Building Community among TGS Students
 
When I took the job as Dean of the Graduate School beginning in September 2004, I recognized that TGS needed to address in a more overt way its service function and become more responsive to the everyday needs of graduate students and graduate programs. I believe that the structural changes we have already introduced to TGS have already improved this situation, and I believe that by next year technological progress will make the filing of routine paperwork far simpler and more reliable for our students.  I also had and have implemented plans for evaluating and improving the quality of our graduate programs and policies.  The fruits of our efforts in this area will take a bit longer to ripen, but I am confident that we are making positive change here as well.
 
What I was much less aware of when I took the job was the role that TGS plays (or should play) in creating community among graduate students.  When I was a graduate student, in the dark ages of the 1980s, graduate schools did not think much about this issue.  Graduate students were, it was thought, happy to spend their entire lives in their laboratories and libraries and had no need for a graduate school to provide much of anything beyond the opportunity to study.  In the past decade, however, graduate schools around the country have begun to recognize that many graduate students have crucial needs that are not (and in some cases cannot be) provided by their academic departments.  Many of these needs come down to the fuzzy but important notion of community.  It is well known that graduate school can be an isolated and isolating experience.  This is particularly true in those fields where research is produced by individuals thinking and writing alone (most humanities fields, a good portion of the social sciences, and mathematics).  Even in fields where most research is collaborative, the atmosphere of an individual laboratory, no matter how well managed, can become claustrophobic. 
 
A number of organizations on campus encourage graduate students to mix with their colleagues from other departments and programs.  Some of these are officially sponsored by TGS including the Chinese Students Association, the Black Graduate Students Association, and so forth.  Others are not formally sponsored, such as the Society of Women Engineers, Campus Kitchens, or the South Asian Student Alliance.
 
In order to encourage the further growth of community among NU graduate students, I would like to propose a community-building grant program for graduate students.  The program is inspired by one at MIT that has been going for a number of years, and which seems to have had much success in creating a sense of community across various groups of graduate students there (for details on the kinds of projects MIT has sponsored, see http://web.mit.edu/gso/community/rollcall.html).  MIT graduate students, to be sure, are a somewhat more homogeneous group than NU students.  Nevertheless, I believe that given the opportunity, many members of the TGS population could come up with ideas that will bring together at least some groups of students who would ordinarily not come into contact.
 
The NU program is specifically not meant to enhance social and academic interactions within individual departments or programs (or within closely linked departments and programs).  It is our belief that such activities, while extremely important, should be and in many cases are already carried out by the departments and programs themselves.  Instead, this program is designed to

• Integrate academic and social aspects of graduate life
• Bring people together in a social context
• Improve communications and outreach
• Encourage creative expression through the arts
• Serve as models for community building