Provost Makes Official Recommendations

Full report at: http://provost.uchicago.edu/pdfs/gradstudentconditions.pdf

Summary from the email to all students:
* Total amount over five years: $4.7 million
* Allow departments in the Social Sciences and Humanities Divisions to reduce the number of new graduate students admitted in 2008-09, and use the reallocated funding to raise the stipend level for current graduate students. The resources made available by the Provost’s Office, the Divisions and the Departments to improve the stipends of current students will be $529,000 in the Humanities and $421,000 in the Social Sciences. The following Humanities departments have elected to participate: Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English, History of Culture, Jewish Studies, Linguistics, Music, New Testament, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Participating departments in the Social Sciences are Sociology, Political Science, History, and the Committee on Social Thought.
* Expand the Graduate Aid Initiative to include matriculating doctoral students in the Divinity School beginning in 2008-09. In addition, Divinity also will reduce the number of students admitted in order to reallocate funds to raise stipend levels for current graduate students. This represents a new funding commitment of $1.4 million over four years in support of current graduate students.
* Increase the number of Provost Summer Fellowships from 25 to 100 in 2008, and from 15 to 50 in 2009. (The number of fellowships each year will decrease as the number of students in Scholastic Residence not covered by the Graduate Aid Initiative also decreases.) This new funding commitment of $330,000 is coming from the Provost and the Vice President and Dean of Students. The Summer Fellowships, awarded competitively, are designed to assist students so they may concentrate on undertakings such as preparing for exams, completing a thesis or conducting research during the summer.
* Increase the number of dissertation-year fellowships by 15 during the 2008-09 academic year. Currently there are 80 such fellowships offered within Humanities or Social Sciences, allowing advanced graduate students whose funding has expired to concentrate on completing their dissertations. The new fellowships will be funded for the next five years, with a goal of expanding to 20 new fellowships during that period and raising sufficient funds to fully endow the new fellowships into the future. The University’s five-year funding commitment for this program will be more than $2 million.
* Appoint a committee to review the compensation structure for graduate student teaching, with a goal of implementing the accepted recommendations by the start of the 2008-09 academic year. In addition, the committee will be asked to make a wide range of recommendations concerning the roles and responsibilities of graduate student teachers, pedagogical training, and systems for monitoring and improving the experience of graduate student teachers.
* Appoint a committee to review the advanced-residency system and the yearly increases in advanced-residency tuition.
* Appoint a committee to recommend improvement of services in support of international graduate students.
* Review the effectiveness of health insurance programs and health care services for graduate students.
* Strengthen the mechanisms for consultation with graduate students, and develop regular surveys of graduate students.