Total Meeting Time: approximately 2 hours (sorry) Discussion Summaries:
DEI Committee is taking input from graduate students for a department-wide code of conduct, and a form is included in the minutes to facilitate those opinions. The code of conduct cannot include any form of discipline for department members, and instead stands to formalize a social contract of the department's morals. Many grad students are upset that tenured professors cannot be held accountable for incidents of misconduct such as verbal abuse.
Outreach Committee has been meeting to formalize a strategic plan for the committee. It has no outline for actions, and instead includes overall events that the outreach committee will spend their time on. Conclusions haven't been made on graduate student participation in the strategic plan itself because there is still a large amount of confusion on what the point actually is and how binding it will be in the future.
Updates on the Qualifying Exam discussion have been presented. Temporary changes have been presented and the faculty vote regarding these changes was discussed at length. Many graduate students feel like their opinions/perspectives are not being heard or discussed by the faculty at these meetings. A number of graduate students expressed frustration in that they feel the department says they would like to promote diversity and inclusion but will not enact changes to the qualifying exam that would be believed to promote those things.
Graduate students have brought to our attention that they feel the GSO meetings are one-sided and don't include dissenting opinions. They feel that the environment at meetings is such that they are intimidated away from presenting their dissenting opinions for fear of social isolation. The GSO has encouraged people with dissenting opinions from those discussed at meetings to attend the meetings and bring their thoughts to light, otherwise we cannot represent them, as we don't know what these graduate students want. If they are intimidated from presenting their opinions openly, the GSO encourages them to either speak to a GSO officer privately or use our anonymous reporting avenues to bring their opinions to light.
Action Items:
Faculty/GSO Meeting will include questions regarding the qualifying exam and the votes that were held.
GSO will create a forum to post summaries and minutes from all meetings that they attend. Those summaries will be posted to all social media sites we organize on.
GSO will make a conscious effort to include opinions of all graduate students at meetings.
GSO will push the faculty to allow a GSO representative at faculty meetings.
TL;DR - Mostly a typical general meeting that went long, but the end included some really great discussion and suggestions about how the GSO can improve to hear all grad student opinions, and not become an "echo chamber."