A newly formed advisory task force created by Provost Peter Lange will look into the issues raised by the Graduate and Professional Student Council's report to the Board of Trustees, as well as other topics relevant to graduate and professional student life.
Chaired by Dean of the Graduate School Lewis Siegel, the nine administrators and five GPSC representatives are slated to present short-term solutions by the end of spring 2000 and long-term solutions by the end of the summer.
The GPSC proposal that sparked the task force's creation was centered around community issues and pointed to residential life, transportation, academic space, child care and social space as problematic aspects of graduate and professional student life.
"The possibility to interact with and learn from your fellow grad students, especially those at different stages of their graduate student careers, is one of the critical components of an excellent graduate program...," Lange said in an earlier interview.
At the Dec. 3 meeting of the Board of Trustees, GPSC President Tomalei Vess, a fifth-year graduate student in zoology, presented her organization's long- and short-term goals for improving graduate student life.
After the presentation, President Nan Keohane said she thinks GPSC and the task force could go a long way toward resolving these concerns. "I think this is a very appropriate moment to do this," she said, "partially because... the leadership in GPSC is strong and well-focused and because the capital campaign gives us to opportunity to look at some long-term goals."
Although the GPSC proposal prompted the creation of the task force, the group is expected to evaluate other issues as they become apparent.
For example, Siegel said he had expected to see health care and other long-standing concerns of graduate students in the GPSC memo. "The thing that surprised me was the lack of mention of several issues that graduate students have pushed very strongly for the last several years among a list of priorities," Siegel said.
To ensure that the task force addresses the needs of the greatest number of graduate and professional students, Lange included a systematic fact-finding effort in his charge to them.
The task force will also look at graduate students' stipends. For the past five years, the Graduate School has been working to improve graduate student support, especially for humanities students, who rarely receive outside grants after a certain number of years.
The task force's charge directs members to consider financial support alongside-not instead of-student life concerns. According to Lange's charge, "The stipend support available to our doctoral candidates has improved dramatically in the past few years, but there are still significant grants in our funding packages that need to be addressed.... I want [the committee] to assume that Duke's administration intends to continue the high priority it has given to meeting our goals of fair and competitive support."
Katherine Stroup contributed to this story.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.