GSC Fills Executive Board

The Graduate Student Council (GSC) approved a new constitution and filled vacant officer positions at their final meeting of the year, held last night in Lehman Hall.

The offices of president and vice president were filled at last month's meeting, and last night the council elected officers for the remaining positions.

The new secretary will be anthropology graduate student Matthew H. McIntyre and the treasurer will be Kenji Schwarz, who represents the graduate program in East Asian studies. The Graduate Student Health Advisory Committee (GSHAC) will be represented by Alicia W. Walker and Robert O. Krikorian.

The council also evaluated their budget, as the budget committee expressed concern over making spending limits more realistic.

New year's budget will be finalized when the council can assess how much money they have left after this year. Some concerns were also raised about student groups who do not get their necessary funding quickly enough.

In addition, the council discussed this year's overspending of their allotted budget for alcohol, saying this is because they could not have kegs delivered to Dudley House anymore. This has increased the "pub night" spending of the council by quite a bit this year, members said.

GSC representatives from various University committees reported on their recent activity. The library committee reported that Langdell Library at Harvard Law School (HLS) plans to limit library access during the HLS exam period as law students felt that there were too many undergraduates flooding the library. Langdell will be closed to all students not in the law school from now until the end of the HLS exam period.

The health advisory committee announced that University Health Services (UHS) has recently been given free samples to many varieties of expensive prescription drugs. UHS will fill valid prescriptions for free with these drugs for a limited time.

The GSC ended with a discussion of changes to their constitution and by-laws. The major issues discussed was whether or not to have a quorum requirement in order to hold votes at meetings. The committee finally decided to postpone further discussion of this issue until the fall, and approved the rest of the constitution.

This was also the final meeting for longtime GSC president Carlos A. Lopez. Lopez has been president on and off since 1993, for a total of four years.

Ian A. Richmond, the new president said, "I'm looking forward to basically continuing the same programs that we have had in the past." Richmond also said he hoped to better incorporate graduate students who were married or had a family into the community.

Richmond said he also felt that graduate student advising was very important. "We want to make sure that it stays an issue with the faculty because they have the quality of advising in their hands," he said.