The University has recently announced, after a vote on Monday, April 1, that graduate students will now have seats on the Faculty Committee for the Graduate School.
This decision followed a faculty vote to allow graduate students into the four subcommittees of the Committee: Policy, Curriculum, Fellowship, and Student Life and Discipline. Currently, the subcommittees are made up of four or eight faculty members. Each subcommittee must have an equal representation of faculty members from each of what the University has identified as the four academic divisions: engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities.
The Policy, Fellowship, and Student Life and Discipline subcommittees are chaired by Dean of the Graduate School Rodney Priestley, and the Curriculum subcommittee is chaired by Deputy Dean Lisa Schreyer.
The announcement did not specify how students will be chosen or if these students will need to represent different academic divisions.
“Graduate students already have many ways to participate in shaping important dimensions of their experience at Princeton… But having them now sit on the governing subcommittees of the Graduate School expands that partnership. We look forward to working directly with students in this new way,” Priestley noted in the announcement.
However, Princeton Graduate Students United (PGSU) organizers Harry Fetsch and Gaby Nair shared their reservations about the announcement in an interview with the ‘Prince.’
“Ultimately, what we need is not only representation, but real power that comes with it,” Fetsch said. “When there are issues that are important to graduate students, we need to be able to advocate for them in ways that are backed up by more than just asking very nicely.”
Nair referred to the lack of specifics on the power graduate students will hold in the updated governance structure. “The announcement is really careful to make clear that the graduate student inclusion on these committees is in a policy-reviewing and recommendation-making facet, and so graduate student inclusion on the committees is not inclusion in the body of decision-makers,” she said.
“The faculty and the graduate student members of the subcommittees will have equal weight in debate and decisions by the subcommittees,” Jennifer Morrill wrote in an email to the ‘Prince.’ “Although almost no decision is made by a single subcommittee, as with any committee governance structure, the subcommittee’s work, recommendations, and advisement are regarded with deference and are often reflected in the final decisions.”
According to the announcement, “the four subcommittees of the Faculty Committee on the Graduate School are responsible for reviewing and making recommendations on academic policies, curriculum, fellowships, and student life and discipline.” These recommendations are then sent to the dean or the larger Faculty Committee, made up by the Directors of Graduate Studies (DGSs).
Fetsch stated that PGSU did not explicitly ask or lobby for this change to be made, but said that “this could very conceivably be prompted by the clear fact that graduate students are on the path to unionizing.”
Priestley stated in the announcement that the change was made in the belief that it “will strengthen graduate education at Princeton.”
“What kind of influence graduate students who sit on these committees will have is unclear,” Nair said.
Previously, GSG has highlighted the need for greater graduate student representation in decision-making. In his campaign, current GSG Vice President Christopher Catalano focused on achieving parity and equal recognition for graduate students.
GSG did not provide comment for this piece by the time of publication, nor has it released information about a process to determine which students will serve on each subcommittee.
Meghana Veldhuis is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Bergen County, N.J. and typically covers faculty and graduate students.
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