From students in Canada and Chile who fought for the right to an education, to students of color in the United States who established Ethnic Studies departments across the country, to the current uprising in South Africa where students are fighting fee increases, student activism and resistance has fundamentally transformed the landscape of higher education worldwide. [Read more…] about An Open Letter of Solidarity to the #FeesMustFall Decolonization Movement
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Read the 2015 Graduate Policy Journal!
Click the cover below to access the 2015 Graduate Policy Journal via Dropbox.
Message from the 2014-2015 Graduate and Professional Student Committee Chair, Iman Sylvain
Of 238,700 University of California students, 1 in 5 currently pursues a Graduate or Professional degree. We serve a critical role in the success of the ten-campus system which depends on our labor. We conduct primary research in our fields, are hired by the UC faculty to assist in data collection, analysis, and the writing of manuscripts, and generate significant scholarship with global impacts.
Probably our most critical role is as Graduate Student Instructors and Teaching Assistants: We teach, mentor, and advocate for Undergraduates (and sometimes even other Graduate students). If we are not the sole lecturer in a course, we provide the bulk of instruction in discussion section and lab classes, and are thus directly responsible for the academic success of hundreds of thousands of students. [Read more…] about Read the 2015 Graduate Policy Journal!
Student Organizations – Take the UConsent Pledge!
Student orgs can now participate in the call for peer-to-peer education programs to be available on campus and provide consent and bystander intervention training. Click here to download the pledge!
Protected: SAGE Brainstorming Session
UC Graduate Professional Student Agenda 2015-2016
The following agenda of concerns was adopted at the beginning of the 2015 school year by graduate and professional students across the UC system.
Click here to download a copy of the Graduate Professional Student Agenda.
1. Secure Pathways to Graduate Degrees
Problem Statement: There is insufficient secure financial support for graduate students working toward doctoral degrees. This situation is compounded by a lack of consistent transparent guidelines for normative progress.
Desired Outcome: Chancellor-mandated guarantees for normative time to degree for terminal degree students in all departments.
2. Food Security and Equal Student Service
Problem Statement: Graduate and non-traditional students don’t always enjoy access to resources and other opportunities offered to undergraduates on campus, which makes them feel excluded from the campus community at large.
Desired Outcomes:
• system-wide no questions asked food banks
• equal pay for equal work esp. for grad- RAs
• inclusion of non-traditional students in event attendance
• continuation of summer services for grads
3. Healthy Graduate Student & Advisor Relationships
Problem Statement: The lines of communication between advisors and graduate students can be easily broken when the proper avenues for creating and maintaining a healthy rhythm are ruptured, or nonexistent to begin with. Since one of the top ten predictors of graduate student depression at UC Berkeley is Advisor Relationships (Panger et al., 2014), we may deduce that current methods to create and maintain positive communication channels are not sufficient. The challenges of graduate student-advisor relationships are made invisible by the expectations that graduate students are solely responsible to prevent and resolve conflict with advisors without proper guidelines nor a shared language, or by primarily relying on the Ombuds office – official channel for anonymous reporting (lacks record keeping for repeated offenses) – UC counselors who defend faculty, or fellow peers who are also untrained in conflict resolution.
Desired Outcome: Have a functional working group that hosts cultural humility trainings between faculty and graduate students.
4. Affordable Graduate Student Housing
Problem Statement: Graduate students lack access to affordable and dignified housing.
Desired Outcomes by January 2016:
Housing distribution standards should be equalized and consistently enforced across all campuses.
Address issue at UCSF of housing shared with Staff/Residents who make much more $$$
Overall outcomes by Priority:
1. Graduate students should pay no more than 50% of post-tax income on campus or off campus housing. Campuses can likely achieve this by reducing on-campus costs or providing additional housing stipends.
2. Housing standards should be standardized system-wide and consistently enforced across all
campuses. Concerted effort should be made to ensure that these policies help promote equity by helping vulnerable groups of students to access housing.
5. Campus Climate for Diverse Graduate Student Identities
Problem Statement: While there have been some top-down campus climate efforts towards improving graduate student inclusion and the multicultural resources available at the UC, there persists a significant disconnect between administrative perception and the lived experienced of graduate and professional students. Many campuses still struggle to foster a sense of inclusion and community among groups such as students of color, LGBTQI and nontraditional students.
Desired Outcome: Increase campus climate inclusivity among non-traditional and multicultural students
About the Students of Color Conference
The Students of Color Conference (SoCC) is UCSA’s oldest and largest conference, providing a safe space for students of color to strategize around statewide and campus-based actions. SoCC has been hosted every year since 1988.
