Two of my years at McGill were spent working as a floor fellow in student residence. I've been wanting to write about my experience, and just last week the university announced that they will be eliminating the entire position. Now seems more timely than I expected to explore how I feel and tell you a little about this job I did.
Turning over the rock
It's 2017 when I become a floor fellow. This is a time when student culture at McGill is centered around social activism, and a lot of my politics are formed in response to watching events unfold in the US from Montreal. By now I've spent about a year traipsing around leftist groups at the university, but I'm starting to feel like it's just air; we don't do much except talk in circles about issues that we're far away from.
Working as a floor fellow is a more solid activity that fits into my political worldview. Floor fellows have an edge: we stand against the archetype of the RA who writes you up for drinking and stuff like that. In fact, we have zero disciplinary power, and that's kind of the whole point of it. We can support students because they trust us, and they can trust us because we answer to them first. And we're close, we're accessible; the only other people are faraway adults, whose support lies behind appointments and wait times and bureaucracy.
Mid-August, we move into our residence halls for orientation and team bonding. It's summer, it's breezy, and campus is empty; we're running the place. We make door signs for the students, we put free condoms in a bag on each floor, we write our phone numbers on the whiteboards. And we have training. It's about mental health crisis intervention, it's about having conversations on race, or gender, or sexual assault, or eating disorders, it's about using Naloxone kits for drug overdoses. We come out like student social workers.
Then the students move in, and the job starts. It's mostly fun and casual, community building type stuff at first, but as the year goes on it gets harder. The rush of living away from home wears off and the stress of university kicks in. We check in on students more often; we develop individual support plans, like case work. We try to mediate conflicts and resolve larger issues that are making the community feel unsafe for some students. And every year, at least one thing really serious happens that puts the community on edge. This is when floor fellows step up, and you hear about it later like a newspaper headline. It's all part of the job; we expect it.
But something else is happening this year: the politics of the job are getting harder, too. My manager gets promoted, and then fired; classic. We don't have a manager for a while, and then we get a new one who doesn't know what any of the words in our training mean, but it's not like it's his fault, because it isn't part of the job description anymore. The ethos of residence life is crumbling from the top down, and we're at the bottom trying to avoid the falling pieces.
For a long time, the university overlooks residence life. It's just a rock in the stream. But people with a lot of power come in and want to change the course of the stream, and that rock stands out and becomes interesting all of a sudden. So you turn it over, and you find this system of doing things that makes administrators sweat. It's all based on trusting each other, it's all based on good will and good judgment. These are liabilities when you want to regulate everything, and formalize what is by nature an informal thing.
Erosion
The year ends, and another summer passes before I return to floor fellow again in 2018. A lot is the same for me, personally. I move back into the same room, so there's a familiarity in the space: I recognize the view, I know the building, I have the same couch again. It offers some stability. At orientation, the tension between floor fellows and the administration is hard to ignore. I wonder to myself if this is how returning floor fellows always feel.
But sudents move in again, and the job starts. We keep trying to do things the same, the way we know, but everything is changing around us. Administrators are concerned with reporting on students who are struggling, in order to follow up with them through some nebulous, impersonal process. Visibility is the focus, not support; these things need to be logged somewhere, vaguely addressed, and then forgotten. Each step adds a bureaucratic layer of sediment that is no use to us or the students we live with. It doesn't work, coincidentally; students keep coming to us, because they are real people up close, and they need support, not visibility.
When I graduate, it takes me some time away from McGill, away from student politics and residence life, before I can see anything clearly about floor fellowing. This was a special experience that introduced me to some of my closest friends, as well as students, whose gratitude for the impact we made on them will never be forgotten. But I feel betrayed by the university, by the people with power who wield it like children. Floor fellows and students alike, we all often grew close because of how much we had to support each other, as young people in the face of an overwhelmingly uncaring administration.
Now, the university is eliminating the floor fellow position from residence life; we are the last thing to erode into nothing. I really mean erode, because the face of floor fellowing never changed really, but was worn away by something external. It was a face that saw all the realities of first year of university in a student residence, which are easy to miss from far away but not from up close. As I understand it, McGill plans to absorb the responsibilities of floor fellows into other residence life staff, who watch things unfold from somewhere far away, and it doesn't make sense to them.
Arms like boulders
In my first semester at McGill, the time I spent in residence not as a floor fellow, I was quiet and reserved. I was never a natural at making friends in new places, I had to put in effort. But it helped that I saw a place for myself in the residence community that my floor fellows had built. In my second semester, I really put myself out there, and a lot of people thought I had just moved in because they had never seen me before.
It's easy to be invisible. This perspective was always on my mind when I floor fellowed. I was not so much the energetic camp counsellor type as much as I was a quiet and easy-to-talk-to, friendly neighborhood guy. I tried to be a mentor to my students, and a good listener, and someone who noticed and recognized the other quieter types of students like myself.
I made some mistakes. Looking back, I struggled in university just the same as anyone, including the students who looked up to me. It was hard to always be there for them, especially as another young person. But it made support real and human to them and not administrative and far away.
A lot of people have been saying already, in response to the news, that students will die; floor fellows save lives. McGill seems to believe that anyone can save students' lives just by being there for the heroic moments. I think that's misguided. Without floor fellows, what we lose are not only the heroic moments of saving lives, but a great deal of smaller ones that happen every day, in the hallways and the common spaces and the dining hall, where the most meaningful work is done, but hardly noticed, until it really matters. The smaller moments are what make the heroic ones possible.
It is the persisting presence of someone you can trust, who lives a few doors or floors away and cares, in little ways, and gives you a nod in the hallway when you haven't made any other friends yet. Someone who you've cried to, joked around with, threw up on (but then one time you saw them coming home at 3 a.m.), maybe even got mad at a few times. Someone who, through whatever happens, is still there for you. Someone who, like you, is growing too, and doesn't hide that from you.
There was more or less a tradition among floor fellows to write a little note in your room, on the wall or in the closet or whatever, before you moved out for good, for the next floor fellow to read. This is what I wrote:
"Allow yourself to grow with your students. You will see changes in their lives and yours."