Years after proposal, young GS alumni still lack board seat

Dozens of undergraduate alumni have served on the board as young alumni trustees over the last 40 years, but no comparable positions have ever been established for young Graduate School alumni, despite interest expressed by some members of the current Graduate Student Government (GSG) who said the board was “inaccessible” to graduate students.

The last organized effort to add young Graduate School alumni to the board was in 2001, when Lauren Hale GS ’03, David Linsenmeier GS ’03 and Karthick Ramakrishnan GS ’02 co-authored a proposal to establish two young Graduate School alumni trustees. The proposal, Ramakrishnan said earlier this week, was a “culmination of a bunch of things that graduate students did to push for greater benefits,” including better health care and dental coverage, as well as more affordable housing options.

The proposal was a way to “institutionalize these concerns” rather than simply protesting and demanding, Ramakrishnan explained, but he added, “I never got the sense that [the board] debated it.”

The board reviews its composition roughly every decade, said Vice President and Secretary Bob Durkee ’69, who serves as the University’s liaison to the board. “The last time the board took a thorough look at its composition, four years ago, they concluded it was a good size,” he noted.

The board is currently composed of 40 trustees, and adding two more would make it too large, Durkee said. “The concerns of the campus community and of Princetonians,” he added, “are brought to the board effectively.”

But Giri Parameswaran GS, the current GSG chair, said that though he has not heard of any organized efforts to add a young graduate alumni seat to the board, “there’s certainly talk within the GSG of the trustees being really inaccessible.”

“One of the things we’ve been asking for years is increased funding for scholarly travel,” Parameswaran explained. “A young alumni trustee who’s just out of grad school, who’s facing all the things that you do,” he noted, is more likely to be aware of these concerns.

The trustees meet with graduate students at an annual dinner, to which between 15 and 20 students are invited, Durkee noted. But Ramakrishnan called these dinners a “very indirect form of representation” and said it would be more effective to have a formal meeting to encourage debate.

The board is required to have a minimum of two Graduate School alumni as trustees. Currently, three Graduate School alumni are on the board, and the youngest of them, Kavita Ramdas, graduated in 1988.

“I don’t know if Princeton ultimately gets it in terms of treating graduate students with respect,” said Ramakrishnan, who added that he believes the University is “losing out on a big resource.”