[1073] in peace2
GSC orientation poster excluding violence/diversity events
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Aimee L Smith)
Tue Oct 2 23:33:29 2001
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To: peace-list@MIT.EDU, anti-hate@MIT.EDU, peace-women@MIT.EDU, stop@MIT.EDU,
greens-announce@MIT.EDU
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Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:33:16 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Come to the GSC meeting at 5:30pm, Wed. in room 50-220 to find out why
GSC supports sweatshop corporate sponsored charities on their
drop posters, but not their own rape awareness and diversity events...
This meeting is technically open to all grad-students, but I think
other community members who worked on these events, signed the petitions
for the undergrad events, etc. or feel these events are needed in
this community should also come.
Recently, SJC and SOS students worked together to get rape awareness
programs into both grad and undergrad orientation and in addition,
since GSC wasn't already doing it, a grad orientation on diversity issues.
The GSC events were organized "under" the GSC orientation committee.
The undergrad event was organized by the administration, who wasn't
that keen on the idea (although in light of last spring's suicide, will
likely credit themselves for the idea) did not let us participate in
the planning of the event (and were sometimes quite hostile.) Well, this
is the administration and we have come to expect this kind of response.
We are supposed to be good and quiet and leave all the changes to them, right?
Well, we didn't exactly expect underhanded tactics from our own student
government. In the large event posters in lobby 10 and the medical
center, there was room enough to advertise the still 1 month off
corporate sponsored (by Gap, Starbucks and New Balance) "run4kids", while the
orientation events on rape awareness and diversity were actively removed
from the posters without at least one of the orientation committee
chair's knowledge, perhaps neither.
I know everyone is busy and there are many important issues to work
on just now, but if you can manage the time, SJC and SOS students put
in hours and hours of work to prepare these events and we would like some
answers as to why (a) certain GSC member(s) would attempt to undermine
their efforts in this manner. We just don't get why...
Peace,
Aimee
------- Forwarded Message
To: LaRuth McAfee <laruthcm@mit.edu>
cc: alsmith@mit.edu, gsc-officers@mit.edu, gsc-admin@mit.edu, wcwu@mit.edu,
elrond@mit.edu, tamara@mit.edu, kweiss@mit.edu, stop-officer@mit.edu
Subject: GSC orientation poster excluding violence/diversity events
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2001 22:51:08 -0400
From: Aimee L Smith <alsmith@MIT.EDU>
Dear LaRuth,
Due to recent events, I haven't been able to get back to you until
now. I apologize for sending my previous comment to the inappropriate
list. I just grabbed the email from a recent mssg from it without too
much thinking. Perhaps this issue could be discussed at the GSC
meeting this Wed.
I would be interested to learn more about who actually decided to
remove these events from the poster and why. While you and Wan-
Chen have been very supportive and encouraging throughout the
process of planning and have worked very hard to make everything
come together for orientation, which is no small task, I have
felt that some others in GSC have not been supportive of these
events, (although, I wouldn't say malicious, simply negligent.)
That is why it was particularly discouraging to see some new
events on the posters, s.a. the corporate sponsored run4kids
and volunteer day, but not the rape awareness and diversity
events. I realize that there are those who feel that orientation
should be a fun and happy time and that topics such as violence
and discrimination are quite heavy, but I can't understand how
someone would unilaterally decide to remove these events without
first getting approval from the orientation co-chairs and/or the
GSC. And I certainly don't hold the co-chairs responsible for
any decisions made without their knowledge or approval. (You
should be able to count on people to act in an open and forthright
manner.) I am very concerned about the deliberate omission and
I would really like to understand more about how people within
the GSC can feel empowered to act without the consent of even
those who are in charge of organizing these events if not the
volunteers doing the leg work for them.
As far as funding, we were asked to submit a budget to the GSC and
we were told verbally that $700 was not a lot and that we should try to
get outside funding, but not to worry about it. I understand the
status of budgets can be different than the perception, so I don't
confuse the verbal assurance as a guarantee of funding, I only
bring up the point to demonstrate that the GSC did not put much
support behind this event other than booking rooms and putting it
on the GSC calendar. Perhaps there are other actions taken that
do demonstrate support that I am unaware of, but for the most part,
students with no formal positions in the GSC organized and
fund-raised the event, which we were happy to do, but we just
don't understand why a thing as easy as including the events in the
posters was not done. It does feel a bit like sabotage, and
even more so now that we know the events were actively removed
from the poster and not simply forgotten. While I am quite convinced
that you never attempted to undermine the events in any way, I
will withhold judgment about whether the removal of these
events was a careless oversight or an attempt to undermine the
hard work of the students organizing and speaking at these events
until I hear more details about how the decision to remove them
from the poster was made.
One recommendation for next year is that, while the GSC is only
responsible for its own schedule, it would be helpful to tell students
organizing events what the deadlines are for submitting the events
to ISO for their schedule. People who have not been involved
with orientation planning may not even know that these other
schedules exist.
