After writing up yesterday's post about some folks trying to get Illinois State University to not allow their RAs to have live-in girlfriends, I thought I'd follow it up with another story involving RAs at a public university. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire decided in July to tell its RAs that they could no longer hold bible studies in their dorm rooms because it might make them less "approachable" to non-Christian students who have a problem. One of their RAs filed a lawsuit against this policy this week, and yesterday the university decided to suspend its policy in response. Good move. The rationale for the policy was quite flimsy in the first place. The student who filed the suit, Lance Steiger, says he is going to continue with the lawsuit until the university officially repeals the policy. He is being represented in the lawsuit by the Alliance Defense Fund, which proves that even a blind squirrel gathers a few nuts.
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I would more readily buy a policy that restricted RA's from proseletyzing to students who approach them with a problem - in fact I think that is very innappropriate. But saying they cannot practice their religion with others in their living space goes way too far.
I lean toward the view that a state-university RA's room is, at least in part, a state office, and that during office hours, RAs should not be conducting religious activities. Of course, I'm forty years past college, so I don't remember if there were office hours for RAs in my day; I seem to recall that it was sort of a 24/7 position back then. I would have no problem with an RA conducting bible study in another part of the dorm, though.
Proselytizing those seeking advice and counsel should be a firing offense, though.
Pieter B wrote:
The problem here is that the concern that they cited goes far beyond what an RA does in his or her room specifically. If the concern is that one might be less approachable because they host bible studies, wouldn't the same concern be triggered if he hosted the same study in another room in the dorm? Indeed, that would likely be more conspicuous as it would likely require that flyers be put up instructing people on when and where the bible study would take place, while if it was in his room he could just have friends coming over and no one would know what was really going on.
The other problem is, why limit it to bible studies? What if an RA is involved with the university's College Democrats? Couldn't that make him less "approachable" to Republicans? What if an RA is also a drama major and takes part in a highly controversial play on campus that gets mentioned in the paper? I mean, the problem is that the justification they've offered is quite literally limitless - there are a million potential ways that one might make themselves less "approachable" by taking any sort of public stand on any issue at all. An RA's room is his home as well as his office, to whatever small extent it really is his office, and you cannot forbid him from engaging in political or religious activity in his home based on such a flimsy and ultimately unmeetable standard.