As debates get rolling, grads pause for review

As the quest for graduate-student-government reform continues, leaders are turning to their peers for feedback.

Four graduate-student government meetings, including one held yesterday afternoon, gave the average grad student a chance to catch up on what's become a heated debate among the graduate community.

With the way in which the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly and the Graduate Student Associations Council are currently set up, the two groups sometimes overlap, and graduate students, at times, find themselves unsure of which group they should go to for assistance.

GAPSA serves as the umbrella organization for all graduate and professional students, while GSAC's role is to represent graduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences, as well as doctoral and research master students from all schools that offer those programs.

This problem of uncertainty is one of the difficulties that student-government leaders are hoping to fix with the suggested restructuring.

The proposal - presented in all the meetings by either Lee Shaker, an Annenberg School of Communication Ph.D. candidate and GAPSA chairman, and/or Cassondra Giombetti, a fourth-year student in the Graduate School of Education and GSAC president - aims to create one single "General Assembly" for student government. It would represent every graduate and professional student at Penn, regardless of school or program, and additionally create a separate student government for graduate students at SAS.

Another proposal, presented each time by Roger Turner, a fourth-year SAS graduate student, recommended the current structure be kept and reformed as it is instead of revamping the entire system.

And while attendance numbers were reportedly low, Shaker and Giombetti are intent on resolving the issues by April.

"We've come really quite far in this process already, and it would be a shame to fail to move it to the end game," Shaker said.

Giombetti added that she hasn't "met many people that don't agree with the fact that these problems exist once they understand the [current] system."

In the meantime, regardless of whether students are in support of the first proposal or the second, they seem to recognize that something needs to be done.

"Fundamentally, I believe that it's really important that GSAC and GAPSA represent the concerns of their constituents," said Elise Carpenter, a fifth-year SAS graduate student and former GSAC president.

The next phase of the process will begin on Monday, when Fels Institute of Government student Joung Lee, the vice chairman of GAPSA, will be taking the discussion to a forum where graduate-student leaders from across the University will weigh in on the proposals.

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