Grad students need community at UCLA

Smith is GSA’s director of graduate interaction. He would like
to remind all graduate and professional students to stop by GradBar
tonight (Feb. 27), 6-10 p.m., in Kerckhoff Grand Salon for an
evening of karaoke and jazz, but not necessarily at the same time.
He can be reached at [email protected].

By Shane G. Smith

Here’s a comic allegory to start your day: below the decks
of the good ship Bruin, power meant to propel our vessel forward
instead escapes in a burst of heat, a shower of sparks. For
mysterious reasons, the ship’s engines operate well below
capacity. Mechanics struggle to diagnose the problem and fidget
nervously as fuel stores fall. Then someone notices: by Jove, the
graduate students just don’t care!

Though we do care about a great many things, as a group we
don’t particularly care about UCLA or the campus community.
And that spells trouble for all those aboard.

The reasons for our collective indifference are understandable,
but this indifference saps the strength of the university
nonetheless. Graduate student disengagement limits intellectual
synergy between disciplines. It promotes distance between UCLA
administrative units and the graduate student population they
serve.

Students who harbor no allegiance to UCLA are unlikely to join
the Alumni Association. They are less likely to purchase BearWear.
They do not participate in graduate student government (this past
academic year was the first since the mid-’90s that voter
turnout for a GSA election exceeded 10 percent). They tape the
men’s basketball schedule above their desks only to be sure
to leave campus early before home games. And perhaps most
lamentable of all, graduate student disengagement limits the human
aspect of the graduate experience to whatever a student encounters
within the confines of their individual research program. Try
explaining that one to a prospective applicant.

As graduate enrollment declines amid the first ripples of Tidal
Wave II, these and other consequences of graduate student
disengagement promise to become more severe with time. Fortunately,
it doesn’t have to be this way. All we need do is make an
honest assessment of the problem.

Admittedly, UCLA’s 10,000 plus graduate students are a
difficult group to get a handle on. There are significant
subcultures (especially within the professional schools) with a
real campus bond, but these involve focused attachments which do
not necessarily extend to the university as a whole.

In general, I find four reasons for graduate student
disengagement:

First, we’ve already been to college, so the novelty of a
collegial allegiance has passed.

Second, though learning and mentoring sometimes takes place, we
aren’t really students. UCLA is the first step in our careers
as intellectuals, where we begin to make a name for ourselves.
Going to school is no different than going to work.

Third, the current graduate student “community” is
actually a hodge-podge of insular programs separated by sizable
geographic and academic barriers. With no permanent graduate
student commons, there has been no opportunity for a true community
to come together.

And lastly, UCLA-provided services, though conveniently packaged
and affordably priced, often fall short of meeting graduate student
expectations. This is especially bothersome to those of us who held
real jobs between college and graduate school. Just ask SAGE
(Student Association of Graduate Employees).

To be fair, many campus administrators have labored to improve
university services for graduate students (applause please for the
UCLA Student Housing Office, the BruinGo! program and
ASUCLA’s support of GradBar). But the net result remains that
graduate students tend to look off-campus for the same services
that the undergraduates take for granted as part of the college
experience. These services enhance the UCLA-undergraduate
connection while their impact on graduate attachment is muted.

So how do we fix the problem of graduate student
disengagement?

No one can do anything about reasons one and two because they
are inherent to graduate education. And improvements to university
services require long-term, multibillion dollar solutions, which in
many cases, are currently inching toward fruition anyway.

In the short-term, however, great strides can be made toward
enhancing graduate students’ emotional attachment to the
university by creating the infrastructure for a true graduate
student community. Essentially a university-provided apparatus of
both fixed and mobile facilities, this infrastructure would embody
the focal points around which graduate students may coalesce.

The hallmarks of such an infrastructure include an
institutionalized GradBar, graduate student-focused events (e.g.
networking opportunities), an on-campus pub open to the entire
university and an actual physical space that graduate students can
call their own. Special seating sections at athletic events and
graduate student intramural leagues should be considered as
well.

As the guy who puts on GradBar every month, I’ve seen
first hand how successful these types of community-building
activities can be. Every month, GradBar draws 500 graduate and
professional students to Kerckhoff Hall for three hours of music,
dancing and camaraderie. Students from different parts of campus
converse with one another. Sometimes they leave together.

But I’ve also experienced the frustration of marketing to
a balkanized graduate student population. Despite campus-wide flyer
distribution, mass e-mailing and word-of-mouth buzz, I field
complaints after each event from people who didn’t hear about
GradBar in time. Our inability to keep in touch with each segment
of GradBar’s customer base effectively cuts this service off
from a large portion of its intended audience.

Now, I realize that some graduate students are not in the market
for live music and beer (though I can’t imagine why not!).
But given that attendance at our Halloween GradBar peaked at over
800, I estimate that there are several hundred interested students
who miss out on GradBar each month. I surmise that many campus
groups confront this same problem.

When compared to other university programs, a graduate community
infrastructure can be built extremely cheaply. Consider: each
GradBar costs roughly $2 per graduate student in attendance, while
the construction of one new parking space costs tens of thousands
of dollars. And, once a true community has established itself,
administrative units will no longer need to expend valuable
resources on the kind of shotgun outreach activities that graduate
students ignore: leaflets, informational seminars and
advertisements in the Daily Bruin.

The benefits to the university derived from a fully engaged
graduate student community justify the costs required to foster
such a community. On a campus that produces long-range plans for
almost everything, a short-term plan to promote graduate student
engagement merits serious consideration. Indeed, graduate
engagement is like a forgotten Christmas tree. Decorate it, and
sooner or later everyone will get a present.