Approved GSA Council Meeting Minutes from Nov. 18, 04

Attendance

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

Department Reps: Brian Gerstenberger (chem), Jesse Saba Kirchner (linguistics), Sara Bothwell (environmental studies), John Hofmann (math), Nathan Whitehead (CS), Cintia Mergi (CE), Amy Dexter (psychology), Sina Farsiu (EE), Carmen McDonald (philosophy), Marina Sarren (soc), Berra Yazar (MCDB), Nick Konidaris (astro), Abhijit Sen Gupta (econ).

Others: Takeshi Kaneko (MAT), Joseph Sung (CE), Joe Marcelin-Sampson (EDU), Jamus Lim (ECON)

Minutes from Nov. 4 approved.

Announcements

1) Joseph Sung <chengyus@soe.ucsc.edu> is interested in starting a Tiawanese Student Association. Contact him if interested.

2) Community rentals, in 125 Hann Student Services, is holding a drop-in open house on Thurs Dec 2 from 10-3. They provide rental listings for rooms, apartments, and houses off-campus.

Departmental Reps

We approved the following new departmental reps:

Jesse Saba Kirchner (linguistics)

Carmen McDonald (philosophy)

Jon Hofmann (math)

By-law Changes

Allison Luengen proposed some changes to the by-laws. The changes included enfranchising the CPB representative by allowing the department with the CPB representative to have 2 votes- one from the departmental representative and from the CPB person. The second change created alternate department representatives that are elected by the same process as the primary representatives and can vote in the absence of the primary. The third change removed some antiquated language from the descriptions of the officer’s duties. The secretary is no longer required to write a newsletter and the treasurer is no longer required to attend CPB meetings. The duties and stipend of the board-reps are also spelled out in the new by-laws.

The by-law changes were approved by 13 in favor, 1 against, and 2 abstentions.

Election of New CPB Representative.

The GSA representative to the Committee on Planning and Budget attends weekly meetings Thursdays from 8:30 to 12. When appropriate, the rep contributes to discussions about grad student issues in CPB meetings. The rep keeps GSA officers updated on matters discussed in the meetings that are relevant to graduate students. In addition, the CPB rep attends internal GSA officer meetings and meetings with the campus administration. The stipend for this position is $600 per quarter. Link to the public website for the Committee on Planning and Budget: http://senate.ucsc.edu/cpb/

Marina Sarran (soc) was elected as the new CPB representative.

Old Business

Kai developed a questionnaire on the proposed Graduate College and we suggested some minor changes in wording. Kai will email the questionnaire out to the department representatives and they will gather responses from people in their departments.

Committee and Officer Reports

1) Committee on Teaching (Berra)

The committee on teaching is trying to gather information on how much training TAs receive. Currently, each department has its own ways (if any) to train TAs. Each departmental administrator and chair will be contacted to gather this information.

There is a teaching symposium coming up on Feb 17. As part of the teaching symposium, the committee is seeking proposals on the topic of "How to engage students in large and small classroom settings."

There is also funding available to anyone that is designing a course that would like to try innovative techniques. If you feel this is relevant and there is and some interest in your respective departments, please feel free to circulate the following information: For a mini-grant, grad students need to have a faculty sponsor who is the principal applicant. The reason for this is to ensure that the improvement will have ongoing impact after the grad students leave UCSC. IIP materials (instructions, Call for Proposals, forms) are on the CTE web site: http://ic.ucsc.edu/CTE/grants.html.

2) Social Committee (Sina)

The party is this Friday. Show up at 5 if you want to help.

3) Transportation (Brian)

Wes is marching toward 24 hour parking enforcement for financial reasons. There may also be increases in the cost of carpool permits to generate more revenue. “A” permits already cost so much that they can’t be increased anymore, so Wes Scott is looking for more sources of revenue.

The Graduate Council will be taking a position on the extended parking (to 8:30 PM) proposal and mailing our letter.

