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Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student government will vote on a motion to make its meeting attendance policy stricter after years of struggling with meeting attendance among its members.
The GSAS Student Council’s Executive Committee proposed a motion to amend the policy at a meeting on Thursday. The vote will take place asynchronously, and results will be announced by the end of the week.
If the motion passes, the GSC’s new policy will require that each Ph.D. program has one representative present for at least five of the GSC’s eight open meetings each academic year.
If a program’s representatives fail to meet the requirement, their eligibility for certain types of funding via the GSC will be temporarily suspended.
The policy would apply to two pools of funding allocated by the GSC. Departmental groups — student organizations affiliated with a specific Harvard program — can ordinarily receive GSAS grant funding for activities and expenses related to group meetings and events.
The GSC also awards up to $750 of funding grants for individual students to attend academic conferences. Under the new motion, students would only be able to apply to these grants if their department representatives have fulfilled the minimum GSC attendance requirements.
Neuroscience PhD student Laura E. König, who is the GSC President, noted that attendance and accountability have been raised as issues at GSC meetings in the past. But whether the motion passes will depend on whether it gains support from the entire GSC, including program representatives.
“This is a democratic process. We’re going to vote on it,” König said. “We’re not trying to force anything.”
König said the motion would also try to ensure meeting attendance requirements were feasible by offering both in-person and virtual access and by allowing exceptions to the rule in case of emergencies.
“We want to emphasize that representatives can send a proxy and attend virtually,” she said.
The motion drew debate in an open-floor conversation after it was proposed on Thursday.
Sociology Ph.D. student Aaron B. Benavidez, who is a GSC representative for the department, pushed back against the motion, calling it “punitive and coercive.”
He noted that holding funding opportunities from students is “antithetical” to the democratic processes of the graduate school.
“GSC is meant to make graduate student life better, not to burden scholars by withholding their funding opportunities,” he said.
Natalia D. Orlovsky, a PhD student in the Division of Medical Sciences, said she worried that departments without students present at the meeting might not be aware of the motion when it passes — meaning they could face penalties they didn’t know existed.
“My personal comfort with this hinges on whether there is a clear plan to reach out to those groups,” she said.
“I do think that before they start facing consequences, there needs to be a period for remedial action,” Orlovsky added.
Zelin Wang, the GSC Chair of Recognition and a student in the Regional Studies East Asia master’s degree program, defended the motion.
“It’s implicit in the measure that we’re really encouraging people to participate,” he said. “And then people come in, they find out what resources we can offer, and then they give back resources — and that creates a positive feedback.”
The motion is meant to be “rewarding for the entire community,” not punitive, he said.
“The matter of fact is, if a department is not sending representatives here, I would assume that’s a department that’s also missing out on most of the information we’re sharing anyway,” said GSC advocacy chair Max Lu, an Education PhD student.
—Staff writer Iris Hur can be reached at iris.hur@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @_clairejiang_.
