GSA Council Meeting Minutes from Oct 7, 2004

Attendance

Officers: Kai Pommerenke (President); Lisa Downward (Internal Vice President); Meredith Armstrong (Treasurer); Allison Luengen (Secretary); Ian Dobbs Dixon (External Vice President)

Department Reps: see below

Others: Susanne Altermann (EEB); Shannon Patel (Astro); Chanda Prescot Weinstein (Astro); Jack Turner (Econ); Jon Adams-Kane (Econ); Christian Flacco (Physics); Luke Wenstrom (Physics); Michael Wilson (Physics); Zoubing Zu; Kelly Holt (Literature); Courtney Rivard (Politics)

1) We discussed possible goals for this year. Each person was given 2 red dots and 2 green dots which they used to vote for issues that they were interested in and issued which they wished to work on, respectively.

Health care. 7 red, 3 green

Housing. 2 red, 1 green.

Parking and alternative transportation. 9 red.

Summer bus pass for RAs. 6 red, 2 green.

Support for service and clerical workers. 0 dots.

Survey of grad students. 3 red. 2 green.

TAships: should cover increased fees, ratio of TA/undergrads should not go down too much 6 red, 4 green.

Tuition for international students. 1 red, 1 green.

GSR protection. 7 red, 4 green

2) Parking

TAPS is proposing to enforce nighttime parking in all lots until 8:30PM as of January 1. We agreed to invite Wes Scott, head of TAPS, to our next meeting. Susi is unable to attend TAPS meetings this quarter and Brian Gerstenberger <gerstenb@chemistry.ucsc.edu> will be sitting on that committee this quarter.

3) CUE/ASME

We agreed to write a letter of support for CUE (clerical workers) and ASME (janitors). Some of the issues that these groups are facing are: a difficulty moving up (no promotion opportunities), years of experience not counting for anything, salaries not being adjusted, and low wages.

4) We approved the following department reps:

Nick Konidaris Astro

Marla Holt Ocean sciences

Brian Gerstenberger Chem

Abhijit Sen Gupta Econ

Amy Dexter Psychology

Brooke Crowley Earth sciences

Nathan Whitehead Computer sciences

Sina Farsiu EE

Sara Bothwell Envs

5) Funding requests - Chinese new student welcome, Oct. 15

Zuobing xu <zbxu@ucolick.org> from the EE Department requested $500 for the Chinese Student and Scholars Association and we agreed to fund them for the full amount. Bing estimated that there are 150 graduate students and post-docs in the organization.

6) Committee and officer reports

From Marla Holt: The Student Fee Advisory Committee (SFAV) is in charge of making recommendations to the chancellor of student affairs about reg fee allocation. This year they are having programmatic reviews. This year, they gave us another 1 time $4500 increase in travel grant funding.

Ian Dobbs-Dixon: The UCSA has identified 3 main areas to work on for this year: 1) voter registration; 2) eligibility vote; 3) education on incarceration. Oct 18 is the voter registration deadline and Ian passed out voter registration forms.

LRDP- the LRDP does not include a grad college. This is inconsistent with the WASC review.

Student Regent- fliers are available about the position of student regent. This is a 2 year commitment. The student regent is a voting position. He/she gets tuition paid. This would be a good thing for a first or second year graduate student to consider.

Kai- Lisa Sloan is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and she is our main contact now in the graduate division. She is also serving on the graduate council. The Graduate Council is interested in exploring why the cost of on-campus housing for grads is not decoupled from undergrads.

The Alumni Council met in July. There Cornerstone campaign will raise 50 million. Of that 5 million might go to fellowships for grads and undergrads.