The RAs encouraged the tour guides to “engage students critically around issues of mental health, financial aid, emergency preparedness, and the lack of institutional support for students by the Dean of Students office.” That is, they suggested telling prospective students that our college is mean and uncaring-never mind that the majority of students consider Scripps a happy community of students seeking to learn and to succeed. Talk about “intersectionality.”Īfter the victory, the strike continued. Whom the RAs find insufficiently sympathetic. Tiedens did refuse one demand-to fire the dean of students, (Harvey Mudd College, another school in the Claremont Consortium, also ratcheted up its shrink budget in response to student tantrums last week.) Ms. She promised to pay for students’ private therapy and to hire a “wellness” administrator.
“As an alternative, we will use our tours as a platform to share with prospective students and families the toxic and frustrating climate that Scripps has created and perpetuates against marginalized students.” “In our act of solidarity, the majority of us will not guide the normal tours beginning Monday, April 17th,” they declared in a statement. “This financial burden,” the letter complains, “should not be put on any student who seeks to improve their mental health.” Should a college provide therapy to RAs whom it pays to be the mature authorities in its dorms?Ĭiting “intersectionality,” Scripps’s “admissions ambassadors”-the student tour guides-joined the strike. But the school only pays $75 a session, and even if students can get insurance to cover the rest they must “front” the cost. The letter acknowledges that Scripps already subsidizes students’ visits to private, off-campus therapy.
Then there are the mental-health problems purportedly generated by the “emotional labor” RAs do. They allege that Scripps “discourages students from seeking external support to pay for their education, but does not provide the necessary funding”-but they also admit that “we do not completely understand the complexities of the financial aid system.” The RAs declare that they’re on strike to “put pressure on Scripps to fulfill its obligation to students” and to “demonstrate the extent of the labor we perform on campus.” That “labor” largely consists of opening dorm doors for residents who forget keys, asking students to turn down music on weekend evenings, and so forth. In an April 13 letter to new college president
Scripps RAs, most of whom are African-American and Latina, get room and board worth almost $16,000 a year.
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