A group of graduate students are looking to create their own government at USM to represent the roughly 1,700 graduate students who have, until now, lacked formal representation.
Will Walker, a Muskie student and current chair of the Muskie School Organization, is a member of an exploratory committee that has been meeting since January to figure out how to create a Graduate Student Government. He said the MSO has been overwhelmed trying to be both a social network, and a forum to foster community involvement among grad students.
“For us, having a student government body we can look to to represent the grad students at USM can take that off our hands and let us be more effective at the other things that MSO does, things that really only MSO can do,” he said.
The purpose of the GSG would be to both represent graduate students during a tumultuous period of restructuring at USM, as well as to help fund student research and provide grants.
“Grad students currently have no voice other than one appointed rep to the Board of Trustees, yet there are over 2,000 grad students who pay between double and triple the undergrad tuition,” said Dave Holman, a 26-year-old MBA student who is among the four on the exploratory committee.
The GSG would also provide representatives to university committees requiring graduate student input.
“Currently at USM there are more than five committees which are required to have a graduate student member, but can’t find one because they don’t know who to ask for representatives,” said Holman. “This is another area where a GSG would contribute to USM. If graduate students served on committees at USM they would bring a lot of valuable experience into the discussion.”
The exploratory committee met last Friday in Portland with Chris O’Connor, assistant dean of student life, and Maggie Guzman, undergraduate student body president, to get advice on how to create a government from scratch.
They’ve got a long way to go.
The group met initially in January with Craig Hutchinson, vice president of student and university life, who said he would support any measure to create a GSG. Guzman was involved from the beginning as well. She said she’s helping the graduate students because “they have no connections to the university.”
According to O’Connor, in order to get the GSG running by this fall, the group needs to make sure there is interest among graduate students. Then they have to draft a constitution and by-laws, which President Selma Botman would then sign off on, before sending it to the Board of Trustees, who would have to vote to have the documents added to USM’s governance doctrine.
But it will take them another year to get approval from the Board of Trustees to charge a student activity fee. The university currently charges $18 per undergraduate student taking one to six credits, $35 for six to 11.5 credits, and $52 for 12 credits or more. The fee is used to pay for student groups and activities such as the Student Senate and the Outing Club.
“If they want to impose a fee on students, that has to go to a referendum voted on by grad students,” said O’Connor. There’s nothing “written in stone” about how many students have to vote in order for the referendum to pass, he said, but if turnout is small, Botman may not be impelled to sign off on the fee.
Hutchinson has pledged to help them with funds from the university’s operating budget in the meantime, according to O’Connor.
Holman said the committee is looking at the feasibility of tacking a small fee onto grad students’ bills to pay for research, grants and activities. The group is planning a survey for March to see if support exists for such a fee.
“The fee would be much smaller than the undergraduate fee because grad students are often too busy to partake in the same range of clubs and activities,” said Holman. “We’ve been discussing something like $2 per credit hour or a flat $10 to $20 fee, so this would be a very small contribution. The Orono Graduate student government charges $30 per semester to full time grad students and has a budget of $120,000 per year, but we’d be looking to start with a significantly lower budget even though we have slightly more graduate students.”
This isn’t the first time the idea of starting a graduate student government was broached. Holman said a survey conducted in 2005 among 550 full time graduate students showed significant interest in starting a GSG at USM. In that survey, 77 percent “supported a graduate student representative organization of some kind,” 83 percent “want representation as graduate students” and 62 percent” support a small fee to fund this organization,” according to Holman.
“Provided that graduate students are still energized about creating new opportunities for student research and networking we hope to see strong support,” he said.