutually beneficial or engaging program or initiative or is this something that’s really meant to benefit white students. Because the argument around racial capitalism is that white students will use their association with racially diverse spaces, peoples, communities for further advancement so you can talk about it in an essay to grad school or med school or law school or to a job like, “Oh, yeah, I was involved in this work with this group and I now have this desired outcome of being more enlightened or more sophisticated in an increasingly global world,” that’s the part that feels gross, that’s the yucky part.
And so, I think this is the ongoing question and Lauren and I, I think, both recognize that what that type of program looks like, and this isn’t a cop out, but what it looks like in Tennessee or Kansas or Iowa is radically different right now than what it looks like in California or Illinois or New York and that makes things even more difficult, I think, as you try to speak to broad audiences.
Lauren Irwin:
I’m sitting with a conversation I had with a former graduate assistant of mine when I was a full-time student affairs administrator and this is something we would talk about a lot because she was one of the few students of color in her masters cohort and in our office and we would often have this conversation of, in some ways, our racial identities are the most important thing and also the least important thing about us in our relationships. Her and I or any two people that have a genuine relationship, ideally, if it’s truly genuine, it transcends so much more to encompass the fullness of our humanity and, of course in our context, race is a huge part of that, as is gender, as is class, as is the intersections of all those things. And so, I don’t think we can help foster meaningful relationships without that and that can’t also be the end of the conversation.
And so, I think about that diversity cupcakes program, for example, I could actually see a world in which that’s a really great first conversation and awareness raising. Maybe there are folks who really haven’t had a chance to think about that or don’t have language to talk about diversity of identities and experiences, maybe it does open the door. I think where we might be falling short is that that is the one and only or is a checkbox and we’re not helping folks across identities but, especially in this case, white folks, think about how to follow up on those conversations or be curious in ways that are respectful and mindful as well as be curious about ourselves because I think sometimes these efforts can be really external focused on learning from the other, so to speak, without turning that curiosity inward to think about what experiences have I had about race, who were my friends in high school, what does that mean.
Being curious, I guess, about our own experiences as white people particularly as it relates to proximity or knowledge of race and folks of color, I think that’s what comes to mind for me right now.
Zak Foste:
Crystal, could I add just one thing here-
Crystal Lay:
Yes.
Zak Foste:
… because this conversation feels really important because one of the things we want to do in the book is not … The book is about white students and their conditioning but the consequences of that conditioning are mostly felt by students and faculty and staff of color. So, one of my fears around the racial capitalism stuff is … So, I used to do service learning work and students would take a course, it was on leadership, and then they’d do 20 hours of community service at different community partnership organizations, food banks, afterschool homework, help centers, stuff like that. And I vividly recall I was teaching, it was when I was a PhD student and these two white women all semester had talked about all their racial learning and they could talk the talk and you can see where this is probably going. They could talk about white supremacy and racial domination and white privilege in the abstract but, when it applied to them and their lives, they became very defensive.
And there was an instance where I asked at the beginning of class, “How are your service sites going? What’s going on?” and the two white women, you could tell were really angry, and they said, “This young Somali child who we had been tutoring at the homework help center said we can’t tutor him anymore because his dad doesn’t trust white people,” and they could not comprehend why the dad had any fears or trepidations about this arrangement or what he wanted for his child. And the irony of this was, literally the week before we had read the book Between the World and Me which is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reading of raising a Black boy in a world of white violence, and academically they got it or they could perform it but, when the gaze was applied to them or the critique was applied to them, they became so defensive.
And that to me is this idea of racial capitalism or the real trepidation or concern I have about doing programming that appears to impart some racial enlightenment and the downwind effects, I guess, on people and communities of color in those spaces.
Crystal Lay:
After both your responses, I’m really wondering, and this just came to mind for me, what’s the beauty of disruption. I think there’s the awareness piece, you talked about the curiosity piece, honing historical context, all the things but someone might be listening and thinking this sounds hard and it is. But is there a beauty that comes with disruption that you all have discovered when you were doing this work?
Zak Foste:
I appreciate this question a lot because I think sometimes, especially … So, Laura and I both teach in grad prep programs, we get a lot of great master students, I’ll speak for some of the students I’ve worked with, they’re really well-intentioned white students who read Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together at the Cafeteria or some really instrumental text and now they want to go change all the other white people’s frames of reference in their lives. And what they fail to recognize is the enormity of whiteness that shapes most white people’s frames of reference, their orientations to the world and that this is a long game of self-work and education and speaks to the role of white people in particular, I think, in partnering with white students.
