GSC Meeting 2010-05-26
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010Agenda
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GSC Agenda: May 26th, 6:00-7:00pm – FOOD @ 5:45!
Graduate Community Center – Nairobi Room
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1. 5:45 FOOD (thanks Drew!)
2. 6:00 Welcome with Introductions
3. 6:02 Announcements (Justin/Jess)
i. Minutes from 5/19/2010
ii. Proxies of the week: Di Wang for Ping Li, Robert Hennessy for Praveen Shanbhag, and Ze Yuan for Addy Satija
iii. Reminder that meetings are recorded.
4. 6:05 Funding (Krystal)
i. New Frontiers Design
5. 6:10 pm – ASSU Update (Kelsei/Angelina) – Bill to approve cabinet nominations, Q&A with nominees
6. 6:20 pm – Transfer from reserves to VSO funding pool
7. 6:25 pm – Programming update (Joanna and Addy)
8. 6:30 pm – Proposed student group re-registration requirement (Crystal)
8. 6:45 pm – Retreat Update (Jess)
9. 6:50 pm New Business (All)
Attendance
Voting Members present:
Business – Ping Li (proxy Di Wang present)
Earth Sciences – Justin Brown
Education – Imeh Williams
Engineering – Drew Kennedy
Engineering – Joanna Lankester
H&S Humanities – Praveen Shanbhag (proxy Robert Hennessy present)
H&S – Natural Sciences – Erik Lehnert
H&S – Soc Sci – Salvador Zepeda
Medicine – Jessica Tsai
Law – Evan Berquist
At-large – Addy Satija (proxy Ze Yuan present)
At-large – Krystal St. Julien
At-large – Yichuan Ding
At-large – Crystal Yin
At-large – Tao Chu
Non-voting members present:
Kelsei Wharton – ASSU executive
Theo Gibbs – ASSU executive
Michael Cruz – UG Senate
Raj Bhandar – SSE
Demetric Sanders – ASSU
Taylor Savage – ASSU Exec cabinet
Angelina Cardona – ASSU executive
Fanuel Muindi – DAC Rep
Adam Beberg – GSC non-voting member
Elise Geithner – ASSU
Madeline Hawes – UG Senate
Ryan Peacock – ASSU Exec- grad chair
John Haskell – ASSU Exec- C.O.S.
Brianna Pang – Daily
Minutes
***************************************************************
GSC Agenda: May 26th, 6:00-7:00pm – FOOD @ 5:45!
Graduate Community Center – Nairobi Room
***************************************************************
1. 5:45 FOOD (thanks Drew!)
2. 6:05 Welcome with Introductions
3. 6:08 Announcements (Justin/Jess)
i. Minutes from 5/19/2010
ii. Proxies of the week: Di Wang for Ping Li, Robert Hennessy for Praveen Shanbhag, and Ze Yuan for Addy Satija
iii. Reminder that meetings are recorded.
4. 6:09 Funding (Krystal)
i. New Frontiers Design – Not necessary to evaluate – withdrew application.
5. 6:09 pm – ASSU Update (Kelsei/Angelina) – Bill to approve cabinet nominations, Q&A with nominees – Angelina: We brought in most of our cabinet tonight for you to ask questions of. We have ex-com meeting tonight and are extending the dead-line for applications. We will be on the retreat this Saturday.
6. 6:10 – Raj – During graduation, it’s important to tell people to buy from student stores so we can get more money from the ASSU.
7. 6:10 – Cabinet Intros: Kelsei lists cabinet nominations (same as in bill). We would like to open for questions.
Robert Hennessy: Does the bill include descriptions of each chair’s job?
Kelsei: No.
Robert: That’s required.
Justin: Just to go off of that, it’s helpful for us to know so that we can collaborate better when dealing with the university.
Angelina – The financial information is also included in our advertisement. We can get you that for the final bill.
Kelsei – Our chief-of-staff is also working hard to get time-lines for people about what their goals are for the year. We can give that to you as well before this bill is passed.
Jess: This is for Taylor (Technology Chair) – how are you planning on integrating the calendar systems?
Taylor: People have tried to do an ASSU activities calendar before, but this didn’t work so well. I’m going to create a .stanford.edu website that is a center for all groups to post their events. We’re open to suggestions on what this should look like.
Adam Beberg: Calendars fail because groups don’t use them. We’ve made a calendar every year.
Kelsei: We’ve started doing this with ASSU appropriations committee – getting both the calendar and the logo updated.
Fanuel: For the Chair of the Diversity, what is her mission?
Kelse/Angelina: She will be working on RA/CA training to improve diversity training in the RA. Some RAs are not being trained appropriately – it is a three hour workshop that is based around mining for commonalities without a foundation of knowledge for disability diversity, queer diversity, socio-economic diversity.
Erik: What are some the issues that are lacking in RA training?
Angelina: Right now, training is a three-hour workshop involving mining for commonalities – doesn’t help with a lot of diversity issues. We want to work on creating a foundation of knowledge for all RAs.
Robert: What is the goal for the grad cabinet member?
Ryan: My goal is to further work in communicating with the exec and the GSC. I don’t want to duplicate the GSC with the exec, but I think improving communication so that issue-specific positions get improved. I will help the exec know who they need to contact, improve communications.
Angelina: Just to echo Ryan, we are aware that he is the only grad student on our cabinet, but we have set an expectation with our cabinet members that they serve both populations, not just undergrads.
