Why have community standards?

[Admin]

Why Have Community Standards?

As college students we are maturing adults.
This means we make choices for ourselves and learn from those choices.
As we make mature decisions in our young adult lives, we are able to make more mature decisions easier later in life.

Community Standards provides a means by which students’ expectations of the authority to meet their needs are shifted to a recognition that the individual and the community must work together to create an environment that best meets every ones’ needs.

--- As an RA, I (christine) help this process happen instead of someone who fixes things for people or someone who always punishes behavior that is not in line with expectations.-----

Because we are affected by one another’s behavior, we tend to have expectations about what we consider acceptable for the other people to do. We may or may not realize that our behavior affects others or we may believe that everyone has the same expectations that we have. This last concept can extend to a point where we believe that everyone has the same expectations at the same time (i.e. "if I want to listen to music now, everyone wants to listen to music now").

Out of an awareness of expectations, the residents can discuss their different expectations and come to agreement on ways that they can live with the differences or compromise around the differences.

One of these is the ability to consider another's point of view as being valid and thus to be taken into consideration in one’s own point of view.

Expectation setting, rule enforcement, and conduct problems are no longer the sole responsibility of the RA or the CD; rather they are the shared responsibility of the community. By establishing Community Standards and shared responsibility, residents are empowered to deal with problems before they occur.