Ashraf Beshay

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