The Graduate and Professional Student Government executive committee is poised to address sustainability and sexual assault this school year.
“(Sustainability) is going to be at the forefront of what I want to do, from the committees I want to sit on around campus to the people I want to meet and the people I want to work with,” GPSG President Benjamin Verdi said.
Last December, Brady Harman, former GPSG president, and Andrew Bredeson, former GPSG sustainability officer, met with Gary Stratten, IU Foundation vice president and chief investment officer; Dan Smith, IU Foundation president; Gary Anderson, IU Foundation investment committee chair; and the IU Foundation investment committee to urge the IU Foundation to divest from the top 200 fossil fuel companies.
The IU Foundation, however, said its members base their investment decisions on a variety of considerations and do not use their investment decisions to make symbolic statements.
“I don’t really think that, frankly, the student leaders that brought it forward really thought it through, because I don’t think there were enough financial and economic arguments made for why divestment is a good idea, and that’s exactly the arguments the IU Foundation want to hear,” Verdi said.
Verdi said he plans to explore the idea of setting up a parallel fund and then divesting, rather than divesting immediately. He said the idea is to talk to donors who would donate if they knew their money was going toward sustainable projects and see if this new portfolio makes as much money as the original portfolio.
“And so I’d like to spend as much of my energy as I can back at the table with the people that Brady Harman and Andrew Bredeson met with and sit on the same side of the table as them this time,” Verdi said.
He said he also hopes to explore the idea of setting up a student conference, either IU-wide or Big Ten-wide, dedicated to sharing the best sustainability practices.
Verdi said he also plans to address sexual assault.
In April, GPSG representatives passed a resolution calling for changes in the rape alert emails sent by the IU Police Department.
The resolution called for the removal of the phrase “rape by force,” as representatives said the phrase suggested there are different kinds — even different levels — of rape, as well as the replacement of the safety tips with gender-neutral bystander intervention tips.
“However, they didn’t really change it in the way that we wanted,” Verdi said, adding that he plans to press for further changes.
In addition to sustainability and sexual assault, he said he hoped to create new career-oriented programs.
“I want us to focus a little more on the realities of what it means to be a graduate student here,” Verdi said.
Although he said he wanted the new career-oriented programs to target all graduate students, he particularly wants them to target international students.
“I don’t want there to be people who are here, who are graduate students, who could be served by us in some way, that maybe previously we’ve talked about, but haven’t explored,” Verdi said. “It’s an inclusive space, that’s the number one thing I want people to know ... You’re going to be totally represented by everything that we do.”
