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Sharif Gias
Gias laid out a five-part platform for his GPSA campaign, which covers interdisciplinary research collaboration, graduate funding, community outreach, campus safety and diversity.
He said a number of the points go together: For example, he said the lack of easily-accessible graduate funding due to federal cuts can be dealt with through interdisciplinary collaboration.
“I encourage students to collaborate and write student grants,” Gias said. “Funding is sparse and students need to come together for their common cause.”
Gias also said he would focus on external funding sources unlike his opponent, Priscila Poliana, who he said takes an exclusively internal funding approach.
“My opponent has talked about how she will go to the president’s office, the VP of economic development, but that is all internal,” Gias said. “How do you fight for external funding? Through showing your research capability, prospects and needs to outside sources.”
When speaking about community outreach, Gias cited a financial education community outreach project he helped create while teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. He created it in concert with the university’s department of finance and secured funding from the U.S. Treasury Department to educate students about topics such as credit card use and how to avoid credit card debt.
“We not only supported these initiatives, but brought in a lot of community funding and awareness through this program,” Gias said. “I would like to see the same thing here. It is viable here because I have done it and I will work to make it happen again.”
Sharif said he went to different departments at UNM and “knocked door-to-door” to get a sense of the campus safety concerns that different students have.
“I believe in gathering grassroots-level information,” Gias said. “I went to the departments to find out what is happening in this respect at UNM.”
Gias discussed plans for extending current shuttle bus services past 10 p.m. until 2 a.m. to accommodate graduate students who work late hours doing research on campus. He also said the short-term costs involved in extending shuttle bus hours would be outweighed by the future benefit of showing potential students UNM is a safe campus, thereby making it a more attractive choice.
“I have an M.S. in finance; I am working on my Ph.D in economics,” Gias said. “I understand the process, that there are initial costs but that in the long term, it will pay off.”
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Gias also said he would create a volunteer GPSA campus safety team to escort all students around campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Students from the team would be scheduled to stay in Zimmerman Library and escort students from there as needed.
He also said he would create a volunteer group of GPSA safety representatives from each department, students who would be on-call to escort students in need around campus at any time of night.
Gias said he would require GPSA safety team members to take UNMPD safety training courses to make sure they could do their jobs correctly. He said these student escorts are necessary because of concerns he had received from students about the long response times from existing escort services.
“Campus safety is my first priority because I am a graduate student. If my life is not safe, how can I produce better research?” Gias said. “I don’t want to think about if I can protect myself for five minutes, who will come and save me. I need safety now.”
Regarding diversity, Gias said his main concern is diversity in life experience, not demographics. He said he would implement a diversity scorecard, and students could earn points by attending diversity events and lectures and departments could earn points by holding diversity events.
He said incentives for students could include credit or points toward class grades, and that departments could receive incentives that would encourage them to bring professors from underrepresented groups to campus.
“Diversity is important because it will make this campus better,” Gias said. “We can take what we learn about other people and make our community and society a better place for living.”
Priscila Poliana
Poliana laid out a three-point platform that covers securing funding for graduate students, fostering a culture of unity at UNM and promoting campus safety and diversity.
She said graduate funding is her main priority in order to relieve the debt burden on graduate students at UNM that she said makes graduate school not financially sound.
“What I see is a significant proportion of graduate students relying on loans because tuition is so high,” Poliana said. “These people work at the University, they have a job, but they don’t necessarily have tuition remission or health insurance.”
She discussed GPSA’s new one-time assistantship grants, and said she would like to expand them to create repeat opportunities for more students to have access to monthly stipends, partial tuition remission and health insurance.
As part of her goal of unifying the student body, Poliana said she wants to encourage students to take advantage of the Faculty/Staff Club happy hours every week to help main and north campus students meet halfway. She also said she wants to create a weekly calendar of all graduate student events on both campuses.
“It’s about networking, it’s a matter of introducing people … so they can transit among each others’ circles and can get past the physical barriers between campuses and start working together for common causes,” Poliana said.
Poliana also said she believes her campus connections give her an edge over her opponent and send a better message of unity to students. The University could leverage this when going to Santa Fe to petition the Legislature for funds and UNM-related laws, she said.
“I have a plan, I know what I’m doing, I know the people and I’m already meeting with them … and a number of student organizations, saying, ‘Guys, I’m here, let’s do this now’,” she said. “I am known by this community and I know my community.”
Concerning campus safety, Poliana said women and students of color are under attack at UNM, citing the recent campus sexual assaults this semester and the racist incident in Coronado Hall on March 1, in which a violent and racist image was drawn on a black student’s dorm room door.
She said she supports the recent forums hosted by African American Student Services and the Women’s Resource Center in response to the attacks. She said her personal connections helped her to get involved with further preventative measures. She said Don Trahan Jr., a senior program adviser at AASS, invited her to AASS’s discussion on the subject.
“This is a conversation that needs to go far beyond the act itself,” Poliana said. “In the community, the conversation we need to have … is that we need to ask exactly why these things are happening. Once we understand why they are happening, we will be able to get some incident and address further issues.”
Poliana also said she would like to work with the office of the president and UNMPD to improve campus escort services, in response to some students’ complaints that escorts sometimes show up late.
“People can’t be waiting for half an hour; we need to establish clear guidelines,” she said. “We need to establish a response time that is reasonable to students and reasonable to the UNM police. We need to talk about reports, we need to find out how long the response time is and work with specifics.”
Regarding diversity, Poliana said further diversity on multiple levels throughout the University is important to her, because “contentious points of view advance our own,” she said.
“When I talk about diversity, yes it’s related to social standing and to ethnicity, but it’s also related to paradigms and people who come from different perspectives and who have different worldviews,” she said. “We need to share that and to respect others even when consensus cannot be reached.”
Poliana said she would work closely with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to find ways to bring “excellence diversity” to the University. She said this would include initiatives to help UNM prepare for a large influx of international students, and cited President Frank’s efforts to bring more international students to UNM.
She also said she would seek the mentorship of the UNM faculty and administration in finding the best ways to attract faculty from underrepresented groups to the University.
“We need to give continuation to the work that they are already doing in order to bring about a faculty body that is more diverse,” Poliana said. “It can only strengthen our community.”
