Graduate students at Iowa State could face a major change to their rights and responsibilities in the near future.

Graduate students, Graduate and Professional Student Senate members and the Graduate Council have been working together to update a document that hasn’t seen changes since 1967.

Chapter nine of the Graduate Handbook includes a section of graduate student rights and responsibilities that is more of “a section of things that if you do, then you are in trouble,” said Ardhendu Tripathy, university relations legislative affairs chairman of GPSS.

Tripathy has been working with the Graduate Council to submit a working draft of a new Bill of Rights for graduate students.

Tripathy said chapter nine is “a collection of punitive clauses rather than a document with a message as a whole” and is hoping for the Bill of Rights to pass so graduate students know they have specific, laid-out rights.

“These are pretty common sense things,” Tripathy said. “They are pretty reasonable and things that we expect … to be the norm.”

Ashton Archer, graduate student in mechanical engineering and GPSS senator, helped draft the Bill of Rights submitted to the Graduate Council. Some of the issues she carved into the Bill of Rights are the right to change a graduate student’s major professor or adviser, the ability to communicate between student and faculty and the ability to be informed about a graduate student’s financial status.

“I know in some other departments, some people had some problems where they feared retaliation for maybe changing their professor if it just maybe wasn’t working out a lot of time,” Archer said. “[Graduate student’s] assistantships are tied to our professors, so if the relationship isn’t working out or the research isn’t what you thought it would be it’s very hard to change because you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so a lot of students may stay in a situation they aren’t happy with just out of duty.”

Tripathy said graduate students are “vulnerable” in this sense.

“A lot of professional development hinges on the adviser’s impressions of them, so it kind of gets tied into one person a lot,” Tripathy said. “We want to make sure it doesn’t become make or break for one person.”

Archer said some program degree requirements change while a student is at Iowa State and that some students were told they would have to automatically accept the new requirements.

“[That] is going to affect your time to graduation,” Archer said. “That’s going to affect your research, your teaching, your coarse load.”

The Bill of Rights includes a section to help students address these issues and make it easier to deal with conflict resolution.

“I hope that it’s just going to make it a lot easier for students when they go and they deal with their major professors or their DOGE [Director of Graduate Education] if they have any conflicts,” Archer said. “I’m hoping it’ll make it easier to deal with conflict resolutions in other departments and I feel like it’s going to give graduate students a nice standard of ‘OK, this is what is expected of me [and] this is what my duties as a graduate student [are] to my university.’”

The Bill of Rights is likely to include a section for international students as well. Some international students have specific contracts through their visas, and if the contracts expire, they cannot work while they wait for their new contract to become active. Archer said some professors “either don’t know or don’t follow” this rule in order to keep their students working.

“[We wanted to] make sure if they’re not supposed to be working that they can realize they can stand up and say, ‘I don’t have to work because I’m not legally allowed to work,’” Archer said. “… A lot of students don’t feel comfortable saying ‘no’ to their professors.”

Graduate students fall into what both Archer and Tripathy refer to as a “gray area” because they are both students and faculty members. Faculty members and undergraduate students each have their own Bill of Rights, but graduate students belong to both the student category and faculty category, which made their rights and responsibilities previously encompassed by both documents.

The new Bill of Rights for the Graduate Handbook will be specific to graduate students only.

“[Graduate students are] sort of in a weird position because we are students, but we are also sort of employees, so we have this gray area that we operate in,” Archer said. “Some of the stuff that applies to the undergrads doesn’t apply to us, but then some of the stuff that applies to actual employees doesn’t apply to us because our assistantships are on an appointee basis and we have a contract for it but we don’t get the same benefits university employees get.”

Archer said the hardest part of putting the draft together was “incorporating everyone’s concerns without being overly prescriptive.”

She said each situation is unique. For instance, some students were concerned about medical leave, while others were concerned about qualifying examinations for their program.

Ph.D. students must pass an exam in order to qualify for their program. If they do not pass, they usually end up with a master’s degree instead. Some departments weren’t letting their students know, so the students were taking these exams too late and were unable to qualify.

“I think [the exams are] more of an issue that the Graduate Council needs to be harder on the individual departments who maybe aren’t following that policy that the graduate departments put forth,” Archer said.

Archer said some of the reasons these issues were left out were because the drafters didn’t want to be “overly prescriptive.”

“We didn’t want it to be so confining that there’s no wiggle room, but at the same time, we don’t want it to be so vague that it could leave people room to do nothing,” she said.

The proposed Bill of Rights is agreed by both Archer and Tripathy to be “well-balanced” and have “good language” that should easily pass through the committee.

“There shouldn’t be any reason why this is not to be passed because, like I said, it’s pretty common sense and actually ethical,” Tripathy said. “I would not expect people or faculty members to complain — it’s not like we are taking things from them.”

Archer said she didn’t foresee many problems of the draft passing because the language of it is “satisfactory to faculty and staff and graduate students.”

GPSS is currently in the process of writing a resolution in support of the new Bill of Rights, which Archer said she is hoping will pass unanimously and make the draft set on a “good track to be recognized.”

Tripathy is looking forward to this new opportunity for graduate students to be “proactive” about issues they may face during their studies or research.

“I would think of it as a small step in a direction we should be going,” he said.