When Noah Hermes, a former McGill University floor fellow, first heard of McGill’s decision to remove floor fellows from residences, he was horrified.
“I think it’s endangering people’s lives,” he said in an interview with rabble.ca. “I just think there’s a lot of people who are going to fall through the cracks.”
Floor fellows, often called residence assistants (RAs) at other universities, are older students who live in residence to monitor the well-being and safety of students, and to provide support when needed.
In February 2024, McGill announced that they were removing floor fellow positions from their residences in favour of hiring additional residence staff, including residence life facilitators — upper year students who do not live in residence, but plan social events for students living there. This makes McGill the first major Canadian university to remove the position of a live-in RA.
This year, two students died in a McGill residence. The first was due to a medical emergency and the second, which occurred in January, is still being investigated.
Hermes, who now works as a social worker, said he doesn’t think residence staff are enough to support new students. He explained that, as a floor fellow, he was often the first point of contact for students struggling.
“We were doing harm reduction information and then a lot of crisis intervention,” he said. “I had students where they were dealing with sexual assault, where they were severely depressed, suicidal, struggling with thoughts of suicide.”
“You’re the first line of defence for that,” he continued. “For someone who was immediately in crisis to have someone where they know, ‘okay, I can knock on their door.’ They were able to access that really quickly.”
The state of resources available for students struggling
In an email to rabble.ca, a spokesperson for McGill said that residence staff, including floor fellows, are not mental health professionals and should not be responsible for such care.
“That role should not be mistaken as theirs,” the statement said. “Their focus should always be on referral to appropriate resources and experts.”
They also highlighted a number of mental health resources available to students, including Quebec’s suicide.ca, the Office of the Dean of Students, Info-Santé, McGill’s Student Wellness Hub, and Canada’s 998 suicide helpline.
Hermes explained that floor fellows did act as a referral service for students, but they also acted as an accessible support service for students in immediate need.
“Another student who I know — I was literally walking with them to bring them to the mental health department to meet with a psychiatrist because they were so suicidal,” he said.
Dymetri Taylor, president of the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), said that many new students are unaware of the resources available to them — and find some resources difficult to access.
“They’re quite difficult to get a hold of,” he said in an interview with rabble.ca, referencing McGill’s Student Wellness Hub. “You have to call around eight in the morning — that’s when they first open up — and then you have the span of a few seconds to get lucky enough to get an appointment.”
What this means for students living in residence now
This is something Julia Wykretowicz, a first year student living in residence, dealt with first-hand when she broke her foot in October.
“I attempted to call the Wellness Hub for four days at eight in the morning — that didn’t work at all,” Wykretowicz, an international student from the United States, said in an interview with rabble.ca.
She explained that when she had trouble accessing care at the Wellness Hub, she wasn’t sure where to go.
“I had to figure everything out on my own,” she said.
This led Wykretowicz to turn to Reddit to ask for recommendations from her peers.
Taylor explained that Reddit has become a common resource for new students, especially this year, partially because new students don’t have easy access to an older student to get advice from in the form of a floor fellow anymore.
“They tend to go on Reddit to kind of get the idea of what’s happening on campus,” he said. “To some degree, it’s replaced our student news publications.”
Eventually, Wykretowicz managed to get an appointment at the McGill Sports Clinic.
“I had to, like, limp all the way up the hill to get a doctor’s appointment where they told me my foot was fractured,” she said, “and then I had to go and buy a walking boot by myself.”
“I think it might have been easier if there was an RA, you know, to help me,” she said. “They might have not known what to do, but they would at least be somebody with more experience or they would have known who to contact.”
Hermes said that this was another important role of floor fellows — helping students, many of which are international or out-of-province, with navigating Quebec and McGill systems.
“It’s navigating a system that is completely brand new and navigating a province that is completely brand new,” he said. “All of that is going to be extremely hard for someone who’s just starting university.”
The need for more support for new students
Wykretowicz said she hopes to see additional support implemented for new students living in residence.
“The biggest concern, in my opinion, is health — mental health, physical health, social health, emotional health,” she said. “I think the school needs to figure out how to deal with the capacity of students that they have, considering that everybody needs help at some point.”
“If there are people with a broken foot who have to walk up the hill because they don’t know what to do because there are no RAs,” she continued, “there needs to be more advertising for health services — and there needs to be better health services, period.”
Hermes emphasized that the advantage of floor fellows is that they have a small number of students that they interact with on a regular basis, and it’s impossible for current residence staff to fill that role in the same manner.
“There is no way that one person can have, you know, an informal case load of 200 students and actually be accessible enough for the ones that are going to need it,” he said. “There’s a reason why every other university has RAs.”
When asked about her level of interaction with residence staff, Wykretowicz said it was minimal.
“I see them once every two weeks or something,” she said. “They’re handing out like pastries and then occasionally they have on Instagram — they post, like, ‘oh, we’re doing this activity.’”
“But otherwise it’s like you don’t really know who they are,” she said. “And I don’t think that they particularly make the effort to get to know the students.”
In their email, McGill said they have no intention of reinstating the floor fellow position.
Taylor said that while he thinks the position is important, with the recent tuition hike for out-of-province students, as well as the new requirement that 80 per cent of international and out-of-province students learn French when attending English-language universities in Quebec, the SSMU is not currently taking any action to advocate for the position to be reinstated.
“Because of the financial constrictions that the Quebec government has placed on the university, it’s gone into a relatively hard point,” he said. “If you go with floor fellows, then other parts of the university will then suffer.”
McGill stated that the removal of floor fellows was not motivated by financial concerns.
“Labour cost savings amount to $165,000, negligible in the overall Residence Life budget,” they said in their statement. “The change follows a lengthy review of residence life services and surveys of student residents.”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
