Door Decs
Noun
Abbreviation for “door decorations” and references the decals placed by RAs on doors to the dorm rooms in the residential halls at MSU with the intention of making residents feel welcomed into their new home.
Anyone who has ever lived in the dorms in East Lansing remembers showing up on their move-in day to see their name on their door. If you’re anything like me, it was months before you even knew the number of your room because you simply looked for your name to know which room was yours. This year, the university housing department decided to replace the DIY door decs with universal ones so that every student at MSU would have the same name tag on their door.
This year’s universal door decs have blank lines for residents to fill in their information to help those living around them get to know them. This includes space for one’s name, major, hobbies, hometown, and preferred pronouns. While it is clear that these fill-in-the-blank universal door decs were implemented to allow every student to self-identify and promote inclusion, in many campus neighborhoods they are doing exactly the opposite.
Since it is not commonplace in every interaction to introduce ourselves with pronouns, this can make it difficult for individuals with differing gender identities to make their preferred pronouns known. These universal door decs were supposed to eliminate this barrier and allow all students to immediately feel at home, regardless of their gender identity. However, since these signs are for students themselves to write on, once RAs put these door decs up, it is out of everyone’s hands what students will write on them.
In an ideal world where everyone respects one another, this wouldn’t be an issue. However, college is far from an ideal world and in a place where a variety of diverse backgrounds come together, many students either don’t understand or don’t respect the idea of “preferred pronouns.” This is leading to not only the misuse of these door decs, but they have become a vessel for outright transphobic occurrences.
Many students have taken to this “pronouns” section to write things like “nor/mal” and “who/cares.” Though a wide variety of other language has been used, I feel it is not beneficial to repeat that type of language. Additionally, it is not necessary for the vulgar language to be repeated for these issues to be taken as seriously as they are. Now to some this might seem like a harmless joke, and some students may have written them as a harmless joke, but joking or not, these comments are doing harm. One RA that I spoke with said that several residents who use they/them pronouns have approached him with concern over the door decs. These residents explicitly mentioned feeling uncomfortable because “how can we tell between someone who is joking and someone who isn’t?” and if residents don’t know who is joking, or if they are joking, they don’t feel safe in their hall.
With these outright hateful comments, other members of the LGBTQIA+ community are becoming uncomfortable as well. In fact, one RA that I spoke with mentioned having several other RA’s bring their personal safety concerns over the door decs to him as well. When I asked him how these door decs have been affecting him personally he said “how am I supposed to do duty when I don’t know if this hall is safe or not?”
Concerned yet? Angry? These RA’s were. They went and brought the issue to their supervisors. The supervisors said that they are not allowed to remove the door decs but should discuss the issue with their residents and warn them that if they do not erase the comments, the RAs will erase them. So this is what the RAs did and within a day of erasing all inappropriate and transphobic comments, the same things were back up on several doors. When RAs brought this issue to their supervisors again asking for permission to remove the door decs and replace them with simple name tags. The supervisors (Community Directors or CD’s) went to their bosses, ADs (Assistant Directors). ADs said that the RAs cannot remove the door decs and when asked for a reason, the ADs said that it wouldn’t look good to remove them or to cut them below the name label.
Now both the RA supervisors and their supervisors are aware of an issue that is ongoing and creating discomfort for residents, but not one supervisor has made an effort to help reconcile the problem. After several discussions about the issues door decs are causing, ADs and CDs received an email from Vinnie Gore, senior vice president for residential and hospitality services and auxiliary enterprises, that stated RAs are not allowed to take down the door decs.
By refusing the removal of these door decs, these supervisors, and by extension the Residence Education and Housing Services (REHS) that the CDs and ADs work for, are allowing for the continuation of homophobic and transphobic instances in neighborhoods across campus. REHS’s official stance as expressed in their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion University Resources webpage (which can be found here) is that “REHS and the Gender and Sexuality Campus Center are dedicated to providing safe and comfortable living environments for all students, including those whose gender identity and/or expression differs from the sex assigned to them at birth.” They go on to say that “we believe in maintaining a positive, supportive living environment in the residence halls and apartments. At MSU, You Have A Home Here regardless of your background or social identities.” Yet, at every level REHS has allowed several residents to feel uncomfortable and unsafe in their “home” by requiring the universal door decs to stay up, allowing for the continuance of inappropriate and disrespectful comments.
The RAs are student workers who not only have the same experiences as many students in the dorms, but they are the front lines of handling resident conflict and they have followed every protocol they’ve been given to resolve the conflicts that these door decs have created and at every step they have been told not to follow through with their solution and not been given any alternatives.
This is an issue of transphobia. This is an issue against the LGBTQIA+ community. Issues of discrimination against minorities groups have occurred within dorms at MSU in the past and they must not be dismissed. Maybe the comments in the “pronoun” section have had a primary impact on a small percentage of students, who deserve to be supported and fought for regardless of their numbers, but the additional “hobbies” section has perpetuated sexism as well as the objectification of women. Comments such as “Ted Bundy’s Assistant,” “double dd’s and up,” “8+ inches,” “MILF,” “DILF,” and a plethora of other vulgar sex-related comments have been written as so-called hobbies. These comments attack women as well as could have very detrimental impacts on the mental health of survivors of sexual misconduct of all genders and prevent them from feeling safe as well.
Whatever the intention of these universal door decs was, it is clear that they are being used to perpetrate hate and are directly violating the claims of inclusion that REHS states, and their refusal to remove them enables students with some identities to be discriminated against. Here’s a call to MSU’s REHS: your residents deserve better. You MUST do better.
For many students, college is supposed to be a home away from home; but for some students, “home” isn’t a safe place to be themselves. It’s incredibly difficult to feel the comfort and safety of “home” in a place where you can’t be every part of yourself. How can we expect students who are a part of the LGBTQIA+ community to feel at home in dormitories that are remaining passive and allowing for the continuation of hate?