The two met Thursday morning.
Before Ohio University President Roderick McDavis made his way into Alden Library on Thursday morning, the clock was ticking.
OU’s Graduate Student Senate passed a resolution to boycott university committees unless McDavis came to a GSS general body meeting before Nov. 16 to address concerns about the general fee. GSS wants graduate students to have the option to opt out of paying the general fee if they don’t plan on attending sporting events, and went as far as passing a resolution in March and holding a protest during the first home football game, according to previous Post reports.
McDavis did meet with GSS members Thursday morning — four days before the deadline — in a special meeting with Executive Vice President and Provost Pam Benoit, Vice President For Finance and Administration Stephen Golding and other administrators.
“The Graduate Student Senate has passed resolutions supporting a lower general fee and has advanced this issue onto the agenda of other university groups including the General Fee Advisory Committee,” Graduate Student Senate President Carl Edward Smith III said in his opening remarks Thursday.
McDavis began the conversation with a presentation that detailed the effects of programs such as graduate student assistantships, emphasizing that the cost of tuition for graduate students, which stands at $9,444, is more than $1,000 less than undergraduate tuition, and has remained static for the past eight years.
“These numbers attest to the value we place on graduate-level education,” McDavis said. “We value you and we are making every effort to support your academic and financial well-being.”
Audience members were allowed to voice their questions and opinions, with much of the audience applauding Graduate Student Workers Party Chair Shehzad Ahmed, who questioned McDavis about the allocation of general fee funds to athletic programs.
In the 2014-15 academic year, more than $27.4 million was collected for the student general fee. About 34 percent of that total went to OU Athletics, according to a previous Post report.
“What it does is it shows that Ohio University (administrators) … value intercollegiate athletics more than they value their actual students,” Ahmed said. “That is a problem ... that can be addressed by knocking the general fee down and taking money away from intercollegiate athletics, because we are a university. And the university is a place for education, right?”
McDavis said the general fee supports students’ activities out of the classroom, rather than inside, adding that “much of what students learn during their four or five years on campus comes from what they learn out of the classroom.”
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Smith and McDavis spent a handful of minutes in heated discussion over their professional relationship the past year, as well as GSS' stance on the general fee.
Throughout the meeting, Smith repeatedly asked McDavis if the Office of the President is against decreasing the general fee, but McDavis never directly answered the question, adding that without specific details and a recommendation from the Budget Planning Council, he could not yet adopt an official position on the issue.
Despite the disagreements, McDavis said later in an email that he values the feedback from graduate students, and believes the meeting was overall a positive step in improving communication.
“We challenge ourselves to elevate the student experience for all students, including graduate students, and this kind of feedback is crucial to ensuring we are meeting the needs of our students,” McDavis said in an email.
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