The GSA can have a second representative on the transportation committee because Wes has merged TAC and TOC. The merged committee is called TAC (Transportation Advisory Committee). So now the two seven member committees are now one thirteen member committee. There are 4 undergrad reps, 2 grad, 4 staff and 3 faculty. Wes is now a non-voting member in order to make the committee an odd number so there won't be a tie in voting. Brian doesn’t think this merge matters much to us other then we can put two people on the committee. One thing we just need to keep an eye on is that the original purpose of the TOC was to deal with the funds generated from the student transit fee. Thus the TOC committee was made up of almost all students. Now the new TAC is about 50:50 student:nonstudent. But in the end the student transit fee is a self imposed fee and if TAPS decide to use it in a bad way we just vote it off ourselves.

Currently, some of the revenue from “A” parking permits is set aside for summer bus passes, but some revenue from the “B” permits is not similarly going to the summer bus passes.

4) President’s Report. Kai.

There is a question about whether graduate students have catalogue rights, like the undergraduates.

5) CPB (Beth)

At CPB today something was brought up that we probably want to follow. There was mention of a new effort by the department of commerce to somehow limit international students. There's a concern that the U.S. is losing intellectual property when international students get trained in the U.S. and then leave to go back home. It's a move that universities with large international student populations are strongly opposed to. I'm guessing that it will be discussed by CPB in the near future. I tried to look for more info on this online but was unsuccessful.

6) Committee on Academic Freedom (Nathan)

There was no meeting last Monday, but there has been some email discussion. Barbara Epstein and Paul Ortiz of CAF met with Acting Chancellor Chemers to discuss the Senate PATRIOT Act resolution. Excerpts from Barbara's email report:

"Chemers was very emphatic about his support for our efforts... He also

said that he takes a unanimously passed resolution very seriously."

"He said that in asking him to send letters to public officials, and

to the senates of other campuses, and even to post notices in the

library and bookstores, amounted to asking him to take a political

stand... This, he said, could be held against UCSC by the Regents,

in the current political climate... We don't know who the next Chancellor

will be. Do we really want to give some unknown Chancellor the right

to make political statements?"

The current consensus in CAF is that no-one will raise this issue in the next Senate hearing (11/19/2004) or make a stink about it soon. We think the administration is on our side currently.

My own personal opinion is that this is not so much a political issue. Universities should fight for the rights of their students, faculty, and visitors as a matter of course. I don't think now is the time to make a fuss, but I think it is important that the UC system and UCSC signify their commitment to foreign students and foreign visitors. Maybe forcing the issue about the resolution against the PATRIOT Act isn't the right strategy and there is some better way to do this.

Second minor issue: does it infringe academic freedom of students to have reports written up about comments they make in class during discussions? The case referred to us was a situation where during discussion about laws against selling dog meat, a student said something along the lines of "the Vietnamese would steal your dog and eat it". Other students reported the incident to the UCSC Peer Response Team. The teacher was concerned that an over-eagerness to file reports on other students during lively debate could be a hindrance to academic freedom. CAF's reply was basically that anyone can report anything to anyone if they feel like it. The important thing is what happens in response to such a report. As there was no response (that we know about), we didn't think there was any problem with academic freedom.

Discussion on Ethics and Mistreatment of Graduate students

An article from Physics Today sparked a discussion about the treatment of graduate students by professors. We didn’t have time to finish the discussion, but a summary of the article is below.

The November 2004 issue of Physics Today reports the results of a survey of young physicists who were asked about ethics in their profession. While the ethics panel had been originally concerned with data fabrication and publication, the majority of the responses from the young physicists addressed the unethical treatment of graduate students and postdocs. The

responses included the following abuses:

"abuse of graduate students by advisors"

"slavery of graduate students. Professors threaten to not write

letters of recommendation unless graduate students stay in their

group to produce more data"

"Truthfully, graduate school's purpose is to provide cheap,

talented labor to get science done cheaply."

According to the article, "Junior members expressed concerns over not giving students credit for research by leaving their names off published papers. They also wrote of supervisors imposing grueling hours on their graduate students and sometimes pressuring them to do unethical things such as overlooking data that did not conform to expectations. Particularly shocking to the task force was how often the words 'abuse' and 'exploitation' were used to describe the treatment of graduate students. . . . Several wrote of the 'powerlessness' of graduate students and postdocs who . . . cannot afford to blow the whistle on instances of mistreatment."

What could be done at UCSC to promote the ethical treatment of graduate students? Would a campus ombudsperson who advocates for graduate students help?