Student Self-governance in HRL at the University of Virginia

Student Self-governance in HRL at the University of Virginia: Transcript

Tasmima Hossain: I think that we do hold a certain amount of responsibility, a significant amount, really. But at the same time, I think the way that we have to kind of be there is very much controlled by like policies put into place by the university.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: I’m Fawzia Tahsin. I am a current undergrad student at UVA.

Fawzia Tahsin: Today I’m here to talk about Housing Residence and Life aka HRL and its relationship with Student self-governance. Now student self-governance is “One of UVA's most enduring traditions and strengths.” It essentially entrusts the decision-making process solely to students. This idea is most prominent in organizations such as the University Judiciary Committee, Honor, Student Council, and…..you guessed it: HRL.

Fawzia Tahsin: But there is also part of student self-governance that isn’t really talked about, and how burdening this work can be for students, especially students of color. I was able to learn more about how this concept and how it operates within HRL and hear about different events that have occurred in past recent years regarding hate speech against BIPOC communities. In UVA, there are many BIPOC students in positions of authority and in an ideal world this is great...but in the university setting it’s more complicated than you may think….

Ilyas Saltani: My name is Ilyas Saltani. I'm a fourth-year anthropology and bio major.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: Ilyas is a good friend of mine that I have known for three years now. Since I’ve met him, he has been involved very closely with HRL at UVA.

Ilyas: Since I began as an RA, I became a senior resident in my second year, And then this year I'm the vice-chair for community development and residential inclusion. My role did not exist previously for this previous year. So this is a role that was created and I was the first to fill it because it was designed to address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the program, specifically because there wasn't really a role that had done that before.

Fawzia Tahsin: So just tell me a little bit about how you got into HRL.

Ilyas Saltani: In my first year, I had always liked the R.A. role and liked the idea of the R.A. role. It always fit into things that piqued my interest. So my first-year R.A. was an interesting character, He became a little bit too comfortable with, particularly the white students in our hall. And he was the kind of person who enjoyed dark humor and he would like to make jokes at the expense of certain identities with those other white students in the hall. You could count the number of BIPOC students in that hall on your fingers to begin with. He did a very good job of excluding those students from the get-go. And so I never really had a good connection with them and never felt comfortable with him. And so I found that to be pretty good fodder for like my R.A. interview and talking about how I've noticed things that were definitely shortcomings on my hall that made people feel excluded. And inclusion is going to be a priority if/when I become an RA

Fawzia Tahsin: How has your experience been since you first started?

Ilyas Saltani: And in the beginning, things were all kind of, you know, roses and daisies, and we were all having a good time with each other, having a lot of fun.

Fawzia Tahsin: This was 2019?

Ilyas Saltani: Yep. This was the fall of 2019.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: Fall of 2019 was also when I was a first-year and started to learn more about UVA’s organizations like HRL,

Ilyas Saltani: It wasn't until the following semester that things started to happen that kind of strained our staff dynamics. I think the most specific example that I can think of is when in my hall there was a swastika carved into the wall with a knife, presumably. And that was a pretty traumatic incident for the building because it was founded by a resident and that resident had come to tell me about that. They had found that. He was very visibly traumatized and visibly uncomfortable. And so I immediately went to my SR and notified her that this happened and that she took it seriously I will say and we acknowledged the fact that this was a very serious incident. After a number of students had heard about this and an email went out to the building, which I had to write, it was still kind of all of the student's responsibility to be the ones to heal from this. And there was no kind of like top-down intervention like we'll do something for you all, or we will notify the university community that something like this happen, or we'll make an effort to figure out who it was and hold them accountable. It was very much just that you all have programming as a toolkit. You can plan programs, you can design things to engage your residents, and that's the most that you can really do to respond to this again because technically this is protected by free speech.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: Just to pause for a moment and unpack this more: the notion of free speech at the university can get very complicated. Ilyas told me that his Senior Resident aka SR who oversees all the RAs in the building went to their HRL supervisor to notify them of the incident

Ilyas Saltani: And so when she had taken those concerns to him and asked him how to respond, he had basically told her that the administration can't respond because unless it was inciting threat of violence on a specific individual or person or just inciting violence in general, then it doesn't breach free speech. And because the university is a public institution where we abide by the Constitution, and so things like that are protected by free speech. And so the administration could not do anything about it to step in because technically it was that individual's constitutional right to carve the swastika.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: As Ilyas mentioned, when the university is not stepping in when needed, it ultimately falls back on the students to sort out the situation.