Erik: How are the candidates specifically intending to reach out to grad students on their issues?
Angelina/Kelsei: The Social Chair intends to meet with relevant parties – GSC, the new law school presidents, the governments in each school. The grad VSOs. We understand that it is not the same structure as undergrads.
Ryan: A lot of grad students don’t care until they get pissed – a lot of my job will be reactionary.
Joanna: Is Women’s Issues or Health here?
Angelina: No.
Justin: In your job descriptions, we would like contact info for everyone involved (funding committee for grad VSOs, women’s center for women’s issues).
Angelina: It will be a pretty hefty document, but we can either attach it to the bill or give it you separately.
Robert: It’s probably a good idea to include the GSC committee chairs on the e-mail addresses for the appropriate cabinet positions so you could get instantaneous feedback from at least one grad student.
Jess: Let’s table the vote on this until next week so we can see the full bill including description and pay.
6. 6:24 pm – Transfer from reserves to VSO funding pool –
Krystal: I was told by Ping that our budget was $150,000 and we transferred $20,000 to funding committee. We should then expect a budget of $187,000 with take-backs. Ping told me we were at ~$160,000, but we are at $180,000. Ryan recently told me that $163,000 was our budget with take-backs included. We are at $189,282.75. This means we are $27,000 over, which is a problem – we can find this. We need to have more willingness to turn groups down if we don’t feel the event is worthwhile – they shouldn’t just get the money because they are within the bylaws.
Drew: I don’t feel comfortable turning something down if I don’t feel it will be fun.
Crystal: We’re not saying you have to have a specific reason, just use your judgment.
Erik: We can talk during the retreat if we need less subjective guide-lines so that we have some basis for shared judgments.
Justin: We have a rainy day account for this, the reserves. We have plenty of money – Daily shouldn’t write that we’re broke.
Ryan: We had $480,000 in reserves at the start of the year. In addition to fees, we’re spending this down at $50,000 a year so that over the next ten years we get to just one fiscal year in the bank. We need to phase into it – next year we only budgeted $35,000 into the red. Grad programming spending has been fine, but the VSOs have not.
Jess: Do we have approval to transfer $26,282 from reserves to VSO funding. 15 in favor, 0 abstain, 0 against.
7. 6:39 pm – Programming update (Joanna and Addy) – Joanna – Addy and I met with Nanci Howe today so the registration has been taken care of. 4th of July, 1-5 pm. Does anyone think this is a bad time for any reason?
Erik: Are fireworks going to be on that date?
Joanna: Probably. People will have time to get to them though.
8. 6:42 pm – Proposed student group re-registration requirement (Crystal) – Crystal: We came up with the recommendation that groups renewing themselves will have to list their activities of the previous year. Failure to do this will lead to SAL not allowing them to re-register. We are doing this because people are taking advantage of the system to either get more money through co-sponsorship or off-campus events. Also, because new groups are required to differentiate themselves from inactive old groups.
Erik: Sometimes old, inactive groups are restarted by students. Do we want to get rid of these?
Crystal: People will just have to re-register under this situation.
Michael: SAL is currently not allowing new groups to be formed, so if you kill groups now they might not be able to form.
Crystal: I think the bar for new groups forming is high because we are not de-registering groups. Why do you not think SAL will not lower the bar?
Justin: A couple of things to keep in mind – if a group is inactive, it pops up on mygroups as inactive. And co-sponsorships are no longer allowed, right Krystal?
Krystal: The cap is now the same for co-sponsors, but is no longer from a specific fund. Now we determine if a group is active or inactive and then we decide how to divide the funding.
Crystal: How does mygroups determine if a group is active or inactive?
Robert: You just have to get 5 signatories.
Crystal: I want people to give a summary of their group activities.
Erik: I’d like to go back to the point that SAL is not letting new groups form. What is this about? This sounds like something that I don’t like.
Robert: I think SAL is doing this to reduce their workload.
Adam: SAL is doing this to consolidate groups.
Justin: There is a two-week window every quarter to get registered.
Erik: If that’s the case, that’s fine. But if people can’t get registered even if they apply within that two week window, that’s a problem.
Joanna: Nanci says that she is not aware of any grad student group that has been denied.
Robert: It can be an issue of SAL saying it is too much work for them to advise 700 groups.
Fanuel: The GSC needs to have a say in what SAL is doing, even if SAL is the final decision-maker on this. Also, the rules that need to be clear.
Ryan: I know a grad group that took forever to get through SAL. But I think clearing out the brush is good – there were some groups that literally described themselves as groups whose goal was to get more money from GSC. You could have SAL automatically de-register, and they can appeal to representatives.
Robert: Grad groups don’t register for SAL because it’s too much work, so this wouldn’t work if SAL.
Justin: Since this is under the purview of SAL, we have little control over this. A lot of groups are just involved with SAL for insurance purposes, even though some groups don’t really use them. There could be a working group to deal with this – led by Warner Salman – to work with this. If that could happen before fall.
8. 7 pm – Retreat Update (Jess) – I sent up a room-mate assignment. Joanna, Drew, and I will be drivers. I will send out another e-mail with drivers. We are putting together an announcement.
9. 7:01 pm New Business (All)
Robert: If you can, advertise the BBQ that Ryan is organizing.
Jess – Do you need help during?
Ryan: Yes.
