Graduate Student Center Moves Ahead

Officials say Bynum Hall is a strong candidate for the long-term location.

Associate Provost Steve Allred said the Graduate School has been working with the Graduate Education Advancement Board to formulate a plan for where the student center will be located. The GEAB is the fund-raising arm of the Graduate School and is made up of about 30 donors who fund programs for the school.

Branson Page, Graduate and Professional Student Federation president, said, "(The GEAB has) been instrumental in making this happen. One of their top priorities was to establish a graduate student center," he said.

University officials said that they are leaning toward permanently placing the center in Bynum Hall but that other buildings remain possibilities.

Linda Dykstra, dean of the Graduate School, said that in either 2005 or 2006, the cashier's office for graduate students, located on the first floor of Bynum, will be vacated, leaving a possible space for the student center.

The hall would be ideal because the Graduate School office is there now and because it is also a central location on the main part of campus, she said.

Dykstra said there have been several considerations for a temporary graduate student center during the interim period.

Ideas include a place in the new Student Union or in West House, former home for the Institute of Arts and Humanities, but that would be an expensive proposition, Dykstra said.

Although options are being examined, there is no concrete timeline for establishing a temporary graduate center, she said.

Allred said there is both a social and an academic reason for a graduate student center. He said there is a need for a place where graduate students can convene.

"We are interested in having students from different disciplines coming to a central location," Allred said. "It would also make UNC look more attractive to graduate students."

David McNelis, a GEAB committee member, said that the graduate student center would be a home for the Society of Fellows but that it also would be open to all graduate students. "Graduate students don't have a regular place to meet where they can share their experiences with other students," he said.

When graduate students go out into the real world, they will be interacting with people from different disciplines, and the graduate center would be a place where students can do just that while they are at UNC, McNelis said.

Dykstra said the center ideally would be a place for seminars, symposiums and fellowship for graduate students.

"Graduate students would like a place to call their own," she said. "The student center would support mechanisms which bring people from different disciplines together."

The University Editor can be reached at udesk@unc.edu.