Graduate Student Senate passed a resolution to create an official leave of absence policy for graduate students.
The revised resolution, which was first drafted in November, was approved at Monday’s GSS meeting. Copies of the policy will be sent to Chancellor Jimmy Cheek, Dean of Student Maxine Davis, Provost Susan Martin and Dean of Graduate Students Carolyn Hodges.
Martin Walker, the anthropology representative of GSS and the resolution’s main author, said the resolution is designed to start conversations and debate with UT administration about developing a leave policy. He expects there to be back-and-forth on the policy’s fine points, especially when it comes to financial concerns, but he is confident that the resolution won’t get flat out rejected.
That confidence comes from Walker’s claim that at least one of above administrators already supports the leave of absence policy, although he would not name which specific one.
“I would like to think that with the definite one support we have … we could definitely start a conversation and hopefully within the next year or two we can write something in and get graduate students protected,” Walker said.
Currently, there is no set leave of absence policy for all graduate students. This leaves them susceptible to being kicked out of their program if they have to leave for an extended period of time due to issues such as illness or having a child.
Inspired by the leave of absence policy used for faculty, the proposed graduate leave policy would allow for a graduate student to temporarily leave the grad program for six weeks for four separate reasons: for childbirth/adoption, for family or dependent care, personal health reasons and military service.
SGA ElectionsAdditionally, GSS also voted against an amendment to the “Student Government Association 2013 Rules and Procedures” packet that would have prohibited campaigns and candidates from using “all tuition-funded, university, staff, or departmental resources in order to freely produce campaign materials that might otherwise be of monetary value.”
This means that potentially any printer, screen printer or other device that is funded through tuition, even if available to all students, would be prohibited from being used in an SGA campaign.
Under Section F, VII, D, 5 of “Rules and Procedures,” SGA campaigns must not only report any “university, staff or departmental resources that utilized to produce campaign materials,” but all of those materials and resources must be available to all students. This includes, but is not limited to “printers, screen printers, dining supplies, art supplies, etc.”
The purpose of that section is to prohibit students from taking advantage of resources otherwise unavailable to the student body, such as free printing provided by a department head that a student was close to. Resources that any student could access (such as video cameras checked out of The Studio in Hodges Library) are perfectly acceptable to use.Had GSS approved the amendment, it would have gone to SGA for a vote; however, GSS voted “nay,” and the amendment became moot.
Afterward, GSS approved the “2013 Rules and Procedures,” and it should be fully available to the public by the end of the week on the GSS website, http://web.utk.edu/~gss.
Insurance Benefits for Domestic PartnersIt was also announced that GSS’s resolution to obtain insurance benefits for the homosexual and heterosexual domestic partners of graduate students is again being tabled until the next meeting in February. The resolution would allow those domestic partners to be covered under the insurance policy that married partners of graduate students can buy into.
Amanda Sanford, GSS president, explained that the purpose of tabling the resolution was to give GSS’s 12-person committee more time to fully research the issue before presenting it to GSS for a vote.
“We’ve got 12 different people working on the research now,” said Sanford. “We’ll fine tune it and have a solid proposal for the February meeting.”
Sanford is confident that a resolution will be fully prepared and drafted in time for the February meeting, saying that it would be the last time that something such as a resolution expanding insurance benefits could be passed.
“(February is) going to be the last really meaningful meeting that we can have (this presented), because March is going to be wrapping up business for the year and the April (meeting) is where I transition it over to the new administration,” she explained.
The GSS president is also not deterred by the recent letter from chancellors Cheek and Larry Arrington explaining and again denying the Faculty Senate’s resolution to get benefits for the domestic partners of faculty. Sanford said that GSS will go forward as planned.
“We’re going to anticipate a little bit of pushback. …” Sanford said. “We don’t anticipate that the administration is going to be anymore receptive of (a GSS resolution) than they were to the Faculty Senate. But to those of us working on it, that doesn’t mean it lacks merit as a cause.”
The next GSS meeting will be held on Feb. 25.
