Yesterday evening the 2006-2007 ASSU Undergraduate Senate heard presentations from a member of the Graduate Student Council’s Diversity Committee criticizing the poor racial diversity in the graduate student body. It also heard from next year’s ASSU financial manager on the organization and finances of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE).

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Glenn Kurtz and Amelia Glaser, both recent PhD students, soak in the sun while discussing their mutual interest in interdisciplinary studies. #gallery http://daily.stanford.edu/image/full/6041
Joel Lewenstein

Glenn Kurtz and Amelia Glaser, both recent PhD students, soak in the sun while discussing their mutual interest in interdisciplinary studies.

Cullen Buie, a third-year graduate student in mechanical engineering, has served as co-chair of the GSC’s Diversity Committee for two years.

“This committee was formed to look at diversity in the graduate level for women and under-represented minorities,” Buie told the Senate. “The major issue was that these populations on the graduate level were far below than what you see in the U.S. Census or even at the undergraduate level.”

Buie’s charts showed that while the U.S. was 12 percent black and 13 percent Latino, and the Stanford undergraduate population is roughly similar, the graduate population is only 3 percent black and 5 percent Hispanic.

Buie also claimed that the University was reluctant to release a breakdown of each department’s racial diversity.

“The University just will not yield this data, probably because it’s so bad,” Buie said. “The idea is that if you yield this data that is broken down by department and for instance, there is one black student in chemistry. That technically violates some privacy laws because you can identify who that person is. In my mind, that’s crap. If that’s the issue, then maybe you should try to get two.”

Recently there has been a drop in the numbers of graduate students from underrepresented minority groups. Buie blamed this on the decentralization of graduate school admissions practices in 1996. This measure gave each department more freedom to choose their graduate classes, at the cost of University-wide agendas such as upping diversity.

To counter this trend, the Diversity Committee proposed that the University hire a vice provost for graduate education to focus on the subject. According to Buie, this official would work to increase centralization and make departments more aware of diversity issues without encroaching on their autonomy.

The new senators, who took their seats a few weeks ago, also got a brief overview of Stanford Student Enterprises from Matt McDonald, Class of 2005, who will be the ASSU financial manager and chief executive officer of SSE next year.

“The ASSU has had random businesses for 20 or 30 years now,” McDonald said. “And in the early 1990s there were some major University budget cuts. A guy named John Hall came along and wanted to make sure that the ASSU endowment was sustained in the long term. So the SSE was formed out of the ASSU.

“At that time there were 12 divisions, with a total endowment of around $2.8 million,” he continued. “Right now, the endowment is around $5 million. So you can see that the SSE is pumping quite a bit of money into the organization and is really sustaining the long-term viability of the ASSU.”

The Senate also heard from Dmitry Belogolovsky, a first-year graduate student in computational mathematical engineering and a member of the Nominations Commission.

“We’re basically done nominating people for Board of Trustees committees,” said Belogolovsky in an interview with The Daily. “The Board of Trustees committees might deal with something like alumni affairs, while the University committees deal with dining or Founder’s Day.”

Belogolovsky reported that committee assignments were extremely competitive.

“We had a lot of applications,” he said. “We went through them and read all of them. We interviewed a lot of people. We were interviewing for three weeks, weekends as well as during the week.”