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the evaluators. Including early career faculty may be a good option here and serves
the two-fold purpose of engaging academic
partners in a student affairs endeavor and
assisting these faculty with the service work
needed for their professional advancement
(i.e., promotion and tenure).

Are Your Selected Group Activities
Meaningful?
As described earlier, group process can be
used to educate candidates in various ways.
In addition to sharing verbal or written information during group process, group activities and their facilitation or debriefing
can be a mechanism to help candidates
understand the RA position. Rather than
have candidates rank order potential RA
candidates or list items to salvage from a
sinking ship, they might prioritize RA position description elements or " things to do
today " that encompass the RA role, student
responsibilities, co-curricular involvements,
engagement in self-care, and simply being a
person. With facilitation or debriefing, candidates can discuss their reasoning and be
provided with any additional information
deemed important to the department.

Is Group Process a Worthwhile Use
of Staff Time?
Departments should utilize Stoner's (2019b)
staffing cost analysis by running their own
calculations. Then, you can evaluate the cost
against the benefits of group process. Any
cost-benefit analysis should be closely tied to
group process purposes.

Who is Privileged or Hindered by
Group Process?
In part, who is advantaged or disadvantaged
by group process concerns prior knowledge
of or interactions with candidates. Perhaps
there are ways to separate candidates from
observers who know them in a different
context. More importantly, departments can
perpetuate structural racism and other isms
when we are not intentional about eliminating bias based on candidate characteristics.
We draw conclusions about candidates based
on appearance, which may well be incorrect or lacking context: the person who has
gray hair, the darker-complected person who
identifies as White, the articulate student
who has dyslexia. We have a professional and
societal responsibility to account for individual candidates' differences, those that we can
see and might make assumptions about, as
well as those we cannot see. Careful vetting
of activities and evaluation criteria with an
eye towards who might be privileged is an
important first step.

CONCLUSION
In this paper we raised questions about an
enduring vestige of RA selection: group process. Ethical considerations and questions
departments should consider regarding their
group processes were also presented. If your
campus is already reviewing its group process-or if this article sparks such a review-
perhaps that starting point is even more
basic. We posit continuing engagement in

Future iterations of a group experience as part of the
RA selection process should keep its purpose, its ethics,
its effectiveness, and its efficiency front and center.

Volume 47, No. 3 * 2021

Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 3