Graduate students petitioned President Ruth Simmons and Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 April 21 to reevaluate the new Graduate School funding policy. The policy, which was finalized March 9, requires graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to apply for additional funds after five years.
The new policy also sets up a committee of administrators to review these funding applications. Prior to the change, department heads and advisers negotiated funding levels for rising sixth-year graduate students, said Sean Dinces GS, a third-year graduate student in the Department of American Civilization.
But administrators making these funding decisions do not work directly with graduate students and do not understand their needs, Dinces said.
The petition demands removal of the application process, a guarantee of sixth-year funding for graduate students in good standing and more funding opportunities beyond the sixth year.
A group of 30 to 40 graduate students presented the petition with over 230 signatures to the offices of the president and provost last Thursday. The students also presented a similar petition from the undergraduate student body with 100 signatures, said Sara Matthiesen GS, a second-year graduate student in the American Civilization department. Graduate students also handed out flyers during A Day on College Hill.
The petitioning students are not advocating for a return to the old system, which was informal but also inefficient, Dinces said. Instead, he said they are asking the University to be accountable for helping students to fund their research.
Even if they require more than five years to complete their research, graduate students in the life and physical sciences have access to a wider variety of outside funding and thus often need not apply for sixth-year funding, Dinces said. Graduate students in these sciences request research funding less frequently beyond the fifth year of study, Peter Weber P'12, the dean of the Grad School, told The Herald last month.
But the national average time to complete a PhD in the humanities is nearly 10 years, according to a 2008 study referenced in a press release from the petitioners. Matthiesen said the new policy is thus disadvantageous to researchers in the humanities and social sciences because it provides funding for only a portion of their time studying. "We feel it's definitely an indication of what sort of knowledge the University values," she said.
Simmons and Kertzer have not responded to the petition, Matthiesen said. But Kertzer told The Herald that no other school in the country guarantees funding for sixth-year graduate students, and such a guarantee "doesn't strike (him) as very plausible."
"It might be nice, but it's not going to happen," he said.
The petitioning students will continue to "rally around" the students most immediately affected by the policy change, Matthiesen said.
