DSC Page
by Shawn Rice
A New Start
As you know, this year started off with the biggest payroll fiasco that we’ve seen to date. And, as student representative and student advocates, we in the Executive and Steering Committees of the Doctoral Students’ Council have responded as quickly as possible. We have met with many different levels of administrators, trying to work out a coherent account of what went wrong when no coherent account was available. And we have worked with the tireless coordinators of the Adjunct Project, Renee McGarry and Alison Powell, to help disseminate this information and provide you possible solutions if you didn’t get paid. And we must also thank the Bursar, Ab Abraham for the countless hours of unpaid overtime that he put in so that he could process paycheck advances for those students who didn’t get paid. If you do have any unresolved horror stories, please email them to us so that we can help (dsc@cunydsc.org).
Here are the DSC people who have already started and will continue to work for you this year.
New Leadership
First, Suzanne Tamang has replaced Gregory Donovan as the new Co-Chair for Student Affairs. She comes from the Computer Science program. Last year she served on the Steering Committee and on the Graduate Council’s Committee for Structure. We’re glad to have kept her around.
Shawn Rice has stepped into Rob Faunce’s old office, Co-Chair for Communications. You will undoubtedly get way too many emails from him this semester regarding things that we hope you find informative, relevant, and useful.
Chris Sula returns for his second shot at the Co-Chair for Business. Over the summer, we all appreciated Chris’ energy and dedication: he spent most of his summer trying to catalog and make sense of all of our financial records dating back to 1991. He hails from the Philosophy program.
Ally Foster from the English program consented to remain in her position as the University Student Senate Representative. We all admire the endless patience that she has to remain in this position.
Jill Belli, also from the English program, is serving her second term on the Steering Committee.
Anick Boyd from the Comparative Literature program has become a new Steering Committee member. You might know her in her alternate capacity as the “nice one” from the registrar’s desk.
Kyle Ferguson, also from philosophy, spent his summer training chimpanzees at a lab in Louisiana, and now he happily serves on both grants committees.
Kim Libman is also a fresh face on the Steering Committee. She is from Environmental Psychology where she studies urban food environments and plans to bring her expertise to work for us as she now chairs the Health Issues Committee.
From Anthropology, Christine Pinnock has returned to the steering committee for a second term and keeps us all mindful that some Graduate Center students are often in the field or stationed in labs not at 365 Fifth Ave.
Jared Simard, a representative of the Classics program, is starting his first term on the Steering Committee. He aims to make student participation in program governance easier and more transparent.
We hope to do many things this year. We hope to convince facilities to put in more electric plugs around the building to keep up with the number of students who want to use their laptops for more than two hours at a time. We plan to act as student advocates by trying to ensure that students have adequate representation within their programs. And, as usual, we plan to fight hard to expand the Travel and Research fund.
Emergency Loan Fund and Dissertation Fellowships
Last years’ DSC did a few things that were under-publicized but that they deserve much credit for doing. The first is that they created four new dissertation fellowships to be distributed across the major fields in the Graduate School. They also contributed a large amount of money to an emergency loan fund, and their donation was matched by a generous alumnus. The emergency loan fund is meant for students in times of crisis, be they crises brought about by a sudden change in financial aid status or, perhaps, an employer failing to pay on time. Lastly, they also earmarked monies to try to make the ever-precarious and always underfunded Travel and Research Grant program more stable.
Free Legal Advice
In the last weeks of the summer, in late August, the Co-Chairs had an idea to start offering free legal services to students. We didn’t think that we would be able to realize this idea until at least the Spring semester, but we asked the CUNY School of Law if they have any training programs for their students to provide legal advice or other services. The Dean then pointed us to the Community Legal Resource Network, a group of CUNY School of Law graduates who have banded together to provide affordable legal services for those who normally wouldn’t be able to afford them. The CLRN already had relationships with Baruch and Queens Colleges, and so we were able to use the same structure and network for the Graduate Center. Now, since the first day of the semester, we have free legal advice available for you one day a week, alternating between afternoons and evenings. Sign up for an appointment on the DSC website (www.cunydsc.org), or stop by for a walk-in appointment.
New Website
Over the summer, we redesigned the website so that we could streamline the process of many of our services. For instance, to enter the locker lottery (for lockers in 5409 and 5414), one used to have to fill out a paper form and drop it off by our office. Now you all received an email with a link to simple web form to sign up for the lottery. (Un)fortunately this worked well, which is a testament that paper forms are so 2002. We received 291 locker requests, up from 110 the year before. That shows that we made the process easier, and, in turn reduced the chance of any person getting a locker from 54% to 21%. We’ll now work on getting more lockers.
Similarly, we have moved old paper systems to the website, like Room Requests, Check Requests, Grant Applications, and Legal Appointments. You can also see all of the events going on in 5414, 5409, and 5489 by clicking on the reservation calendar on our website.
We’ve also started posting short updates on an almost-daily basis, which get fed into our Twitter (www.twiter.com/cunydsc) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/cunydsc) pages. So far, posts have included announcements about important meetings and funding opportunities, as well as reminders about services we provide. They were also crucial in getting the word out about the payroll crisis.
Please, Get Involved
We will work for you, but we’d rather work with you. Please, bring us your concerns. If you’re having trouble with services on the campus and don’t know how to address them, come talk to us. If you don’t like what we’re doing send us an email (dsc@cunydsc.org), or, better, come talk to us in person, or, even better, come to one of our meetings and address the DSC as a body. We are here to represent you, and we can’t do that well if we don’t know how you need to be represented. Also, come unwind with us at our parties. This semester, we’ll be throwing a Halloween Bash (costumes optional). The party will be a few days before the holiday, but we can celebrate anyway (October 23rd @ 8pm in room 5409). We’ll also have an end of the semester party to help you blow off steam. That one is on December 11th.
Plenary Meetings (all are in 5414 and start at 6pm):
—Septemer 25th,
—October 23rd,
—November 20th,
—December 11th.