I think when we talk about disruption in the book, what I ideally hope for, and I don’t know, this is an imperfect answer, but that white students gain a new frame of reference or orientation or racial literacy that helps them recognize both their own place in the world and the structures that they’re situated in, so that racism isn’t about good people and bad people alone.
I think when we talk about disruption in the book, what I ideally hope for and, I don’t know, this is an imperfect answer but that white students gain a new frame of reference or orientation or racial literacy that helps them recognize both their own place in the world and the structures that they’re situated in. So, the racism isn’t about good people and bad people alone, it is about structures and histories that unequally distribute resources and opportunities and access to healthcare and education and so forth. In the book, if it came down to one thing, I think our concern is that we love the potential of higher education. Higher education, probably more than any place in the life course, has the opportunity, and housing especially, to induce that dissonance and disruption but the arrangements of our campuses often, especially at predominantly white institutions, often do very little disruptive work because of often the mundane, everyday ways we’re organized, very rarely are we offering sites of disruption.
The diversity cupcakes is but one example of, Kelvin, that could have been a really powerful moment. We know peer effects are critically important to student learning, Kelvin engaging his peers could have had a much bigger effect than someone from multicultural affairs coming in or a faculty member in sociology and Kelvin really wanted to do that work but he was told, no, you’ve got to do diversity cupcakes. So, these are the instances in which I think there’s so much potential in higher ed but I think we’re often undercutting it because of the ways we are organized.
Lauren Irwin:
I had two immediate responses to your question and I think it’s really powerful and something I’ll probably think about for a long time. My first thought was I sit with this irony of being a college student, ideally, is meant to be a time where you’re really humble and open to new ideas and learning from all sorts of people and concepts and the sadness about when that doesn’t apply to ourselves or the missed opportunity when that doesn’t apply to ourselves or our position in the world so, in this case, with a real focus on whiteness and racial identity. But then I also think about the vulnerability for white students, for all people but especially in this case white students, who haven’t seen that role modeled or don’t actually know what that could look like.
And so, I guess my hope would be maybe more a challenge especially to other white professionals on campus, maybe especially in housing and residence life to think about their possibilities and role modeling what that disruption could look like or that humility or some of these practices not because I think there’s potential to do that perfectly but to role model possibilities to disrupt that or do that differently. That’s my short answer.
Crystal Lay:
Thank you. I’m going to sit with you all’s answers in that and I also want to think about that on our campus, what could happen to the student living experience if we were able to disrupt or really think about the policies and potential barriers that might be coming up for our students when they live with us. Now, I want to go a little bit more granular and talk about housing deposits, room selection, pricing, building amenities which we talked about a little bit earlier but I feel like those are some practical things or a place to start potentially this disruption. And so, I feel like these can contribute to racial separation and, if you all think so, I think you do based on what you’ve read or what you found.
So, two part, how would I talk to my supervisor to say, “Hey, these things might be causing racial segregation, let’s do away with housing deposits,” how do you recommend we could start that conversation?
Lauren Irwin:
I love this question. I also don’t want to discount the real realities and the function of campus residence halls as income generators, is often a source … Very often located in auxiliary services, generating their own funding, those pressures are real. Empty beds put campuses really at risk, we need to maintain our buildings, all of that is true. I also sit with the fact that I know on many of the campuses that we studied often these newer halls that became known as the white dorms were really powerful recruitment tools especially for students who maybe were continuing generation or more affluent to attract them and to have someplace desirable on campus. And so, I don’t want to discount those real pressures.
And I think being curious about the patterns that we see, I think some of the patterns we’ve identified, I imagine, hold on many campuses and start by being curious about your own data. So, I think what we generally saw is that, especially if a deadline for housing deposits is coming before, let’s say, students receive full financial aid packages, we’re essentially asking students to perhaps try to find the resources to put down deposits at multiple campuses or risk being much later in the lottery.
And so, thinking about when does our deadline need to be and who’s maybe excluded about this deadline being earlier rather than later is one idea. Thinking about too is our signup process for housing selection based on the order of housing deposit which is probably more likely to privilege folks who have those funds readily available, probably also privileged folks who have maybe stronger understanding of college processes and college knowledge, these folks are probably more likely to be continuing generation, middle, upper class, also white. What if we use something like a lottery system so folks … It’s not privileged in that way.