It is a very positive first step to have had these events in the
orientation program at all. We have thoughts about how to better
pitch the events in the future which we would be happy to discuss
with you for next year. It is my hope that gaining a better understanding
of what went wrong with the poster will help ease some of the
discouragement we feel and will help counter the perception that others
have felt of the GSC being a male-dominated insider organization that
is not responsive to the graduate community at large.
Sincerely,
Aimee Smith
> Aimee,
>
> Thank you for voicing your concerns. I would just like to respond to
> these things in writing, but I would be more than happy to schedule a
> meeting if you would like to discuss these issues further or if you feel
> that I've missed any of your points. This is a somewhat long message
> because I tried to be as thorough as possible.
>
> 1. ISO Orientation schedule - There are a few issues here that I would
> like to comment on. First, from your comment about the ISO schedule, I
> want to make sure you understand that there are multiple orientation
> schedules and that the GSC only has control over the events listed in our
> schedule. From what I understand, the ISO schedule was made early in the
> summer before your workshops had really been developed. Also, many of the
> GSC Orientation events were left off the ISO schedule, just as not all of
> the ISO events were listed on the GSC Orientation schedule. If you would
> like to have the workshops in the future and you believe that ISO should
> have them on their schedule, I would suggest that you talk with the ISO to
> make sure that happens. If this did not happen, I would also talk with
> your funding sources to make sure that they advertise the workshops in the
> future.
>
> 2. GSC Orientation posters - I must admit that I'm not totally sure what
> happened here. I definitely asked the person who made our posters to
> include your workshops and the draft poster that I saw did have them
> listed on it. After we saw the draft poster, Maria and I requested that a
> few changes be made to it. I can assure you that removing the workshops
> was not one of them. In fact, we even asked the publicity people to make
> a poster specifically for the workshops that could be put up on the day of
> the event, which did happen. Since we didn't ask for your workshops to be
> removed from the poster, I didn't even realize that that happened until
> someone mentioned it after the posters had been put up around campus.
> Wan-Chen and I agree that we should have done a better job at monitoring
> the publicity so that this omission would have been caught in time, so we
> do want to apologize for that. However, I would like to make it clear
> that this was not a malicious act on the GSC's part as you seemed to
> assert. I haven't talked with the publicity person about this, but I can
> ask him what happened if you would really like to know. As a note, last
> year the family events that we planned were left off the Orientation
> posters. Since spouses&partners@mit commented on that, we made sure that
> they were on the posters this year. Likewise, the Orientation people next
> year will hopefully make sure that your events are listed because they'll
> learn from our mistake.
>
> 3. Funding - I don't recall ever guaranteeing you that the workshops
> would receive GSC funding, even as a backup. In fact, I tried to make it
> clear from the beginning that the GSC Orientation budget was very tight
> this year. Dilan also said that he would try to help you find external
> funding as part of our sponsorship. However, you and Brice made it sound
> like getting funding would not be an issue because you already knew of
> people and office on campus that would be interested in supporting these
> workshops for grad students. Even when Brice told us in early August that
> you were having trouble securing funding, Wan-Chen, Emmi, and I told him
> that we would be willing to talk with people if he thought that a request
> from the GSC Orientation Co-Chairs or the GSC Financial Administrator
> would prove to be more successful than a request from the undergrad who
> was working on funding. As a note, all the new events this year had to
> find their own sources for funding because we made it clear that the GSC
> Orientation Committee could not financially support them. So, don't think
> that your workshops were singled out in this matter.
>
> Finally, I would just like to make sure you understand that we did not
> intentionally try to sabotage your workshops. In fact, we feel that we
> gave you as much assistance as you asked for. The only oversight on our
> part was leaving the workshops off the posters and that was completely
> unintentional. Again, if you would like to talk about this further,
> please contact us at gsc-oc-chair@mit.edu and Wan-Chen and I would be
> happy to arrange a meeting. Please do not e-mail gsc-orientation@mit.edu
> about this because many people who had nothing to do with this year's GSC
> Orientation are on that list, and because the list was made primarily to
> advertise our meetings and recruit volunteers.
>
> In closing, thanks again for letting us know about your concerns. We
> certainly hope that the workshops will continue and we would like to work
> with you to make sure that they can be more successful in the future. We
> will soon ask for written event summaries from all the coordinators and
> arrange a meeting to talk with the coordinators about Orientation. So,
> that will be another opportunity for us to discuss ways to improve on the
> workshops for next year.
>
> LaRuth
>
>
> On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Aimee L Smith wrote:
>
> > Hi All,
> > Just curious why the rape awareness program and diversity
> > program didn't make it onto the poster or the international
> > students office version of the orientation schedule. Can
> > anyone explain? It is a bit frustrating that the GSC originally
> > offered to fund this event in backup, then withdrew that support,
> > which we managed to solve by other means in the end, but I
> > would have expected the bare minimum of support to include being
> > listed on these two important schedules. In the future, if GSC doesn't
> > really want to support a new event, perhaps it would be good to be
> > honest with the students who put in the hours to make it happen from
> > the start rather than in such a manner as this.
> >
> > Sincerely,
> > Aimee Smith
> >
>
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