Departments NOT Represented: Business Economics, Economics, English, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Linguistics, Middle Eastern Studies, Physics, Regional Studies--REECA, Romance Languages and Literatures, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Statistics

1. Announcements
   • GSC Conference Grants. The Fall session of grants has been completed and the Winter one will soon be underway.
     • Fall Round Recipients
     • Winter Round Application Deadline: Monday, January 12, 1998
   • MBTA Semester T Passes: The MBTA has a program in place for students to purchase passes per semester at a roughly 11% discount of the monthly pass rate. The GSC is at the moment facilitating the program at Harvard. Order forms for Spring Semester 1998 passes are available at the GSC office and must be returned by January 15. The passes will arrive each month, and will be distributed from the GSC office during its office hours, which will be arranged to maximize student convenience. The deadline for application is Thursday, January 15, 1998
   • GSC Meeting with President Rudenstine, Provost Fineberg, Dean Wolff, and Dean Gill: Monday, April 13, 1998
   • Home Run Shuttle and M2 Shuttle. Home Run will be eliminated in 1998. Hopefully, the money allocated for Home Run will be resurrected in the form of making the M2 shuttle available to all GSAS students without cost.
   
   
2. Matters Arising from the minutes of November 1997 meeting. None.
   
   
3. Committee Updates
   • FAS Library Committee. Committee representative Stan Wong reported on the last meeting of this committee. The "GET ANY" command from HOLLIS (with which students could have any book from any library delivered to their department) has been eliminated due to extreme cost and low usage. It may reappear in HOLLIS II (projected to go on-line in 1999) on a smaller scale. Also under discussion is the materials to be included in the "digital library," which will be items from microfilm and -fiche digitized in order to be accessed via computer. These matters will be handled on the departmental level. Finally, there will be a meeting in early 1998 to discuss student concerns about the FAS library system as they plan to renovate Widener and replace HOLLIS. Students wishing to register their opinions should contact Stan.
   • FAS Information Technology Committee. Funding is available for graduate students interested in using technology (in particular, the World Wide Web) as a teaching aide in their courses. Consult the Funding for Innovative Instructional Technology page for more information.
   
   
4. Harvard Graduate Council. Laurie Littlepage (G1; Medical Sciences) and Nick Dechman (G3; Engineering and Applied Sciences) were elected GSAS representatives to the Council, which includes members from all ten Harvard graduate schools.
   
   
5. Treasurer's Report.
   • A total of $1840 was awarded to student groups at the December Budget Committee meeting.
     

     Amount	Organization	Use
     $350	Society for Japanese Studies at Harvard	Operational
     $100	Harvard Catholic Graduate Society	Event
     $200	Harvard East Asian Society	Operational
     $300	Joint Harvard/MIT Philosophy Conference	Conference
     $445	Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Graduate Students	Conference
     $445	W.E.B. DuBois Graduate Society	Event

   • There will be no budget meeting in January. Those students wishing to receiving funding for GSAS group events must apply by January 21, 1998 to be considered at the February meeting.
   
   
6. Discussion: Graduate Student Advising and Treatment
   The bulk of the December GSC meeting was taken up with a serious dicussion about the kind of difficulties students face. The GSC is trying to find out as much as it can about experiences students have had so that we can determine the breadth of the problems and the kinds of pressure that students are under.

   Several students related their personal experiences -- both good and bad -- and the experiences of those in their departments. Some of these experiences are quite shocking and troubling and indicate an abdication of professional responsibility and basic human respect by some faculty members. Fortunately, others have had great advising experiences. Yet, it seems that the problem is widespread, existing in almost every department and graduate program.

   In the interests of confidentiality and anonymity, we do not report individual complaints here. We do, however, encourage you to contact the GSC (gsc@hcs.harvard.edu) with your comments and experiences, to be kept in strict confidence.

   The GSC President will be sending a letter to Harvard University President Neil Rudenstine relating student concerns and stressing the importance of this issue. A draft copy of this letter was distributed at the meeting and the final version is available from the GSC web side.

   Also sent to President Rudenstine and available at the meeting was a list of quotes from current Harvard graduate students to give some sense of the scope of the problem and the seriousness of the issue.

   This will be on-going discussion and we urge your full participation, ideas, and suggestions of how best to confront these vital challenges.

   
   

Respectfully Submitted,
Matthew Leingang
GSC Secretary