I also know and recognize that there are real reasons for the fact that halls often have differential pricing either by floor plan or building amenities. As I mentioned, Zak and I have a lot of respect and recognition for the multiple challenges that housing folks have to face and a question that I might wonder and this might feel radical for some folks is do all of our floor plans or contracts in that building need to be at the same price, what might it be to have a certain number that are a slightly different price based on students’ financial abilities to pay. Thinking about how some of those things might shift, even in subtle but meaningful ways, who ends up in what hall. I wonder if Zak has other ideas.
Zak Foste:
Yeah, I appreciate the practicality here because there are administrators who we quote in the book and some we don’t use but who basically say, “Listen, we’re an auxiliary unit, we got to get butts in beds.” And I also know … They basically make the argument there’s not much that’s going to make our institution stand out from the other 50 regional comprehensives in the area other than building a brand-new, shiny residence hall, that’s the … We’re not going to improve our academic profile, we can’t move up these US News & World Report rate, there’s only so much in our control
One thing we can do if we have the funds is to build this really shiny new toy that’s … And some people I talked to lived in absurdly luxurious residence halls that even blew my mind. And that is one of the areas that I think institutions become very complicit, it becomes an amenities arm race, arms race across institutions and so you continue to build newer and newer and more expensive halls and living options. Meanwhile, those old outdated towers from the ’60s remain.
And this was picked up on students at multiple campuses, primarily students of color who would say, “I put a maintenance request in, it takes weeks to hear back, there’s probably asbestos in the walls. But if the white dorm put in a request, I know from my friends it gets answered like that.” That sends real messages to students about their worth and value and how they’re perceived by the institution, going back to our earlier discussion. So, I just want to echo some of Lauren’s comments, we are sensitive, I think, to … If you were to talk to a vice provost of student affairs or director of housing, they’re going to say you’re just scholars who are pie in the sky theorizing, we have real on the ground consequences to deal with and we get that but I like Lauren’s language of being curious, I think. Oftentimes, these highly racialized environments are produced by really race neutral on their face policies.
So, being curious, doing some audits about the racialized nature of some of your spaces and what may have led to that and also some introspection about all of our complicity in this amenities arms race that builds newer and newer and nicer and shinier residence halls that are just going to be totally off limits for some students and are going to create a racialized dynamic of buildings on campus that, again, are not that different from the racially segregated landscape of their lives prior to college.
Crystal Lay:
You gave me a lot to think about. The housing deposits feels pretty easy even if it’s one student at a time. I think back to my own experience of I remember getting my letter and being asked for a $150 housing deposit and my family didn’t have it. First gen, Pell Grant, they gave me everything, they’re like, “Someone give her a bag of money to go to school,” and I called the admissions counselor and they waived the fee for me. That $150 could have completely shifted my life trajectory. And so, I think, again, assessing where we could support our students. I even like the affordable housing options as well, do we look at the floor plans and figure out how we can differently support students based on income and do it with integrity as well and dignity and support of that student so thank you very much.
You brought up the belief and value piece again and I want to go into experiences as we wrap up our time. I do want to go into something that happens a lot, I think, in our communities. We have instances where students look at their dry erase board or they have a roommate that may use a slur toward them. And so, when those things happen, I’m really curious on your thoughts of what should staff do or what they could do or what should they consider when racism or hate speech or hostile symbols or language appears? And I’m not going to say if, I’m going to say when in a residential community.
Zak Foste:
I think one piece that feels really important for me in trying to honor the voices of the participants in their particular specifics is being really certain that, when these incidents unfold on the floors, that the burden is not put on the staff of color to respond. And I say that because there were a number of participants in this larger study that would talk about, oh, yeah, this racist thing happened and my white co-RA said, “Ooh, I don’t really know what to say here, could you go talk to the students?”
And that became a form of emotional labor for that student that they had to carry, back to Lauren’s earlier comment about you’ve got to feel safe and comfortable in your own residence before you can go to your calculus class or go lead your student club. And there’s an account from one of the women, Black woman in the study who says, “The very first day we move in to our residence hall floor, in the GroupMe chat, someone uses a racial slur in the chat about basically being surprised about how many Black students live in the building.”
