This year’s Graduate Students Association officers were effective in their ability to work together, to reach out to a more diverse array of graduate students and to tackle several important student concerns. However, next year’s officers will need to go a step further than this year’s in getting graduate students involved and following through with more platforms before year’s end.
At the start of this year, the four officer positions were an even split across two slates – Vice President of External Affairs Andres Schneider and President Michael Hirshman came from Moving Forward, while Vice President of Academic Affairs Ivy Onyeador and former Vice President of Internal Affairs Hope McCoy came from the Diversity in Action slate.
But any split between these two slates was short-lived. McCoy left her post for a research opportunity in Russia in September, forcing the remaining three officers to work together to keep GSA running.
This board commends Hirshman and Onyeador for collaborating to interview GSA’s committee appointments and keep forum meetings running while this labor-intensive officer position remained vacant for the two months before Milan Chatterjee’s election in November.
The officers were also successful in addressing several of their platforms. Hirshman and Schneider came into the year with goals of addressing graduate student transportation issues. They and other students spoke with Big Blue Bus officials, met with Culver City transportation officials and commented at Santa Monica City Council meetings. In part due to their efforts, Big Blue Bus Line 17 to Sawtelle Boulevard was approved by the Santa Monica City Council on April 28.
Schneider lobbied administrators to implement a summer research scholarship that will allow several international students to accept summer research opportunities at UCLA beyond nine-month visas. He, Hirshman and Onyeador all mentioned to the board their efforts to diversify GSA’s outreach in the graduate community, focusing on international students, students of color and students from a broader set of graduate programs.
While this might have led to greater diversity in GSA appointments, the years-long issue of graduate student involvement persists. This year’s election featured just five candidates and yielded just 8.2 percent voter turnout – the lowest turnout for a GSA election since 2012.
Additionally, four of the six GSA candidates in 2014 specifically mentioned rejoining the University of California Student Association in their platforms. But when the issue of rejoining UCSA was put on the table in March, officers voted unanimously against it, citing annual fees of $16,000. While this might have been the right financial decision, this board questions whether the same assessment could have been made months earlier in an effort to save valuable time and resources.
The 2014-2015 GSA officers also leave behind several unfinished platforms, including a reduction of class sizes for UCLA graduate student teaching assistants, advocacy for lower graduate student fees and an increase in availability of teaching assistant positions.
We understand these are large-scale initiatives with many moving bureaucratic parts and encourage future officers to take them up with student support. However, we feel this year’s officers would have benefited from setting more realistic goals with respect to these complex issues.
Overall, we commend this year’s GSA for identifying real graduate student concerns and making some progress on their platforms, but feel there is more to do in terms of engaging the student body and effecting broad, meaningful change for graduate students’ most pressing problems.