Ilyas Saltani: The student was never identified, no. So we just held a week-long series of programs addressing the history of the swastika, addressing why this was a horrible thing to do, and holding space for students to debrief on it. And once again, this was entirely student-led, and it was just something that was orchestrated by my staff, and not anything done by the administration. The administrative response was not what it should have been. It's not that they didn't take it seriously, or it's not that they kind of undermined the fact that this happened, but they had put the responsibility on our resident staff to be the ones who helped this building recover from harm.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: Because the university never gave an official response to the situation, things started to grow out of proportion

Ilyas Saltani: So the programming only occurred in our building or dorms that are in the area did not know that this had happened so close to them or that they were students who live so close to them that hold these values, you know? Obviously, the narrative became twisted because somebody would say something about it. Somebody would try to blame it on another. So it kind of became stripped of what it really was. And it just became like hearsay because there was no formal response from the university that this had happened in this dorm or that the university was taking actions to ensure that this is addressed. There was nothing like that. It was no protocol, whatever students had said.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: These types of incidents are more common than people think. There was an incident specifically involving the Muslim community at UVA following the 2016 election.

Ilyas Saltani: Tensions were already high, to begin with. And so it was a challenging time for everybody if you weren't, you know, privileged and white and of a set certain identities, to be quite frank. So with that said, there was it originated on Twitter I believe….inciting violence, quite frankly inciting violence against Muslims. It was kind of a ranking of points as like ten points to rip a Muslim woman's hijab off her head, twenty points to call a Muslim a slur. And I think the last thing was like ten thousand points to bomb Mecca. It was obviously a joke. But it was in very, very bad taste. Somehow that meme had gotten printed and apparently posted around dorms at UVA. This was before I was there. But I had a number of Muslim friends when I had come to UVA who told me about this and a lot of them had pictures of it too. And so it was definitely something that had happened.

Ilyas Saltani: But once again, there was no formal university response because technically it wasn't inciting violence against any one person and so it was protected free speech. Students had to be the ones to step in and do the educating. In this particular case, the MSA had stepped in and they had kind of countered those posters. They took them down and replaced them with posters, essentially pro-Islam, demographics and things like that, like the message that Islam is a religion of peace and there were anecdotes on ways that Islam has, you know, has been a very peaceful religion.

Fawzia Tahsin: And so they had never figured out who posted that?

Ilyas Saltani: Yeah, there was absolutely no accountability. There was no… no one knew who, or why they had put out…

Fawzia Tahsin: No formal response from the president?

Ilyas Saltani: No nothing like that and that was the last year of the former president as well, and she had retired at a good time, I'd say.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: As if this incident alone was not bad enough, I learned there was another incident involving the Muslim community this time in 2018.

Ilyas Saltani: This incident had occurred before my time but it was one that we continued to hear when I first became an R.A. and it only happened I'd say a year or two before my time. But there was a Muslim hijabi woman who was living in Brown College and she had the word terrorist. I don't remember if it was written on her door or if it was written on her whiteboard or something of that nature, but she had essentially been called a terrorist, and that's a very terrible and uncomfortable thing to say to someone.

Ilyas Saltani: But the university response was lackluster because like what I said, we are a public institution and we have to adhere to the Constitution because that wasn't exactly threatening violence against her. It was simply calling her a name. It's free speech. It was technically the individual's constitutional right to say that to her, which is appalling to many, and a lot of students obviously will just offer, you know, pushback to that.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: So…the notion of being constitutionally allowed to say problematic things draws buzz from both sides, you know, legally speaking being a public university, UVA is not in trouble, but no student is being held accountable either by UVA…

Ilyas Saltani: You'll find a lot of times a lot of these harmful incidents, like with the example of the swastika or the student being called a terrorist. And there are many other examples, again, of black students being called the N-word and other just acts of hate that are technically free speech that the university says that they can't intervene with or intervene on because it's the student's responsibility to respond to that and kind of reframe that narrative because technically there are no grounds to get that student in trouble. No legal grounds per se. And it kind of takes the responsibility off of the administration, who once again is the one that has the power and the money and the resources to actually do something about this.

Fawzia Tahsin: I think RAs are definitely like having to really… being the ones that can also experience it themselves, and they're the ones having to educate is really just kind of hard. It's very jarring to think about.

Ilyas Saltani: I agree. RAs are still in that position where they're the ones having to do the educating and especially if they're an RA of a background that was harmed, you know, for example, that Muslim woman, if there was a Muslim RA.

Fawzia Tahsin: And you being a Muslim RA yourself

Ilyas Saltani: Exactly, it puts Muslim students in a difficult situation or it could really happen to any identity. We also have been teaching that to know there's a time to step back and that you don't have to be the one to do this. And that's why it's a collective responsibility for the program to understand how to respond to these things and not just the students who are from those backgrounds who might have a personal affliction to it.

Fawzia Tahsin: So are there students of a certain race, you know, particularly the BIPOC community who are mainly facing the brunt of issues? You hit on this really well when it comes to like student legislation demands and feeling supported by administration.

