The Graduate Student Council (GSC) passed a bill written jointly with the Undergraduate Senate (UGS) calling on the University to support the decline of charges against student journalist Dilan Gohill ’27 at its Monday meeting.
Gohill was detained in June alongside 12 student protestors for his presence at a pro-Palestinian student group’s occupation of the president’s office. Gohill was reporting on the incident for The Daily. The joint bill is subject to change pending a UGS vote on the resolution this Wednesday.
The bill requests that the University urge the Santa Clara County District Attorney to decline to file charges against Gohill, which include felony burglary, vandalism and conspiracy. The bill also urges the University reconsider its referral of Gohill to the Office of Community Standards (OCS) and support the dismissal of all charges by the OCS.
The bill states that Gohill “may have crossed legal lines without any criminal intent” and that The Daily may have been unprepared to “train its student journalists adequately” to report on campus tensions over the last year.
Councilors said The Daily may not have properly equipped Gohill to cover the protest. The bill claimed Gohill had “a lack of clear guidance from his leadership at the Stanford Daily.” The councilors also acknowledged that The Daily is staffed by student journalists.
“Yes, the Daily editors were at fault for this, but at the end of the day, they are still students themselves too,” UGS co-chair Gordon Allen ’26 said at the meeting. “This is still a new circumstance for everyone.”
The councilors passed the bill near unanimously, 13-0-1, after approving slight amendments to some of the bill’s language.
The GSC also deliberated a draft bill about funding guarantees for graduate students. Under the bill, Stanford would officially enact a five-year, year-round funding guarantee for Ph.D. students.
The University has chosen not to include the guarantee in a collective bargaining agreement with the Stanford Graduate Workers Union (SGWU). The draft bill encourages the University to transparently define the guaranteed funding by accepting a side letter proposed by SGWU in late September.
Councilors expressed concerns about whether the current funding guarantee is transparently applied. GSC co-chair and fifth-year chemistry Ph.D. student Emmit Pert said that Ph.D. students often leave programs because of funding issues after dissonance between them and their Principal Investigators.
“I think most of the time people are leaving because they’ve functionally been fired, whether or not that’s what happened on paper,” Pert said.
The GSC plans to vote on the graduate student funding bill at its meeting next Monday, pending final approval of details.
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated that the bill called on the University to support the dismissal of official charges, not the declining to file suspected charges, against Gohill. The Daily regrets this error.