Hoping to start the year with greater clarity, the Graduate and Professional Student Council overturned its former charter Tuesday in its first meeting this fall.
GPSC officers worked to amend the document over the summer but decided to rewrite the entire charter rather than revise it piece by piece.
GPSC President Rob Saunders said the group's previous charter had five primary flaws: a lack of nomenclature, missing definitions of duties and purposes, no inclusion of changes from past years, an absence of procedures and an inaccurate reflection of the current organization.
"One of the difficulties of leaving [the specifics] out is we reinvent the wheel every year," Saunders said. "This way I don't necessarily have to know everything [GPSC] has done over the past years to understand the purpose of it."
The new charter defines the body as a general assembly and splits the external and internal affairs between the president and vice president, respectively, as well as specifying the purposes of the at-large positions.
"We are trying to increase the number of committees and decrease the number of people on each committee so we can give them more specific purposes," said Saunders, a third-year physics graduate student.
The new charter also includes caucuses, mostly school-based, which Saunders hoped would gain clarity and definition this year as they lobbied administrators through the specific schools. A few members expressed some concern about the specificity of the charter.
"The more specific jobs you give people to do, the harder it is for them to do it," said Will Tyson, a fourth-year sociology graduate student.
After a short discussion regarding the attendance and voting policies, the assembly voted, the charter passing with a vote of 30-4.
Members voted to add seven committees alongside the existing student affairs committee, in a manner that Saunders said reflects a board of trustees.
While the childcare, health insurance and parking and transportation committees were established to address long-standing graduate and professional student issues, others, such as academic affairs and undergraduate mentoring will work on more specific projects.
"We thought about what GPSC needs in general," said Audrey Beck, a second-year student in sociology. "For example, we created the communications committee because of past problems with the melding of graduate and professional students."
Academic affairs will address the new University-wide academic integrity codes while the undergraduate mentoring group will follow up with a career counseling-type program beginning this fall, pairing graduate students with students in each of the West Campus quads.
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