The Graduate Student Council (GSC) voted unanimously to confirm conditional collaboration with the Office of Community Standards (OCS) in its Thursday meeting. The council also deferred votes on bills that would reduce University natural gas use and dissolve club sports’ funding umbrella.
The Joint Bill Affirming Conditional Collaboration with the Office of Community Standards (OCS) and Board on Conduct Affairs (BCA) affirms that the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) and the GSC will abstain from electing panelists to the OCS unless it enacts reforms. Among the bill’s proposed changes are increased availability of OCS office hours, more extensive student advocacy efforts, faster case investigation timelines, stricter evidentiary standards to initiate investigations and increased transparency of OCS cases.
“We want to show the OCS that we appreciate their willingness to collaborate,” said Tom Liu, a sixth-year physics Ph.D. student. “At the same time, this is not an approval of the way things currently are and we expect them to make changes.”
The GSC also deferred a decision on the Joint Resolution on Protecting the Stanford Community and Environment from Natural Gas, co-authored by 2024-25 UGS Treasurer Jadon Urogdy ’27 and members of Students for a Sustainable Stanford (SSS). The bill proposes a number of measures to reduce natural gas use on Stanford’s campus, such as ceasing construction of “natural gas infrastructure” on campus, replacing broken appliances with electric ones and phasing out natural gas appliances in University buildings.
The GSC voted not to pass the bill when it was first brought to the council this May, requesting that representatives of Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) review SSS’s requests before the bill was subjected to a vote by the UGS and GSC. In Thursday’s meeting, the GSC agreed to defer a vote on the bill until its authors edit it in accordance with R&DE’s feedback.
“R&DE came to the meeting [in May], and they gave us the impression that this was the first time they were seeing these demands,” said Áron Ricardo Perez-Lopez, a fourth-year computer science Ph.D. student. “I, as a GSC officer, would expect the authors of the bill to try to consult R&DE first.”
The GSC also moved to postpone its vote on the Joint Bill to Dissolve the Club Sports Funding Umbrella and Require Direct Team-Level Grant Applications for Transparency and Compliance. If passed, the bill would require club sports to submit grants directly to the UGS and GSC, rather than to the Club Sports Council.
“A lot of changes that club sports has been making to how funding is allocated is not consistent with the ASSU constitution,” said GSC Chair Rory O’Dwyer, a sixth-year physics Ph.D. student. “They’re moving significant sums of money around, inconsistent with how they should be allocated.”