Graduate Student Senate held its first meeting of the academic year over Teams on Tuesday to appoint and teach new members.
GSS meetings will continue to be held over Teams until the Spring Semester. This first meeting served as a crash course to show new members how GSS operates.
The meeting began with a presentation by Joseph Shields, dean of the Graduate College and vice president for Research and Creative Activity, illustrating the reason there is GSS.
GSS is a way to ensure OU has shared governance, Shields said.
“There’s a formalized expectation that there’s pathways for getting people’s voices in the conversation,” Shields said. “To make that meaningful, there have to be structures of the university to enable input to give visibility to that input and allow it to be factored into the decision-making.”
Amal Shimir, GSS vice president and a second-year master’s student studying development and conflict, presented the rules and guidelines of how meetings will go.
One of the biggest points made was the importance of joining committees. Representatives are required to join at least one committee, and senators and commissioners are required to join at least two committees.
The internal committees available are the Governance Committee, Budget Committee, COVID-19 Concerns Committee, GPSAW Committee, GSS Internal Awards Committee, Health Insurance Committee, Social Event Committee and Elections Committee. There are not yet any external committees available for members to join.
Graduate Council is a committee where members discuss the setting and determine policies about how graduate education happens, Shields said.
Outside of the Rules and Procedures, GSS uses Robert’s Rules of Order as a way to move through its agenda. These rules ensure that everyone has the same amount of speaking time, the meeting remains civil, the matters are moved through quickly, everything is covered and the methodology remains the same from meeting to meeting and year to year, Shimir said.
Body meetings will look the same each time. They follow the standardized format that is described in Robert’s Rules, which could be found by the new members in their welcome packet, Brett Fredericksen, a graduate student in the Plant Biology department and commissioner for Academic Affairs, said.
Resolutions will be introduced by the sponsors, and then the chair opens debate. Individuals wishing to speak will be added to the stack. Each individual is given two minutes to speak or thirty seconds to give a direct response, Fredericksen said.
Resolutions will be passed with either a simple majority — which is 50% plus one, not including abstentions — or a two-thirds majority vote, Fredericksen said.
The meeting ended with a mock debate to show the new members what one would look like.
New members were encouraged to participate and ask questions as well as observe what a real debate would include. The trial also showed new members how Robert’s Rules are used.
