When the undergraduate Young Trustee-elect celebrates victory tonight, he or she will not be the only fresh face on the Board of Trustees.
Later tonight, members of the Graduate and Professional Student Council General Assembly will select the graduate Young Trustee. Jeremy Block, a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry, Adrienne Clough, a second-year graduate student in the Fuqua School of Business’ Health Sector Management program, and Alethea Duncan, a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, are the three graduate Young Trustee finalists.
But many graduate and professional students, including graduate Young Trustee Screening Committee Chair Yang Yang, have said that electing only one graduate Young Trustee is not enough.
“People always ask me, ‘Who do you think is the best?’” said Yang, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in physics. “I always reply that these three are the best we chose from all of the candidates. The best recommendation I can make is to have all three to be the Young Trustee. It’s really helpful for us to have more Young Trustees appear at the Board of Trustee meetings.”
GPSC President Yvonne Ford, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in nursing, said GPSC members have discussed increasing the number of graduate Young Trustees, but no GPSC action has come out of those discussions.
“When you look at fair representation, I think the graduate and professional students should have two representatives that are active on the... Board because of our numbers at the University,” Ford said.
Initially, undergraduates had three voting Young Trustee spots, but the Board replaced one of the undergraduate trustees with a graduate trustee in 2001. There are always two graduate trustees, one serving as an observer and one as an active voter. There are three undergraduate Young Trustees at any time—one observer and two voters.
Richard Riddell, vice president and University secretary, said students are in charge of reforming the process. Adding another graduate trustee is not currently on the Board’s agenda, he said.
“The approach has been to let the students work on this themselves,” Riddell said. “So for there to be any change, I would expect the students themselves to talk about it, and we would be happy to help facilitate it.”
In the past, the graduate and undergraduate Young Trustee selection processes have been relatively similar. This year, however, Duke Student Government passed a bylaw to allow the undergraduate student body to vote for one of three finalists in today’s election.
The process for selecting a graduate Young Trustee has not changed. The GPSC General Assembly, which consists of about 70 representatives, will hear opening statements from the graduate finalists and have the opportunity to question them before voting, said Elise Van Buskirk, a general assembly representative and a second-year graduate student in cell and molecular biology.
Van Buskirk, who is also a member of the graduate Young Trustee Screening Committee, said she likes the current process. She said having the graduate trustee elected by the graduate and professional student body would not be reasonable.
“I think it’s a pretty good setup because the graduate and professional students tend to be a little more separate in the way that they go about their lives and days,” Van Buskirk said. “There is not as much interaction between members of the different schools and programs as there would be at the undergraduate level. The general assembly, having gone to different general assembly meetings and hearing what’s going on in the community, have a more holistic idea of the needs of the graduate and professional students.”
Throughout the undergraduate Young Trustee selection process changes, DSG senators and students attending Young Trustee open forums voiced concerns that most Young Trustee applicants have come from either DSG or the former Intercommunity Council.
Yang, however, said the graduate process has not seen similar issues with predominately GPSC candidates applying.
He said 25 students applied for graduate Young Trustee this year, and they came from several different graduate and professional schools and programs.
“You can see from the three finalists, two were not members of GPSC, but they work with graduate- and professional-level issues,” Yang said, adding that the committee looked for candidates knowledgeable about broad graduate issues. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a member of GPSC, what’s more important is that you need to have involvement in this level.”
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