Members of Syracuse University’s Graduate Student Organization will discuss the possible inclusion of online graduate students as GSO senators, including how to collect online students’ input, at the organization’s meeting on Wednesday.

At a GSO meeting on April 10, several senators expressed support for GSO President Jack Wilson’s proposal of including online students as senators. The organization’s Constitution currently prohibits online students to participate in the Senate.

Online graduate students — a population of about 2,000 students, according to Wilson — comprises one-third of all SU graduate students, Wilson said. He said he wants to work with the graduate school to gain access to online student email addresses in order to survey the online student population.

“Contacting online students is our problem right now,” said Evan Hixon, a GSO senator in the English department.

Wilson said he met with online students from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at an in-person event, where they told him they wanted to be represented in the GSO Senate.

GSO services are currently only open for organization members, which only includes main-campus, enrolled, matriculating graduate students. If any online students join GSO’s Senate, all online student will have to pay an additional student activity fee ranging between $15 and $50, Wilson said.

Some senators at the April 10 meeting said they worried about a Senate body of all on-campus students determining fee costs for the online students. Former GSO President Rajesh Kumar, now a GSO senator, said online graduate students should be put on the senatebefore negotiating the additional student activity fee.

Anna Henderson | Digital Design Editor

Kumar also said he was concerned that online students would not find all of GSO’s services useful, and they should only pay for services they would use. Students who are not on campus would find travel grants more useful than registered student organization special programming or child care, he said.

If online students are given access to these services, future online senators would need to decide which services will be useful to students who are rarely on campus, Wilson said.

“I doubt, for instance, a student down in New York City is ever going to come up here and take advantage of the Inn Complete,” Wilson said.

If included in GSO, online students would have access to travel grants, free legal advice from Student Legal Services and special programming, he added.

But Wilson and Evan Hixon, a GSO senator, said logistics of normal functions such as elections, lobbying interests and how online students would serve on committees will take time and effort to solve.

 “As a Senator, I represent a subset of graduate students, 30 or so people in this department on this floor,” Hixon said. “What online graduate student representation means is going to be the complicated thing we are going to hash out.”

Including online graduate students is a great step for inclusion in the Senate, Kumar said. Both he and Wilson said SU would be one of the first universities in the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students to allow online students to participate in graduate student governance.

“I’m sure online students have plenty of issues that they face,” Kumar said. “The bigger GSO is and the more united voice we have, the better.”

Published on April 23, 2019 at 8:45 pm

Contact Richard: rjchang@syr.edu | @RichardJChang1