The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly voted yesterday to eliminate the Slope Day committee’s best hope for securing additional GPSA funding for the spring event – a so-called “slush fund” that makes up $18,000 of the GPSA operating budget.
The vote nullified a $3 increase to the graduate student activity fee approved last fall on the grounds that the increase violated the GPSA charter. The GPSA will now address a letter to Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III requesting that the activity fee be reduced.
Jon Bellante ’06, chair of the Slope Day Committee said, “Grad students are the only community that has not helped us financially.”
On Nov. 28, the GPSA initially decided to add $18,000 to its operating budget, but turned down the Slope Day Committee’s request for $15,000 for the next two years. Bellante said that this amount was calculated at $12 for 25 percent of graduate students.
But grad student leaders dispute the idea that 25 percent of grad students attend Slope Day. Brian Holmes grad, former GPSA president, said that graduate student Slope Day attendance is “nowhere near the 25 percent that Jon Bellante claims