So, again, this maps onto our earlier discussions about who belongs in what spaces, how white students feel entitled to particular spaces. The verdict from the university, the official response of the university was that that student was hacked, that they didn’t put it in the GroupMe which is a wild claim that the handful of Black staff found to be totally bogus. But then, in the conversations with white administrators on that campus, their first priority was to make sure the woman who was accused of sending the message in the group chat, that she was safe and she was okay because she had been misrepresented. She did not send that, she was hacked by some Russian agent apparently who had such serious interest in this first year residence hall community.
So, the initial response feels so important to me, what ended up happening though was that one of the Black women RAs in the building ended up fielding all of the comments from parents, from students, they were the ones fielding calls from parents of like, “Is my child safe on your floor?” That is way beyond the responsibility of a 20-year-old in college, it was way beyond so that sticks out to me.
And also I do fear that, in this age of pretty overt racism that is seemingly normalized in this political moment, that we only look for the big things or only the most extreme things or the loudest things or the most bigoted things written on the bathroom stall but there are also plenty of other pervasive ways that this seeps into the residence hall floors. One of the Black students, another Black woman, if you’re picking up on a theme here, mentioned having a white roommate who, when she got drunk, would ask her to teach her how to twerk, those things also infiltrate the residence hall.
So, it’s not just the whiteboard which did happen a lot in our study but also just not waiting for the big thing to erupt and seeing all of the more subtle ways in which it’s going to bubble to the top.
Lauren Irwin:
I don’t know that I have a lot to add except for the overwhelming amounts of work and labor that particularly staff of color and RAs of color are doing when these things happen even though they’re disproportionately affected or probably also harmed by these instances but are often the ones having to do the repair work. And so, thinking about where can we be proactive or, really, even if we can’t be proactive but when stuff like this does happen, how are we making resources available to, not only the students who are directly impacted, but the RAs on staff in those buildings.
How are we making sure that our white staff in this case are prepared to meaningfully respond to racist incidents of racist speech whether it’s the bulletin board, the whiteboard, the comment because they do continue to happen and we can’t pretend that they don’t. And I think, right now, both of us are really troubled by the disproportionate burden and responsibility that is placed on staff of color.
Zak Foste:
Crystal, this also takes me back to the question I loved earlier about what disruption looks like and we’re talking about this new frame of reference for white students. This to me is ideally, if you think about white RAs, what disruption should look like. So, the dissonance for a white student to develop a new frame of reference to analyze and understand the racial world to say, “Oh, these people writing build the wall on someone’s whiteboard isn’t an anomaly or a surprise, it’s actually a very predictable outcome of a larger social context in which race operates in our lives.”
And that to me is actually … It’s not the only outcome but that’s one of the outcomes I think of what we would want disruption to look like, a new orientation or a racial literacy to understand how race shapes people’s lives at both the individual and structural level. And that becomes really critical for white staff who otherwise would abdicate their responsibilities and just say, “I need my Black co-RA to deal with this because I don’t have the language or the sophistication to do so.”
Crystal Lay:
Yeah, and it’s a burden. You have students who like, “I just want to go to school, I’m here to learn, I want to make friends. I want to get connected. And then, in addition, I have to defend or protect my humanity because of how I visibly present in my culture.” And so, how are we making sure that we’re lifting together versus, again, putting that additional … It’s another role you have to play. I have to be social justice advocate and warrior and student and leader and X, Y, Z and I definitely think that to put the call out of we need to be looking out for each other and supporting each other.
So, I want to end with this question of you both because this has been so wonderful and I’m so grateful for our conversation. Ultimately for me … What’s at stake if housing and residence life does not change? And I also want to say, where can we begin? I’m going to begin with this book but what’s at stake and what resources or, again, where can we begin to start shifting and moving differently?
Lauren Irwin:
Yeah. I feel like a lot is at stake. I think my first response is continuing to fall short of what we’re promising feels like a really … A misrepresentation of what the student experience is and it feels like we’re falling short of the promises we make to students and families that our students will be safe, that they’ll learn, that they’ll be transformed, all these sorts of things while recognizing that it’s incredibly difficult work to promise and ensure all of those things. So, I think that comes to mind. I think we also miss really important opportunities to protect and foster real moments of joy. I think a lot of what we’ve talked about, rightfully so, is heavy and harmful and the realities of racism on campus and, at the same time, we saw consistently ways that students of color were gathering in the halls, often called the ghettos in this place, to play music, to share food, to play games, to be in community.
