SEAHO Report - Spring 2019 - 30

SEAHO Feature Articles
shows 90% of perpetrators of sexual violence against women are men. Research shows 66% of all murders
are committed by men. Research shows men's enrollment in higher education is down to between 35-42%,
down by close to 15% in the last 20 years. And, research shows men disproportionately violate policies and are
sanctioned more often for violence or disruptive behaviors on our campuses across the country.
It's time we take note and do something about it. It's not just for our men. It's for all of us.
Men-in-Residence: Male Student Success Initiative at USF
In Residential Education at the University of South Florida, we took this challenge head on, taking a multipronged approach to creating avenues to support men living on-campus. Through our efforts, we launched Menin-Residence in the summer of 2018. At USF, we view our work as scholar-practioners, finding our framework
through research and data to inform our practices. To do that, we first set out to understand the issue more
deeply on our campus. Why, at a place that does so well to support students to graduation and beyond does this
disparity exist?
Our Theoretical Framework
The first step was finding a framework and testing that framework. After searching the web, the research was
limited, but we struck gold: Experiences of Male Undergraduates That Lead to Academic Failure by Terry
Musser, Tanja St. Pierre, Douglas Wilson, and Marion Schwartz. This scholarly article was written in 2017 and
we believed could fit with the struggles of men on our campus. However, we needed to make sure we could
connect it to our men. To do so, we did an informal polling, asking Professional Staff to introduce a short, onequestion survey to our student staff during weekly staff meetings.
In this process, we painted the picture for our student staff, providing information about USF's struggles with
men's persistence and success on-campus. We then asked a simple question:
"Please describe any experiences with male residents in our on-campus communities that you believe explain
the difference in male and female graduation rates."
The results were incredible. After coding nearly 150 responses, we found our resident assistants and community
managers were able to describe similar experiences as outlined in Musser et al. Our student staff saw men
struggling, they just hadn't made the connection quite yet. Armed with this data, we were ready to dive into
our initiative with Learning Goals and Outcomes themed around Musser et al. and their barriers to academic
success.
Creating the Men-in-Residence Initiative
Ready to go to work, we needed a cohort. We needed a population of students to begin with and selected some
of our summer students. At USF, we operate with multiple summer schedules. Our Summer B experience aims
to support First Time in College students who did not meet the admission requirements to start in fall. USF
admits these students to come early, with the goal of making connections with peers and support services oncampus, and acclimating to the rigorous academic coursework over a six-week period. This was our target. We
were able to identify about 400 FTIC men as a part of this cohort of students. We couldn't reach them all, but
we could do our best to reach as many as we could.
Using our theoretical framework, we designed a multi-modality approach to student engagement, similar to our
Residential Curriculum, recognizing students engage with us or with information in different ways:
* Passive Strategies (Flyers and Emails)
* Events
* Intentional Interventions
SEAHO Report Spring 2019

SEAHO Report - Spring 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SEAHO Report - Spring 2019