First Grad Life Committee Meeting

Greetings gang!
Hope everyone is enjoying their summer.

Greg, Brian, and I just wanted to give you some brief updates about The Committee on Grad Life (I think that’s what their calling us) since we had our first meeting on Tuesday.

First the committee members:
(chair) Alison Winter: History/ CHSS
David Martinez: Classics/Divinity School
Thomas Thuerer: Dean of Students, Humanities
Martina Munsters: Deputy Dean of Students for Student Affairs

The first meeting was really about introducing the issues. Alison began by saying that most of our activity over the last quarter was news to the faculty, so she wanted to hear from us what our concerns were. We proceeded to go over our proposal, which Martina had already provided for everyone present.

By far the most discussion was generated about teaching, I think because everyone present was shocked to learn that teaching salaries had not changed over the last nine years. There also seems to be some support for increased grants and competitive funding, and Martina and Tom have promised to bring figures for our next meeting on how many people have been applying for things like the Provost Summer Stipend and The Doolittle-Harrison Travel Grant, versus how many people actually get these things. But both already seemed aware that the number of students applying for these things and the amount of funds available were hugely out of proportion, which only helps our case.

These are just the things that seemed to draw the most positive reactions and I do want to point out that nothing we brought up was rejected outright. That having been said, it still looks like we’ve got a lot of challenges ahead of us. But our next meeting with Simrit Dhesi from the budget office, Patrick Hall, the dean of students in the Social Sciences, and Terri Owen, the dean of students in the Divinity School, will give us (students and faculty) a sense of where money for these initiatives might come from, as well as give us a genuine sense of the feasibility of some of our proposed changes.

In short, things look promising right now, even if there isn’t much new to report. I do believe there is a genuine spirit of cooperation in the room, even if we’re all coming at these issues from very different perspectives.

As I mentioned before, in the next few meetings Martina is going to do some data gathering for us, which I think will show that student need has increased while funding opportunities from the University have been unable to meet the higher demands. It would be really great if we could present some of our own data from the student survey in return. Any thoughts on this? Has anyone from the Grad Life/Survey Data Committee done more analysis on our data since our presentations in May?