We also know that many campuses have been, while this has been challenged by policies as of late, investing resources in things like identity-based living learning communities or affinity spaces, putting resources behind student leaders and programs that uplift and protect some of those community building things. And so, I think for me the loss or undermining of those efforts does feel monumental because I think our students should be able to find people that they connect to, people they feel safe with, feel moments of joy because learning and being a college student is really hard and I think we have a real responsibility to both foster the productive learning and dissonance that we can while also ensuring that our students are safe, are valued, have meaningful friendships and experience joy and I think we’ve been missing the mark on that especially for students of color as of late. So, I’ll stop there for now.
Zak Foste:
Yeah, a couple of things come to mind for me, one is around these notions of safety and comfort we’ve talked about. I think about housing, if not there, where? If students can’t feel comfortable in their most intimate living quarters where they eat and sleep and study and congregate, where can they find that sense of comfort and integration with the campus? The other piece to me is, one that Lauren named I think is really important that we didn’t talk about as much in the conversation, but students of color are not helpless folks with no agency. Often, out of segregation comes congregation and community. I think, historically, this has always been the case, think about the role of the Black church and organizing during the Civil Rights Movement, same here in some ways, those buildings that were called the ghetto or the hood.
I had one young Black man tell me in so many words like, “They may think this is the ghetto, they’ve never seen a ghetto, this is my home, it’s where I feel comfortable. I see people who look like me, I hear music I like, there are cultural references that speak to me, this is my home and I don’t care that it’s outdated and run down. I don’t care what any of those kids say about my home, this is where I live.” So, that feels really important. Ad also I just think, again, at the baseline what is the role of housing and residence life in this specific moment in time in making sure all students feel comfortable and safe. And I think about, in my own context here, there are a lot of laws and policies that prohibit what we can do on campus and right now students are in the middle of it so they know a campus pre anti-DEI laws, they knew the campus that had the Black cultural center, they knew that campus.
There will be students who eventually come to these campuses who that is a totally foreign concept, that they never knew a campus that had Black cultural centers or African-American studies programs. And so, I worry about those students who are yet on our college campuses who will come to our college campuses with institutions in states like ours that are just stripped of resources to facilitate belonging and support. And so, continuing to think about what is the transformative potential of housing, what role does housing have at this moment and how do you meet it head on amidst these headwinds feels, I think, what I’m left sitting with.
Crystal Lay:
I think you both just posed a challenge, you put it out there. What does community and belonging and persistence mean for our students and we have a front row seat with these students living with us and so thank you both for offering that up. I know I referenced your book, are there other sources that you all would recommend that I can add to the show notes? And I can just put your book there because I thought it was great.
Zak Foste:
We would love if people engaged with the book. Lauren and I spent years on it, it’s probably the most meaningful thing I’ve ever been a part of in my professional career. I think there’s a lot of good work out there on this topic, I always give … The work that’s been most influential to me in this and it’s not about higher ed at all, it’s Elijah Anderson, he’s a sociologist, he writes a lot about what he calls the white space and that was an orienting principle for both Lauren and I that white spaces are really unremarkable to white people but they are incredibly visible to people of color. And I think that was an orienting principle to us in the book so I’d be remiss not to name how important his work is. Whether you’re in higher ed or sociology, whatever it is, I think it’s really useful to work with.
Lauren Irwin:
I also hesitate to offer because I know that I’m going to feel like I could have offered 20 or 15 other things. And given my last comments about the importance of protecting and uplifting joy, I want to give credit to the person who I think really helped instill that in me with their work who is Antar Tichavakunda, he’s a scholar at UCSP, I know his work’s been really influential to both of us. And he’s a Black scholar who often studies the experiences of Black students on college campuses in a way that is really radical by centering joy and community and belonging with an incredible critique of the system and I think his work continues to be really inspiring.
Zak Foste:
Yeah.
Crystal Lay:
Thank you both so much for everything that you’ve offered up today. I know that folks are going to take pieces away from this, I know I will so thank you for being available.
Lauren Irwin:
Thank you.
Zak Foste:
Thank you.
Crystal Lay:
All right. And thank you all so much for tuning in whether that’s audio or visual or both, I’m very excited. If you have an idea for a topic or a person that you would like us to reach out to, please reach out to us and let us know. Thank you again and take care.
