Minutes

Introductions

Announcements by Tom:
Minutes from 03-08-06 confirmed by consensus.
Flicks - ~115 graduate students attended, passed out elections chapsticks & donuts.
Sohini and Jenny are on the VPGE selection committee. Please send them any concerns you may have.
Still need natural science and school of medicine reps to run for elections.
GSC Thank You Dinner – one of the last Wed’s in April after our regular meeting.
The next GSC meeting is April 5th due to end of quarter and Spring Break.

Transportation Bill
Hannah – We have a changed the wording slightly to the bill. We added a comment that we want to connect graduate student to the greater bay area community. We also decided that it didn’t make any sense for the board to be a Non Com appointed committee. We specified that during years with no funding, the board would function as a volunteer advocacy committee.

Cullen – If it isn’t a Non Com board, who would pick the members?

Hannah – The GSC would approve the board.

Tom – Did the numbers change?

Hannah – No. I just added the wrong things together last time. After Justin F-W’s clarifications, we corrected the math.

Jenny – We would like to thank Hannah and the committee for their work. Do you have any comments you would like to add?

TransCom Member – This is an ongoing problem for the community. This board would be able to provide an ongoing evaluation of transportation issues.

Ross – How would the appointment to the committee work? We’ve had problems in previous years that GHAC has come into conflict with the GSC over who speaks for the graduate student community. You may want to have the board appointed by the GSC so that you have only one source for input into the board appointment process.

Hannah – I can change it to say:
At the end of Section C #2 add the following: The GSC will appoint members for the board. The GSC will also have the power to remove members.

Cullen – [question]

Hannah – The budget for the fee has to be approved by the GSC every year. The job of the board is to develop the most effective proposal for the funding every year.

Tom – This requires a 2/3 vote. This vote is just to create the board. All in favor? Opposed? Abstaining? [12,0,0] The creation of the board passes.
Now we have to address the fee.

Hannah – The bill is the same as last week. It’s a lot of money. I went through all of the on campus programs last week. This is the best guess of what it is going to cost and what on campus people are going to need. I realize a lot of people, both on and off campus are not going to use the programs, but having them available will encourage people to use public transportation more. One of the results I’ve realized from my work with the GOPass is that its existence encouraged people to change their lifestyles.

TransCom Member – One of the reasons the Provost funded this program this year is that we promised to put this on the ballot to let the graduate students vote on it.

Stephen – What is your estimate on the number of people who would get this GOPass? What would it have cost if they had gone and bought it personally from Caltrain? How much is that compared to the $318k we are going to have to pay?

Hannah – We estimate about 850 would pick up the GOPass. Brodie did the calculations and I don’t have them with me, but it would have cost a lot more if each of them had bought a monthly pass.

Stephen – The point is, we are taxing the students and giving the Caltrain a ton of money, how much would it cost these people total if they bought monthly passes? Would we save money by reimbursing the students who buy monthly passes as opposed to buying annual passes for all off campus students.

Hannah – It would cost about $360k if 12% of the off-campus students bought monthly passes for a year for a 2-zone commute.

Cullen – Just for clarity…when we vote to put something on the ballot, are we necessarily saying we approve and support it?

Stephen – No. It does not mean we endorse it. I went and looked this up. It means we feel there is something that should go before the students. Obviously, there is dissent in the body.

Tom – This is especially true with general fees since they can’t just petition for it.

Matt – I’ve asked many of my fellow students and all the ones who live on campus don’t want to put it on the ballot and even the people who use the GOPass don't think that other students should have to subsidize their commute.

Hannah – Empower those people to vote by putting it on the ballot.

Tom – We did promise the Provost that we would put it on the ballot. Are there any other comments? [none] All those in favor of putting this on the ballot? Opposed? Abstaining? [8,3,1] It required a 2/3 vote, that is 2/3 of the 12 members present so it passes.

Funding
Indonesion –We are having a film festival at the I-Center April 28 – 29. We hope there will be about 100 students, 95 grad students attending.

Josh – Are the movies in English? [English subtitles]

Adam – We are suggesting $328.

Tom – Are there any objections? [none] Passes by consensus.

Pacific Free Clinic - We are having an appreciation dinner that will also serve to recruit philanthropy.

Adam – We are suggesting $400. This is a public service organization, but we couldn’t cover all of their requests since it is an event mostly for their group.

Tom – Any objections? [none] Passes by consensus.

Diversity Committee Update
Cullen – First, our survey has been mostly analyzed. Some of the general trends were that the biggest discrepancies were between Caucasian males and minority females. Some schools are not well represented in terms of numbers so it isn’t always statistically significant. We are going to use the survey and the stories from it as a tool for advocacy when we approach the administration.

We know that Stanford’s minority application numbers are very low. We would like the University to keep contact with the approximately 300 students who are accepted into the undergraduate program every year but go to another school. We would like to keep up a relationship so that they will consider applying to graduate school here. The University seems willing to do this. We just need someone to keep the data and follow-up with the students.

I’m interested in getting some thoughts on the Vice Provost for Graduate Education selection committee. Alice and John proposed the VPGE to the administration as part of the GSC-DC. This was a year before the Committee on Graduate Education proposed the VPGE. In a meeting with the President and the Provost, they said a member of the GSC-DC would be on the selection committee. None of us are. This angers me, but I’d like to ask Jenny and Tom in particular if we should hold them to the bargain and aggressively pursue this.

