Dear President Skorton,

I would like to communicate to you GPSA Resolution 7: Call for an engaged and transparent conversation with the larger body of graduate and professional students.

The common complaint from graduate students this year has been the lack of transparency in the process whenever a new policy is revealed which negatively affects student life here at Cornell. Having worked closely with the administration on a number of issues, I can say that there is more transparency than many students realize. However, this transparency only extends to a small subset of student leaders. We feel there is much to be gained from extending this to a larger subset of the GPSA. We have detailed a new procedure in the resolution to try and achieve this, where we would convene a closed, confidential meeting of the GPSA in executive session to discuss potential new policy changes. I can not emphasize enough that we want these meetings to occur with enough time for a new policy to be substantially revisited if compelling reasons to do so are presented by the assembly. To do our part in fixing issues of perception and continuity, we will be writing formal memoranda to be presented to the administration detailing the position of graduate students on these new policies, and in addition these memoranda will list the names of students who were consulted. These memoranda will be made public once the new policy is enacted, and serve as a record of the level of transparency in the process.

I look forward to working with members of the administration on exploring this new procedure.

Best, Richard Walroth — Graduate Student Lancaster Lab Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Cornell University