The Graduate and Professional Student Council’s Tuesday night meeting was fraught with tension as students negotiated the development of a new strategic plan.
GPSC Vice President Adam Pechtel, a third-year law student, announced the formation of a Strategic Planning Committee that will develop a new strategic plan to be voted on by the GPSC general assembly April 6.
“We decided there were some issues regarding the tone and organization of [the strategic plan],” Pechtel said in response to requests the he explain the decision to rework the document. He declined to provide details on the content of the strategic plan.
Many students did not see why there was any need to do more work on a document that was already complete. Pechtel said the document was never validated because of minor scheduling problems. The vote to accept the current strategic plan occurred after the last school year had ended, and has technically been “in limbo” since that time.
Only a few other students said they had read the strategic plan in its entirety, but a few of them expressed discontent with some aspects of it and a desire for it to be revised. Those who were familiar with the situation were discontent that it had taken almost eight months to correct the problem.
“It’s been difficult to watch this languish for so long,” Laura Johnson, a third-year evolutionary anthropology graduate student, said.
There was a movement to move the deadline for the revision up to April 6. Pechtel said there would not be significant changes made to the current version.
“That would be up to the committee,” he added.
In other business:
Guest speaker Kim Hanauer, director of young alumni and student programs, later presented the Alumni Association’s plans to engage more with graduate and professional students.
“Up until about five years ago we didn’t care that much about graduate and professional school students,” Hanauer said jokingly.
The DAA has been making more of an effort in recent years to engage graduate and professional school students in alumni events and activities that help them connect with the Duke community on more than just an academic level. Graduate and professional student attendance at the Forever Duke Party on the first day of classes and the Homecoming Dance has already increased—from 152 and 160 in 2008 to 423 and 477 in 2009, respectively, she said.
Hanauer also talked about opportunities for students to connect with other alumni on professional endeavors through systems like DukeConnect. Graduate students have a primarily academic connection with Duke and do not necessarily want to come back to campus for purely social reasons, she said.
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