Graduate student government election: A new guard takes over

I am not one for student politics. This I found out my freshman year of college, at another elite Midwestern university. A debate between two presidential tickets for a prominent Latino student group on campus turned nasty. It was telenovela-style drama, with accounts of backstabbing, crying from audience members and sexual jealousies rolled into one. The new guard clashing with the old guard, more or less. Those in attendance left the debate either wildly upset or luridly entertained, in that sort of greasy way you get from watching ‘Jerry Springer’.

Nonetheless, in graduate school, I gave it another try. At the end of my first year at Notre Dame, I joined the English Graduate Student Association, known as EGSA, and signed up to be our department’s representative at the Graduate Student Union, now known as the Graduate Student Government. Then, the pandemic hit, and, like many, I withdrew into a social-distancing cocoon. Fast forward to today, and I would say I feel too jaded to get involved in the student group scene again. But I would be remiss if I didn’t take the pulse of graduate student politics from time to time, especially during election season.

On Thursday, April 16, the new president of the GSG was sworn in during the last council meeting of the year. Sanchita Chakraborty, a PhD candidate in Applied and Computational Mathematics, will take the helm alongside two vice presidents — Kyle Walker, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mathematics; and Bless Adjornor, a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences. The election was uncontested, so when I spoke to Chakraborty on the last day of voting, March 31, her victory was more or less a done deal.

“I hope to be a very proactive president,” Chakraborty, a second-year student, told me over a videocall. Previously, she served as the GSG’s professional development chair in the outgoing administration. During our talk, Chakraborty stressed the importance of providing graduate students “incentives to reengage” with graduate student government in order to improve existing initiatives. Among the actions that the incoming administration proposes are including laptops in emergency funds for graduate students, expanding parking subsidies for students who have served as teaching assistants and modifying career fairs to include more opportunities for master’s and PhD students.

The GSG, founded in 1970, represents students from the College of Arts and Letters, the College of Science, the School of Architecture, the College of Engineering and the Keough School of Global Affairs. The GSG meets once a month during the school year for roughly two hours, and, on average, 60 people will be present at any given meeting. Each department gets two voting members. All in all, roughly 2,600 students fall under the umbrella of the GSG. Mendoza College of Business and the Law School have their own student governing bodies, but both are allowed non-voting representation.

I spoke to one of our current representatives for English, Daryna Gladun. Gladun is a poet and playwright, who is wrapping up her master of fine arts degree through the Creative Writing Program. She also served on the committee overseeing this past election. Gladun, who is from Ukraine, said she got involved in order to feel like she had influence over her educational experience in the United States. This was especially important for her in light of last year’s widely publicized immigration crackdown on student visa holders by the Trump administration.

“As an international student, I see the appeal of getting some control over our stay in the University and having power over the process,” she said. Gladun said she thought many other international students share her motivation for joining the GSG.

While roughly three out of every ten graduate students at Notre Dame are international, a much larger proportion of students involved in the GSG are from outside the country. It’s not surprising, then, that the GSG sent out a mass email last semester encouraging graduate students to oppose the Trump administration’s proposed four-year cap on student visa holders. It was my first time seeing the GSG urge its members to take political action like that.

As for the election being uncontested, Gladun noted that the council was confident that Chakraborty, Walker and Adjornor were the right people for the job. Still, she said she would have liked to see more options. The three-person ticket came together about a month before the election. Chakraborty and Kyle knew each other from serving in the outgoing council, in which Walker was the representative for the math department. They linked up with Adjornor, who had no previous GSG experience, after meeting him at a candidate info session earlier in the semester. Chakraborty said she got the blessing of the previous two presidents of the GSG.

Though last year’s election was contested between two tickets, in the recent history of the GSG, most elections have featured only one slate of candidates. And there’s also been a pattern of dismal voter turnout. In this recent outing, for instance, just over 100 total ballots were cast.

“I don’t like those numbers,” Walker said, adding the low participation rate underscores the need to make the “GSG as representative as it can be so that it can fulfill its function.” In addition to tackling tech equity, parking costs and career opportunities, he said the new administration would be looking to address concerns around summertime transportation. One issue is that Transpo’s #17 bus, the campus sweep, doesn’t run during summer recess. This route connects Notre Dame’s campus to graduate student housing at The Landings, in addition to stopping at Holy Cross College and Saint Mary’s College.

“There are a lot of irons in the fire already,” he said.

During my interview with Chakraborty, I brought up the issue that inspired the birth of this column: the sudden closure of the graduate student lounge in Hesburgh Library at the end of last academic year. At the time, I sent numerous emails to GSG officers asking for them to intervene. No one responded. Chakraborty apologized on behalf of the GSG and explained that April is a transition period for the new officers — my complaints may have gotten lost in the shuffle. Still, this incident is an example of why many students don’t buy into student government. It’s hard to shake off the notion that it’s really administrators pulling the strings and that whatever student government does is minimal.

Nonetheless, I applaud graduate students for keeping the GSG going these last 50-odd years. Though the GSG is not a labor union with bargaining power, they were still very influential in pushing the provost and the graduate school to institute a recent pay raise, from what my sources tell me. And the social programming is pretty good. For instance, I had a blast doing whitewater rafting in downtown South Bend’s East Race Waterway at the start of the academic year. And the professional development programming has definitely gotten better in recent years.

Still, a shake-up is in order. It’s unacceptable that only one slate of candidates runs for office most years. And the percentage of voter turnout should be much higher than single digits. Trips to the park, poster sessions and career fairs are good, but imagine having a real union to fight for us graduate students. So says the O.G. Peace.