Jenny – They asked us for a list of names and I sent it off [with your names on it]. I was contacted to be on the committee. I was also under the impression that a member of the GSC-DC would be on the committee.

Stephen – In my experience with the committees at the med school is that if you show up, they let you in the door and add you to the list.

Adam – No, they are trying to pull a fast one.

Aravinda – Can the GSC just ask them to add someone from the GSC-DC to the committee?

Jenny – That’s a good idea. I’ll talk to them tomorrow. I was as surprised as you were, Cullen.

Cullen – The next issue is actually pretty big. The School of Education has decided that it is going to expand its definition of diversity beyond the scope of underrepresented minorities for Graduate Diversity Admit Weekend.

Aneto – Do you think this is part of the national trend?

Donna – The liability issue is one of the reasons that has come up.

Cullen – That’s just crap. None of the other schools have said that and the administration has not said it.

Aravinda – From a legal stand point it doesn’t make any sense because of legal precedence.

Matt – I’ll put you in touch with our diversity committee in the School of Education.

Cullen – I spoke with them this morning.

General Fee
Adam – The bill is before you. It will increase the general fee for each student by a $1 per quarter and it will give us more money to give to student groups. For us to change the general fee we have to put it on the ballot.

Aravinda – Why does it say that our target is $110k but we are asking for $120k?

Adam – What I meant to say is that we are spending $110k this year, but we have been capping students and saying no a lot. I would like to have $120k to distribute next year.

Tracy – I don’t understand why we are so hard on the Daily for having so much money in reserves, yet we aren’t spending ours.

Tom – The plan is to put our reserves into an endowment that would pay into programming funds.

Matt – There are a lot of people who can’t just pay extra fees every quarter. The families and international students who aren’t sitting at this table don’t have the money to throw around. There are families on welfare in Escondido Village who just don’t want to pay extra money every quarter.

Tom – Are there any objections to voting on this to put it on the ballot? [none] In favor? Opposed? Abstaining? [8,4,0] The vote passes by the 2/3 margin necessary.

Constitutional Revisions
Tom – Adam, Chris Nguyen, Danny Arbeiter and I worked on this. We took the 72 hr requirement for notice down to 24 hours. We need to start making the 24-hour timeline. A lot of the US rules are being moved to their By-Laws. There is now an impeachment clause for the executives. Special Fees were separated to be approved by each body instead of the bodies together. You need 2/3 of all students to vote yes 15% of all students to vote, but you need at least 50% of the voting students to vote yes for each population separately. If only 1% of the Grad Population turns out to vote, but only 49% vote yes, the fee will not pass.

Aneto – The motivation is to make it easier to pass stuff on the graduate side?

Tom – The motivation is to have joint fees to have a majority of both populations to vote yes so that the grad students don’t have to pay for undergrad things.

Stephen – Are we voting on each individual change? [no] I think we should vote on things individually.

Tom – Breaking it up may make it easier to understand.

Adam- Please send any objections or problems to me, Tom, Danny and Chris in the next couple of days so that we can break it up and hash it out.

Tom – We’ll break it up for next week into about 3 sections…grammatical corrections, items moving to By-Laws, and significant changes.

Jenny – This committee has been meeting and working hard for the past several weeks. Thank you. Also, if you are not going to be here on April 5th, please get a proxy.

Voter Incentive Fund General Fee
Tim – We have severe graduate voter turnout issues and this is an equally severe measure. Let me know what you think...if you think the voter turnout is severe enough to require financial incentives. The plan is to collect a $5 general fee in the spring quarter and that money will either be returned to the student when they vote, or it will be used to fund other voter turnout measures.

Robert – We used to have a raffle system where we handed out over 1000 tickets to Star Wars [and several other items].

Aravinda – Is this constitutional? [maybe]

Aneto – To what extent is this going to actually achieve the goal? [don’t know] Also, we all have a little money we could use on increased election advertisement, do we really need to increase taxes to put more money into election incentives?

Cullen – Either way it is their money, but right now, I don’t think they actually know that we have their money.

Stephen – I think we should have a positive incentive instead of a negative incentive…like the raffles Robert mentioned.

Tom – How do you want this structured? We need to know before we vote on it.

Tim - It is up to the GSC. Send me your own preferences and I’ll work with those to come up with an option amenable to the entire group. I’ll bring something formally next time.
New Business
Adam – Please submit all of your things to me that I requested last week. We need a pro and a con on each of the 7 special fees, we have the transportation fee, the increase in the general fee. About 100 words on each of these.

[Hannah for transportation, Adam for increased general fee, Tom for constitution]

Tim – Is this for the handbook?

Adam – This is separate from the handbook. We are going to try to get it in the Daily.

Tim – It would be great if we can work together on that since we are looking into working with the Daily as well. Is there one person who would be the contact person from the GSC? [Adam] I’ll get Jackie, our point person, in touch with you.

Adam - One last thing, The Daily has not met their petition requirements.

Justin FW – Flicks has met their petition quota.

Robert – One important thing is to work with the Daily because they will often misunderstand issues and oppose something on the ballot for the wrong reason.

Jenny – We only have one week after we return to promote these things.

Transition retreat

Jenny – We need materials from everyone on describing their position and what it involves. Get those to me at our Thank You dinner. We also need to confirm our reservation. [conversation on need for closer location] [conversation on the lack of a suitable date for Tom]

Any other business? [no]