GESO members embark on new plan of attack

By Sheela V. Pai

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH GESO members filed into their semi-annual meeting at Center Church on the Green on Wed., Apr. 15.

After keeping a low profile for the past few months, the Graduate Employment Student Organization (GESO) reemerged as an active voice for change in graduate student policy at a meeting between GESO leaders and Graduate School Dean Thomas Appelquist on Tues., Apr. 14, and at the GESO semi-annual organizational meeting the following day.

The four main issues on the agenda for Tuesday's meeting were teaching fellows equity, health care, minority recruitment efforts, and direct contractual negotiations between the Yale Administration and graduate students.

GESO members complain that teaching assistants assigned to the same "3.5 levels" work unequal hours. "People with the same job description [often] end up teaching vastly different amounts for the same pay," GESO Co-Chair Lisabeth Pimentel, GRD '02, said. In response to this pay inequity for graduate students, the Administration recently decided to issue a $300 dollar raise to teaching assistants who teach the full 17.5 hours a week.

Pimentel said Yale's health care plan is another point of protest for GESO members because"it doesn't provide graduate students with adequate coverage when they're away [from the Yale campus] unless it's an emergency--even though it's built into the graduate program that we have to do research away from campus, and the fees for dependents [of graduate students] is outrageously high."

Although the Administration has started deliberations with the Graduate Assembly over how to lower fees, GESO organizer Antony Dugdale, GRD '99, has decided to go a step further and is currently in negotiations with an alternative health care provider which would be available as an option for both graduates and undergraduates. According to Dugdale, the alternative plan would provide both coverage outside of New Haven and "significantly cheaper rates" for graduate students with families. "At other universities, such as the University of Wisconsin, any graduate students who work 10 hours or more a week receive free health coverage for themselves and their dependents," Dugdale pointed out.

GESO Co-Chair Rachel Sulkes, GRD '01, said increased minority recruitment efforts were brought up with Appelquist after research by GESO member Lori Brooks, GRD '00, led her conclude that the recruitment efforts of the graduate schools are unfocused, disorganized, and ineffective. "We found that the graduate school student body is not very diverse at all and the statistics [concerning retention] are alarming," Sulkes commented. "The figures of [minority graduate students] who attain degrees is much lower than those of people who intially entered the program. One year, only four of the students who received Ph.Ds were African Americans." Appelquist promised to organize meetings with different department members to address centralizing recruitment efforts throughout the graduate school.

The final point of contention at Tuesday's meeting was for many GESO representatives, the most important one: the issue of contracts for teaching assistants. GESO representatives submitted a petition signed by 1,053 graduate students--a clear majority of the student body--endorsing negotiations. Pimentel hopes that the consensus expressed in the petition will convince Yale administrators to "overcome their reluctance to get into official negotiations because the petition states that graduate students, and not GESO, would be the ones involved."

While GESO has asked the Administration to respond to its request by Fri., May 1, it will not discuss its contingency plan in case Yale decides not to grant contracts for teaching assistants. "To say anything now would be more helpful than threatening," Sulkes explained. "We obviously wouldn't just go away, because we'd remain committed to making change."

GESO organizers were generally proud of their recent progress with the Administration. At the semi-annual organizational meeting on Wednesday, members seemed optimistic about their future plans. Pimentel believed that the meeting, which included voting on the internal structure of the organization and the creation of committees to research new issues of concern to graduates, was a time of celebration for GESO.

"It's a pretty exciting period, because we've tried to articulate what is important and we've done it in a powerful way," Pimentel said. "We hope we've shown that graduate students should be sitting at the table with the administrators and helping them figure out how things are going to work out...Now we're just waiting to hear what they think."

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