Ilyas Saltani: These legalities will be in place for a very long time, if not forever, as long as we have a constitution. The least that the university can do is ensure that there is support, widespread support, and accountability for both the RAs and then also the people who enact these acts of harm. The university should make an effort to identify who they are and educate them because if they think they've gotten away with it once, they will continue to get away with it. And these are the same people that end up feeling, you know, high-level positions or being politicians and leaders at some point, and that's a scary thought. And so there needs to be a reality check for those individuals, as well as support for RAs and the affected students beyond just other students having to do that supporting because at the end of the day, we're students, we're still learning about the right way to navigate these things and we're not in paid roles. We're doing this pro bono. And so, administration is the one who is allegedly trained and, you know, well qualified to be stepping in when things like this happen. Unfortunately, they just happen, and they're deflected a lot of that onto students.

Fawzia Tahsin: Mhm. Specifically BIPO students?

Ilyas Saltani: Specifically, BIPOC students, disproportionately BIPOC students, low-income students, and students from marginalized backgrounds because usually, those are the ones at the receiving end of these things. And also the ones who are doing the educating.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: Fortunately, RAs are trying as much as they can to change this culture to become more inclusive.

Ilyas Saltani: What we can do is educate more responsible ways to work around that. So thankfully, we haven't had to deal with anything as egregious as those examples recently in recent years. As long as I've been in this role at least thankfully. Things are still being said. You know microaggressions occur on a daily basis, so the best that we can do is educate on how to respond to those things and show RAs how to be more attuned to these issues and how to catch them and be more preventative than reactive. And so that's something that we've really driven home this year during training is that we want to prevent harm and focus less on repairing harm, though there's still space for repairing harm because harm will always occur. So I think teaching RAs to recognize those nuances and stop them before they become larger aggressions has become a pretty productive response.

Fawzia Tahsin: Do you think HRL is really just like the microcosm of just student self-governance that permeates the university? And is it really representative of the student self-governance and student democracy that UVA loves to brag about?

Ilyas Saltani: Yeah, it’s definitely a great example. I think a lot of the things that we see happening on a national political scale, and a university scale are happening on an HRL scale within its own, its own constraints. And I would say the same goes for any other special status organization at UVA, whether it's the student council, UGuides, or anything else, Honor. So specifically to talk about HRL, yes, a lot of the same issues that we see happening systemically on a larger scale, ee do see happening in HRL. And I think that's just the nature of an institution. That's how an institution will operate. When you have hierarchies and you have policies and you have legalities in place, those very same inequities will arise unless I think we kind of reframe what those look like, whether that's a student's role or the administration's role. Definitely, the onus falls on the administration to be the one to identify those things, but students can definitely advocate and students are advocating.

Ilyas Saltani: And I think as far as student self-governance goes, one of the other things that drew me to HRL is that of other student organizations on the grounds. I've noticed that HRL is one of the ones that can enact the most change in a student role, like the co-chairs for example, or even my role in SR have a lot of agency in terms of what they can do and how they can influence a group of people. Because, quite frankly, if I wanted to do something in my role, I have a budget to do so, and I don't really have many people telling me what I can or can't do, and I can put on programs or host events and things like that to kind of push the narrative that I believe in that I think would impact students positively. And I've done that, I'd say, and also we have a reach to pretty much all on-grounds residents which is a significant number. And so there's a lot of opportunity for change, and I think it's one of the few areas where student self-governance is working to an extent. Obviously, there are always its limitations, but compared to other organizations around the grounds, HRL has had and it is in a position to enact a lot of positive change.

Fawzia Tahsin: You know, these positions become so vacant, so quickly, and it's really up to students to kind of fill them in. But to see that continued lasting change, whether it's supporting BIPOC communities or other minority communities, how can HRL all set a foundation for continued student support?

Ilyas Saltani: Yeah! I think to speak on that. I think the first thing that comes to mind is institutional memory, and you kind of alluded to that in that students will only be at UVA for four years and they'll only really be in influential roles for less than a year if that. And so UVA kind of capitalizes on that because students will graduate, they'll start these like really incredible and impactful projects, but you need a lot more than just a semester or two to work on them. And students will graduate. And quite frankly, their priorities will shift because why would they still be concerned with undergraduate affairs once they've graduated? You know they have jobs, they have lives now. And a lot of institutional memory is lost. So students kind of have to start from the ground up again.

Ilyas Saltani: I think the biggest thing to keep in mind, at least for student leaders going forward, and this is kind of going to be my last act before graduating, is creating a repository of all these projects that students are working on and very detailed notes and documentation and communication for everything that's been done up until this point and where these students left off, so when they graduate, the next student leaders can step right in and pick up where they left off.

[Narration] Fawzia Tahsin: I would like to thank my guest Ilyas Saltani for his courage to speak out about this issue. This audio project was produced for the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia. With help from the Lab’s Senior Producer, Emily Gadek, and the Lab’s Editor, Kelly Hardcastle Jones. Special thanks to my mentor Professor Stephen Parks for sparking my interest in researching more about religion and democracy at UVA. Music for this project comes from Blue Dot Sessions You can find more documentary research on religion, race, and democracy at religionlab.virginia.edu. Thank you so much for listening!