Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Grad Students Protest Cutting of Fellowships

Grad Students Protest Cutting Of Fellowships

By Intisar Rabb Hoya Staff Writer

Graduate students voiced disapproval this week for a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences decision to cancel a fellowship program that allows doctoral candidates to teach upper-level undergraduate seminars. According to Dean Joseph Serene, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Davis Fellowship program will be discontinued next year in favor of other student aid programs.

The Davis Fellowship program was created four years ago to allow graduate students nearing completion of their Ph.D. the opportunity to teach undergraduate seminars based on their thesis research. Each year, funding for approximately 10 fellowships per semester was allocated among the economics, government, history, linguistics, philosophy and psychology departments in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, according to the Office of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

The decision to cancel the program came as a result of recommendations from the Graduate School Executive Committee, which suggested that it would be better to put the money for the Davis Fellowships back into the general financial aid pool.

This cancellation has disturbed graduate students, who question why the fellowships were cancelled and why certain departments affected by the decision were not included in the making of the decision, according to Ian Reifowitz, a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the history department.

Reifowitz contended that the Executive Committee in effect made a decision affecting the fate of several departments, not all of which are represented on the committee. In fact, he said that these departments, which included history, government, philosophy and other social sciences and humanities, were not even informed about the decision until after it was made.

Reifowitz, a Davis Fellow teaching a course this semester entitled “The Vienna of Hitler and Freud,” only found out about the decision last week, after, he said, it had been made.

In response to news of its cancellation, Reifowitz initiated petitions calling for a reinstatement of the program. Gathering signatures from both graduates and undergraduates, he said that if the graduate demands are not effective, he hopes undergraduates will provide more of a push to have the program re-instated. On Tuesday, Feb. 16, Reifowitz collected 608 undergraduate student signatures at a petition set up at a table in Red Square.

According to Dean Serene, the decision was made after a “spread of opinion about how well [the fellowships] worked.The idea worked well in certain departments, such as the history department. It worked less well as the discipline got more technical,” such as in the economics or psychology departments. In the decision to cancel the program, “There was in no sense a desire not to fund advanced graduate students, nor to not provide them with teaching experience,” Serene said.

According to Larry Fields, history department administrative officer, “in general most students are very satisfied with the Davis courses.”

“I was really upset to hear that they had cancelled the program. I think it’s really great to have someone closer in age to us rather than an older professor. … I think undergraduates and graduates will both lose out,” said Jennifer Grana (SFS ’99), a student in Reifowitz’ class.

Serene, however, said that graduate student satisfaction was very localized in the history department. Currently, the Executive Committee is in the final steps of making allocations for financial aid dollars among departments. According to Serene, the committee is looking to ensure that enough funding is provided to at least the history department to continue offering graduate student taught seminars, although the program itself has been cancelled.

“But even if the [six] History courses are re-instated, there are another 19 that may be lost,” said Reifowitz, asserting that although the teaching experience and the seminars might continue for the history department, the program’s cancellation would still do harm.

“We will try very hard to…provide to all departments the resources that are left to provide training and teaching experience,” Serene said, acknowledging the other departments affected. “This will allow them to effectively do what they had been doing under the Davis program.the point being to provide departments with resources to use in a more flexible way.”

“I wish the resources were much larger than they are, so we would not be constrained. But we are very concerned about supporting graduate students, not only for [the] first couple years, but throughout the duration of their graduate studies. My concerns are very much in consonant with those of the grad students; and now it is a matter of finding a mechanism to address them.”

Serene added that the total monetary value involved in these fellowships is small in comparison to the costs of graduate education. The three history Davis Fellowships given last year totaled $37,000. By comparison, a graduate fellowship for someone with full tuition and a stipend for the coming year will be around $33,000. Last year’s total history department allocation of graduate student aid was $668,000.

Reifowitz nevertheless said, “It is important that Georgetown creates and continues to fund a program like the Davis Program, with a name, because it shows it cares about both undergraduate and graduate education, and integrates the two as one educational community. This is the only program I know of that [does this]. It’s a win-win proposition.” Graduate students get teaching experience in their areas of expertise, rather than just correcting papers, he said, and undergraduates get small-group attention while learning about interesting specialized topics.

Also per the recommendation of the Graduate Student Executive Committee, Serene said that he met this spring with each graduate program to address financial support issues. “One message I got over and over again was that it would be really helpful to have at least a small number of somehow prestigious fellowships to use to attract the very best students that we would otherwise lose to other programs,” he said. As it stands, that is the next project that the Graduate School will pursue in lieu of such programs as the Davis Fellowship if it is not re-instated.

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