Graduate Student Council President Tells Peers to Pitch Departments on New Faculty Hires

The president of the Harvard Graduate Student Council told graduate students to pitch their departments on new faculty hiring lines at a Thursday meeting, citing a “defrost” in last spring’s University-wide hiring freeze.

The suggestion comes days after a Tuesday Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting where FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra announced that the FAS would “increase hiring substantially next year.” Hoekstra said departments would submit plans in February to dictate next year’s searches.

GSC President Flora S. Giodani proposed Thursday that graduate students could influence those plans by advocating to their departments on behalf of certain faculty hiring lines.

“If, for example, you were already searching for a faculty and then that search had to stop, now is a moment in which it would be good to keep the conversation going or bring it back and see if it’s possible to hire that person that you were originally thinking of,” Giodani said.

The FAS has 33 active faculty searches, Hoekstra said at the Tuesday meeting, made up in large part by 25 tenure-track searches launched in October. The hiring freeze, announced last spring in the wake of federal funding cuts, loosened this fall after the FAS steadied its budget with a series of cost-cutting measures.

But Hoekstra said Tuesday that she would boost hiring levels further after department chairs and standing committees told her that the current rate was insufficient.

“We were not given information about which of these searches are being addressed or whatever,” Giodani said, “but it’s good to have those conversations.”

At the Thursday meeting, Giodani also proposed changes to the GSC constitution to allow more time for students to decide whether to run for positions of leadership.

Giodani said that under the current system, bids to enter elections for various positions in the council are due just hours after the elections are announced, a system that she said does not allow sufficient time for people to weigh whether or not to run. She proposed extending the period between the announcement and the deadline to roughly a week.

“Right now, the rule is that we announce elections in the open meeting, and you have to send your interest form by that night. So it’s very little time for people to think,” Giodani said.

Giodani said this system often results in time-consuming elections where only a single person is running for a position.

“Normally, the people that are interested in these positions are running alone, unopposed, and so it’s just a lot of time during the meetings to talk about elections when people that are going to just run alone and they’re going to just get elected,” Giodani said.

Giodani asked students on Thursday to join a committee, guided by the parliamentarian, to draft a motion for the proposed changes.

“In order to do this kind of reform, we need to have a constitutional revision committee that is going to be guided by the parliamentarian,” Giodani said. “If you’re interested in thinking about our constitution and bylaws together, it would be great if you would like to get involved.”

Giodani also announced that the GSC is exploring a professional closet initiative to provide free workplace clothing to graduate students. The proposed program would clean and store donations of workplace clothing from alumni and make them accessible to students via pop-ups or other public spaces.

Giodani said there was alumni support for the proposal, but the logistics were still uncertain.

“We are still exploring the possibilities to make this work,” Giodani said. “We know that alumni were very excited about the idea, so donations are going to arrive. But we have to figure out the format, the cleaning, and the storage.”