GSA president envisions brighter graduate future

  Martin Griffin Griffin served as the
2000-2001 president of the Graduate Student Association.

I went home and showered and shaved and changed clothes and
began to feel clean again. I cooked some breakfast, ate it, washed
up, swept up the kitchen and the service porch, filled the pipe and
called the phone answering service. I shot a blank. Why go to the
office? There would be nothing there but another dead moth and
another layer of dust.” – Raymond Chandler, “The Long
Goodbye,” 1953.

There are a lot of things in common between one’s giving
up the presidency of the Graduate Student Association and Philip
Marlowe’s meditation on his 1950s L.A. gumshoe lifestyle in
Chandler’s most powerful novel ““ apart from the pipe
smoking, which isn’t my thing.

The other big difference is that the Daily Bruin called, causing
me to disturb the moth on the desk and the layer of dust on the
phone. They wanted a breezy, happy-go-lucky Viewpoint piece on my
year as GSA president, graduate student life, and so on. I
couldn’t do it. I tried, I really did, but it wouldn’t
come. So this is what you’re getting.

Over the past few years, the cost of accommodation in Westwood
and the immediately adjacent areas has become significantly more
expensive. The average distance from campus to a place of residence
for graduate and professional students is between seven and ten
miles. If you are slightly better off, the nearer to campus you can
live. For financial and other reasons, many people live much
further away.

As the graduate student years go on, the campus becomes the
workplace, the research site and where you go Mondays, Wednesdays
and Fridays for various functional purposes.

The social and cultural life on our campus is essentially
orientated toward undergraduate students. This is not their fault,
and perhaps it’s our fault for not being more assertive
vis-à-vis the administration and the funding politics. In any
case, one of GSA’s motives in starting up the GradBar
experiment was to provide an arena to enable graduate and
professional students to mix and mingle across departmental
boundaries, something that rarely happens. The popularity of
GradBar suggests an unmet need.

My own vision is for a GSA-sponsored pub-restaurant with modest
event facilities (small and medium-size conference spaces, for
example) on campus that would be open to all graduate and
professional students for a small, pro-forma membership fee ““
perhaps $5 a year.

On the model of the GSA-run pub at UC Irvine, this would be
operated on a break-even basis, making enough money to cover its
costs during the year. The problem at UCLA is space, of course, but
I feel that with an active GSA, the new GSA cabinet position of
director of graduate interaction, and positive encouragement and
appropriate support from both the ASUCLA Board of Directors and the
administration, a solution can be found.

This will dovetail neatly with the eventual arrival of the South
West Campus Graduate Student Housing Project, which will, for the
first time, place a large number of single grad and professional
students in the campus residential mix.

Although these apartment complexes will not come on stream until
well into this decade and not be complete until much later, we have
to think long-term thoughts. The social map of the UCLA campus will
change and the graduate component will increase in importance
““ despite the extra undergraduate numbers building up via
Tidal Wave II admissions.

Now is the time to start thinking about improving facilities for
graduate and professional students, not several years down the
line. Now is also the time to take a good look at housing
allocation policies, in respect of both the SW Campus Project and
currently existing graduate student housing. Both domestic
partnerships provisions and the apartment-sharing rules in general
could do with some overhauling.

In the broader context of graduate student academic life at
UCLA, this year’s GSA has been particularly concerned with
student input into the eight-year departmental review system
managed and supervised by the Academic Senate. GSA has four
representatives on Graduate Council, the Academic Senate body
primarily responsible for the review process, and these
representatives act as the contact and mediation points for the
graduate students in the department under review: they make sure
the students know when the review committee is conducting its
hearings, set up private interviews for students with particularly
sensitive issues, and the like.

Unfortunately, not every department on campus goes about its
business with the kind of academic and professional standards one
would expect at UCLA, and occasionally cases of dysfunctional
departments come to light.

At its last meeting of the year, on May 30, the GSA Forum passed
a resolution instructing the GSA officers and cabinet to approach
the Academic Senate and Graduate Division with a view to
strengthening the graduate and student input into the review
system. We intend to point out some flaws in the system and to
propose some appropriate reforms that should prevent situations
happening where, for example, the students in a department do not
realize that they can arrange to speak confidentially to the review
committee, or where the GSA representative has difficulty
contacting the graduate student body in the department.

Nobody wants GSA to be a kind of invasive entity, looking to
create trouble where grad students are happy and contented. That
said, however, there is a strong case for “outside”
student advocacy where a department is manipulating student opinion
or otherwise not playing fair with the review process. I see GSA
representatives on Grad Council, and the GSA Academic Affairs
Commissioner, as a kind of extra channel that the students should
feel they can utilize if they want some assistance in making their
views known. GSA’s representatives on Graduate Council are
our indispensable assets when it comes to bringing academic
departments under scrutiny.

This is the kind of “student service” that makes
sense, and it’s ironic that we cannot stipend our
representatives on Grad Council. UC spends a great deal of money on
student services, and the University of California Student
Association (UCSA, the umbrella representative body for all UC
campuses for both undergrad and grad student governments) has been
very active in campaigning for more funding.

This is all well and good, but the problem is that graduate and
professional students only use student services to a very limited
extent, if at all. No intelligent way has been found yet for
channeling student services funding into areas that would really
make sense to graduate students.

It often seems as if graduate associations throughout the system
pay into a UC-wide representative body that really does not know
how to represent graduate and professional students’
concerns. This has been a contentious issue at UCSA in recent
years, and the GSA External Vice President, Kinshasa Curl, was very
active over this past year in campaigning ““ with the other
graduate EVPs ““ at the UCSA board meetings to make sure that
our system-wide advocacy body did not forget that it is supposed to
be advocating for graduate students’ interests as well, and
not just for undergraduate concerns.

Finally … graduates graduate too. The long goodbye to UCLA is
a somewhat different experience for most graduate students than for
undergrads or those graduating from the professional schools.
Whereas the latter have a sense of an accomplishment shared with
hundreds of others ““ almost a generational thing ““ the
former often have a lonelier and quieter journey out.

You finish up, file your dissertation, say goodbye to faculty
advisors and friends in the program, and move on … hopefully, to
somewhere nice, where you receive an acceptable salary and the
state electricity infrastructure has been kept out of the hands of
private “enterprise.”

On that note, as outgoing GSA president, I’d like to take
this opportunity, on behalf of the other GSA officers and cabinet,
to wish graduating professional and graduate students all the best
for their future careers. And remember, don’t disturb the
dust, and leave that dead moth alone!