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I admire your efforts to get such information from the administration, Igor. More transparency on this and many other issues would certainly be helpful and appreciated but the current administration seems less willing than ever to share information.
Best,
Ronda
On Apr 16, 2023, at 12:40 PM, Igor Shinkar <igor_shinkar@sfu.ca> wrote:
Dear Kirsten,
All these are great ideas, I would support them all.
About the BASS funding, I've been asking the GPS for information about the BASS funding since December last year. I wanted to understand how the BASS funding is distributed between the departments. I was not able to get any answer for 4 months now.
If we want a change in the BASS model, we can start by understanding the current model. For now, even this seems to be a huge secret.
The only publicly available information I'm aware of is here https://www.sfu.ca/gradstudies/faculty-staff/resources/funding-ga3/bass.html.
But I don't know how to read these "models" and "formulas", and I don't understand how they are translated into actual numbers.
Best,
Igor
From: KirstenZickfeld <kzickfel@sfu.ca>
Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2023 11:43:50 AM
To: Lyn Bartram; Behraad Bahreyni
Cc: Enda Brophy; academic-discussion (academic-discussion@sfu.ca)
Subject: Re: Grad Chair public letter on funding
We need advocacy at different levels to be able offer graduate students a dignified level of income, none of which mutually exclusive:
- Call on SFU to increase BASS funding and/or and/or waive graduate tuition.
- Call on SFU to have graduate student needs front and centre in their Advancement efforts and in conversations with government to increase revenue for graduate programming.
- Call on research councils to increase the values of graduate scholarships and awards (currently wholly inadequate), and of research grants (e.g. NSERC Discovery grants) to allow PIs to pay research assistants a decent salary.
Kirsten Zickfeld
Professor and Graduate Program Chair, Geography
On 2023-04-15 4:03 p.m., Lyn Bartram wrote:
I fully concur with Prof. Bahreyni’s concerns. In our school the professors fund the RAs of their students, and that funding is in no way provided by nor dependent on the university.
Are we discussing pooling these funds to equitably support students across other disciplines? This would not be acceptable to the funding councils. In fact, we should be advocating strongly for better graduate student funding to those councils, and at the
same time warning the uni that we cannot sustain current graduate student counts in this finding climate. V
Again, we need to be careful about claiming this letter represents the position of the Graduate Program Committees in each department if it has not gone to a vote in each.
Lyn Bartram, Professor
SIAT
Simon Fraser University
Dear Enda,
I fully support higher funding per student. However, I am unsure if we should ask the university responsible for the entirety of the funding situation.
As far as I know, with all due respect to the colleagues who have signed the petition, graduate chairs should represent the departments they are from when using the title. A request at this level
certainly would have required some discussion within the departments so that the signature of grad chairs would imply consensus in that department rather than personal opinions.
Another factor I hope the grad chairs already have considered is the distribution of funding sources per department. For instance, could we collect data from all grad chairs on how many grad students
are in each department and how much of the average funding per grad student comes from RA, TA, Fellowships, or other sources? We can then see if requesting the university to fix the funding problem makes sense or maybe we should be looking at other fixes.
Thanks
__________________
Behraad Bahreyni, PhD, PEng
Professor, School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering
Associate Member, School of Engineering Science
SFU Simon Fraser University
MSE 4176, 250-13450 102nd Ave
Surrey, BC, CANADA V3T 0A3
Tel: +1 (778) 782-8694 Fax: +1 (778) 782-7514 Web:
http://sense.fas.sfu.ca/
Dear colleagues, yesterday Graduate Chairs at SFU released a public letter calling on the university for a rapid and meaningful increase in real funding levels for graduate students across the university. Some of
you will remember that the letter was initially discussed on this mailing list, and my thanks go to colleagues who offered input, helped craft the letter, and signed on. The letter can be found here,
and we are still adding signatures as they come in so please do get in touch if you are a graduate chair and would like to sign.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Enda Brophy
Associate Professor and Graduate Chair | School of Communication
Associate | Labour Studies
Simon Fraser University | HC 3559
515 W Hastings St, Vancouver V6B 5K3
E:
ebrophy@sfu.ca
Simon Fraser University lies on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations.
--
Dr. Kirsten Zickfeld (pronouns: she/her/hers)
Distinguished SFU Professor of Climate Science
Chair, Graduate Program
Department of Geography
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby BC Canada V5A 1S6
Phone: 778-7829047
Web: https://www.sfu.ca/geography/about/our-people/profiles/Kirsten-Zickfeld.html
I respectfully acknowledge SFU is on unceded and traditional territories of the Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm), Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations.
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