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The Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Student Council is looking for new ways to make sure elected student representatives attend its monthly meetings.

At the GSC’s most recent meeting, on Feb. 6, its executive committee proposed three options for increasing participation: reinstating mandatory attendance for all program representatives, requiring mandatory attendance for at least one program representative, or mandating attendance at 80 percent of meetings.

“We need people in the room with us from the start, from literally the first meeting,” GSC President Laura E. König said in an interview.

König said that student representative attendance has decreased since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a pattern she attributed to the removal of mandatory participation requirements for the GSC’s program representatives.

“I think previous leaders didn’t think of the implications that this would have beyond a time when in-person meetings were not possible,” said König, a Neuroscience Ph.D. student. “We would like to have the engagement that they had in the past.”

The GSC consists of an 11-member executive committee, as well as representatives from each degree program, divisional representatives, and at-large representatives.

Before the pandemic, the GSC tied meeting attendance to departmental funding. If program representatives were not present at the meetings, then their departments would be ineligible for GSC funding — which supports grants for conference attendance, summer research, and January@GSAS mini-courses.

But during the pandemic, the GSC stopped requiring attendance. Under the Council’s current bylaws, each program’s attendance is recorded in the monthly minutes, but there are no specified penalties for missing meetings.

The GSC now offers financial support for recognized GSAS student organizations and research grants on an application basis, rather than tying them to attendance.

Graduate students are elected to the GSC on a voluntary basis. König noted that encouraging more consistent representative turnout at open meetings through accountability measures is not meant to be punitive.

“It’s not us being like, we want to take away funding,” she said. “We want to support the students that show up and that really are engaged members of the community.”

GSC Advocacy Chair Max Lu said that, though the proposal drew debate, the pushback was “not as much as we thought.”

“We’re glad we’re hearing from both sides, and hopefully we can make some good progress on this one,” said Lu, a Ph.D. student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “We didn’t expect this whole thing to settle in one meeting.”

The GSC did not vote on the proposals at its February meeting.

GSC Treasurer Fardin Aryan, a Molecular & Cellular Biology Ph.D. student, said he supported mandating attendance. Increasing participation, he said, was key to helping the GSC fulfill its mission of “representation and advocacy.”

“Those things go hand in hand,” he said. “We cannot advocate for the student body if they are not there.”

—Staff writer Iris Hur can be reached at iris.hur@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com.