Floor fellowing

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 the story of this job I did. It's not a complete story, but it's the one I feel compelled to share.


Turning over the rock

It's 2017 when I become a floor fellow, after taking a sort of convoluted path to get here. Though I really liked my floor fellows when I lived in residence my first year, I didn't think much about being one myself. But by now I've spent two years at McGill trying to get involved in something that makes a difference in the student community, and I haven't found my footing yet. Maybe this is what I need, I think, so I interview and actually end up getting an offer to join a team.

Working in the residence community does fit into my view of making a local change. And floor fellowing has an interesting edge: it is a support and mentorship role that actually has no disciplinary power, unlike the traditional R.A. archetype. It comes from a longstanding ethos at McGill that we can support students because they trust us, and they can trust us because we answer to them first.

In mid-August, we move into our residences for team building. It's summer, it's breezy, and campus is quiet as we get ready for move-in day, making door signs for the incoming students and writing our phone numbers on the whiteboards. But what you don't see on the surface is the two weeks of extensive training we receive in subjects such as mental health crisis intervention, conflict resolution, sexual assault response, even using Naloxone kits for drug overdoses. We come out like student social workers.

Then the students move in, and the work starts. It's mostly community building at first, but as the year goes on it gets harder. For new students, the rush wears off and the stress of university kicks in. This is why we build strong relationships at the get-go, so we can check in regularly and maybe tell early on if someone is struggling silently. A lot can go wrong: academics, making friends, making enemies... We try to mediate conflicts and resolve larger issues that make the community unwelcoming. And every year, at least one thing really serious happens that puts everyone 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.

But something else is making the job harder. People in power at McGill don't like that floor fellows recently unionized, and some shady things begin to happen. In my building, our manager gets promoted and then fired. A very normal scenario, right? 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 really his fault, because it isn't part of the job description anymore. Wait, who decided that? 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 overlooked residence life. It was just a rock in the stream. But people came into power who wanted to change the course of the stream, and that rock stood out and became interesting all of a sudden. So they turned it over, and they found this way of doing things that makes bureaucrats sweat. It's all based on trusting each other, on good will and faith and judgment. These are liabilities when you choose 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 I recognize the view, I know the building, I have the same couch again. They offer some stability. During our training, 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 work starts. We keep trying to do things the same, the way we learned and passed down, 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 dirt 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 is always easy to remember. But I feel betrayed by the university, by the people with power who wielded 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 part of that original ethos 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 one time I lived in residence not as a floor fellow, I was quiet and reserved. I was never a natural at making friends in new places, so 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 friendly neighborhood old man on the porch. I tried to be a mentor to my students, and a good listener, and someone who noticed and recognized the other softer types of students like myself.

I made some mistakes, I mean I was twenty, twenty-one. 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 floor fellows 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 and 911 calls. 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 (either that or I vandalized university property), when your time was done, to write a little note in your room, on the desk or in the closet or whatever, 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."