Samuel LeDoux is a master’s candidate in the Graduate School of Political Management.
The Student Association in its current form cannot efficiently represent and serve graduate students. The SA is too large, has too much undergraduate representation and is structured in a way in which most graduate students would have to put a considerable amount of time and effort to even try and interact with the body. It is time that the SA seriously considers breaking in half and forming a separate graduate student senate.
Many universities across the country have separate student governments for graduate and undergraduate students because they understand the drastic differences between the two populations. With GW’s entire population being almost half graduate in its makeup, it is obvious that the majority of undergraduate SA cannot serve as reasonable representation. Many of the so-called accomplishments touted by the SA have almost no effect on my experience with the University. The SA should not be shocked by low graduate voter turnout, graduate schools not putting up candidates for office and many of them backing a presidential candidate who vowed for the organization’s abolishment when the organization provides them with almost no benefits.
The average graduate student is a working professional, often going to school and working full time. They also tend to be commuters, and many live outside of D.C. Holding meetings that run until the middle of the night on a Monday pertaining mostly to undergraduate student issues is never going to attract people who live off campus or who are not undergraduates. For this reason, it will always skew younger, less diverse and often unemployed students. This means the SA rarely, if ever, discusses the issues surrounding graduate student assistantships and fellowships, access to night classes and the safety surrounding them, the lack of scholarship opportunities for graduate students and many of the countless other graduate specific issues our campus faces.
Graduate students deserve a body that is representative, that cares about issues that concern them and that can accommodate them if they wish to be involved. This can be accomplished with the establishment of a separate body, one free from the undergraduate politics and drama that get in the way of making meaningful reform to many of the issues graduate students face. Maybe with a new body, the SA will not need to beg to fill graduate student vacancies and pretend to be shocked when they find out many graduate students have negative feelings toward the organization. Separating representative bodies of the undergraduate and graduate student populations would help administrators get a better pulse of issues involving both of those student bodies. I urge the SA to give this idea some serious thought.
