GSO to increase its graduate student activity fee, bolster climate-related initiatives

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Syracuse University’s Graduate Student Organization Senate ruled to increase the graduate student activity fee for the first time in five years Wednesday night during its final meeting of the semester.

The increase from $50 to $60 per semester will be put into effect for the 2024-25 school year. The increase reflects corrections for inflation, according to the GSO resolution. A statement on the fee increase and GSO’s financial responsibility will be drafted soon, GSO President Daniel J. Kimmel said.

The GSO also passed a resolution committing to advocating for waste reduction and increased recycling and composting efforts. The resolution called for a publicly released audit of SU’s waste production and management.

Dominic Wilkins, a GSO at-large senator and the co-chair of the Climate Action Committee, said he wrote the resolution to push for a more sustainable GSO and university.

“The committee was relatively, to put it delicately, not entirely impressed by the commitment that the university had made to materially address these issues,” Wilkins said. “And so this is part of an effort to push the Climate Action Plan to be better than it is in the present.”

After SU’s Student Association released its January 2023 Sustainability Report, which called on SU’s 2009 Climate Action Plan to advance its net-zero greenhouse gas emissions deadline by a decade, the university moved up its net-zero emissions target by eight years and introduced new goals which Wilkins hopes to improve.

The meeting also included updates to GSO personnel. Smita Deulkar, a graduate student at the School of Information Studies, was elected as an at-large senator and Dawn Singleton, the vice president of student transition, access and inclusion, was announced as the GSO’s new faculty co-advisor. Singleton will serve alongside current co-advisor Peter Vanable, the dean of the graduate school. Melissa Alvisi, GSO’s comptroller, said she will serve remotely next semester.

Following Deulkar’s appointment, CJ Arnell, GSO’s vice president of internal affairs, said nine of the 10 at-large senate seats are now filled, along with the 10 already-filled University Senate seats. Currently, the GSO senate represents 59.3% of the 4,511 full-time, main campus graduate students, he said.

Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Jamie Winders also discussed the Academic Strategic Plan during the meeting, where she emphasized that its commitments “relate most directly to graduate students.”

The commitments Winders specified were to grow enrollment and research in STEM disciplines, support cross-college interdisciplinary programs and institutes, remove barriers to immersive and experiential experiences in local communities and commit to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives.

“The Academic Strategic Plan should be living documents. It doesn’t do any good to draft it and put it on the shelf and then five years later, draft a new one,” Winders said. “I think there’s the plan as it looks now, but then as we have these kinds of conversations, we surface new things that we should think about.”

Winders answered questions and listened to feedback from the Senate, including a suggestion for increased career training and a separate accessibility plan.

The GSO Senate has yet to announce meeting dates and times for the spring semester.

Other business:

• GSO raised issues with the university’s employment practices in its 2022 Student Survey. Kimmel called it an “ongoing conversation” that will be followed up on as the university works to address the concerns raised in the survey.
• GSO’s 25 percent catering discount, which ended in early October, has been updated to a 10 percent discount — 15 percent at the Inn Complete — for the remainder of the fiscal year after renegotiation with the university, Kimmel said.
• GSO will vote on its amended constitution, which was introduced following its Rules and Administration Committee’s Constitutional Convention, Arnell said. The resolution will be voted on at the next senate meeting and requires a two-thirds vote to pass.
• Arnell said the university is “interested” in making the Inn Complete, which was recently renovated, a graduate student-oriented event space that will not require GSO funding. The first event at the Inn Complete will take place early next semester and is currently in planning, he said.