Five Ways to Make GISA Better

By Rami Mottu, Former VP of Master’s, GISA

Over the past couple of years, the Graduate Institute Student Association (GISA) has undergone an important transformation. The last two boards have worked to put GISA back at the forefront of student life at IHEID. GISA is now an organization focused on advocacy, which has obtained significant results, and on student life, organising many successful events. At the same time, GISA faces unprecedented scrutiny and criticism from both the student body and the Direction of The Institute. GISA, fundamentally, does not have the infrastructure and power to fully meet the demands of its members, namely the student body. 

As a result, I would here like to outline five structural changes within GISA which I feel would significantly improve its ability to operate at the full capacity that is required of it. These proposals are big picture; they cannot simply be changed by an amendment to the Statutes and Bylaws. They also cannot be changed by an increase in the workload or a change in focus of one or two board members. These are far more fundamental and all of them would require Direction approval, but I feel it necessary to highlight them here as something to aspire towards.

But first, who am I to make these suggestions? I was elected GISA Vice-President of Master’s Programmes in May 2024, serving for one year on the GISA Board. I was also highly involved in student politics at my previous university. Notably, I served as Chair (similar to the GISA Administrative Director) of King’s College Student Union, the student union of King’s College, one of the colleges of Cambridge University. Many of these reflections come from comparing these two student associations. I have also had the opportunity to talk about GISA and the ways we can improve it with three generations of board members and a wide array of students. 

I also want to emphasize that this article is in absolutely no way a critique of any individual past or present GISA Board Members, or of any particular Board. There are of course many ways that GISA Board Members could have done things differently. I myself am deeply conscious of my own mistakes and underachievements. But even if GISA was operating fully as it is supposed to currently, the issues I outline here would remain. 

With all of that out of the way, let us get into the proposals. 

1. Housing Committee

I will start with what is probably the best known of these proposals, as two successive boards have tried and failed to create this committee. 

The idea of a Housing Committee is to create a branch of GISA dedicated to representing and advocating on behalf of student tenants. Specifically, this committee would be composed of Housing Representatives, similar to the Class Representatives, to support and represent the residents of Grand Morillon, Picciotto, UNIGE residences, and private housing. While being a part of GISA, this committee would represent all residents of IHEID residences, not just IHEID students, though it would of course only represent IHEID students living anywhere else. The committee would also include students with firm understanding of Swiss law. 

The committee would have several roles. (1) Fostering community in residences: the committee would be responsible for organizing social events in housing, in order to get students on similar floors, from similar backgrounds, and with similar interests to meet and socialize. They would work with initiatives in the implementation of these. (2) Supporting students with housing problems: The committee can advise and provide resources to help students find housing. It can also assist students when they have problems with the Housing Administration. (3) Advocate on behalf of students with the Housing Administration: The committee would be charged with speaking to Housing about policies or practices that are a problem for students. Just like other GISA positions, they would advocate for changes to rules in a way that prioritizes students. 

Anyone who has lived in IHEID housing can begin to see how this committee could be a good thing. It gives students clear points of contact to help them with housing issues. It can try to counteract the coldness of some student residences, particularly GM. It also frees up GISA Board Members like the President and Events Coordinator to focus on other things and provides people who can devote their full attention to housing issues. 

So far, the Direction has refused to allow the creation of the Housing Committee. More accurately, they approve of it in theory but refuse to free up the funds to give its president a tuition waiver. This is a problem because the GISA Statutes stipulate that in order to be a member of the GISA Board, you must receive a tuition waiver, so this Housing Committee would not have those powers. Creating this role without the tuition waiver also means that despite being the same workload, it will be significantly less appealing for applicants than other board positions. 

2. Decolonial Committee

Just as housing issues have not been fully addressed by GISA because there is no clear single person/entity charged with the role, so too have the issues which I am choosing here to call ‘decolonial.’ Under this umbrella, I include topics relating to decolonizing the curriculum, queerness, intersectionality, racism/discrimination, sexism and misogyny, ableism, eurocentrism, and more. 

So far, advocacy and action on these topics has been dispersed through various board positions and initiatives, but I would propose the creation of a Decolonial Committee, which could devote itself entirely to this advocacy at The Institute. The committee would be composed of various passionate students who could be split into different teams based on their interests. It would work closely with initiatives like MENA, QISA, FemCol, LANI, ASA, SIA, and CEAS, but can take the lead on action with The Institute. It would have a similar relationship with the DEI Initiative to that of the Environmental Committee and the Sustainability Initiative. For reference, the DEI and Sustainability Initiatives are Institute-run initiatives composed of faculty and staff members dedicated to address issues related to their respective mandates at the institute. The Sustainability Initiative works closely with the Environmental Committee on a variety of subjects, including advocacy and Sustainability Week. 

This new Decolonial Committee could also take the lead on matters which this year were addressed in working groups like the Providers Working Group and the Misconduct Working Group, as well as key advocacy points like accessibility and Decolonizing/Queering the Curriculum. It was agreed at the last Master’s Forum that a Decolonize the Curriculum Working Group would be created, and I would instead suggest the integration of such a group and mandate into this committee. 

In addition to freeing up time for other Board Members to focus on other issues, the Decolonial Committee would make sure there is a coordinated, long term effort and plan for change at IHEID on all these issues. It would also ensure that any issues raised within its purview can be handled quickly and directly with the relevant administrators rather than requiring a large campaign, which can cause administrators to feel attacked and respond less productively. 

The creation of this committee would probably face the same issues as the Housing Committee in terms of resistance and control by The Institute through money, but there is also the possibility of creating this already as an initiative or a working group led by a member of the GISA Board. For full disclosure, I had the idea of doing this myself while in office, but time got ahead of me, reemphasizing my point about the need for a dedicated person for these issues. 

GISA Board 2024-25

3. Picciotto Common Room

Veering from the committee proposals, I would next suggest that GISA needs a space that it fully controls. At Cambridge, all student unions have Common Rooms, a space under their jurisdiction where they could organize meetings and events free of the authority of administrators, so long as these abided by the Code of Conduct and building rules.

The Picciotto Common Room seems the ideal location. It already, at least nominally, includes a GISA Office and stores supplies for initiatives. It is the most popular place to host parties or aperos. It is already called a Common Room. 

Currently the room is managed by the Housing Administration. All bookings go through the GISA Events Coordinator to Housing for approval, and these gatherings are often charged fines for seemingly arbitrary reasons and without any verification or due diligence. 

GISA could sign a contract with Housing, committing to certain rules about the use and maintenance of the space, with an agreement that it will be regularly cleaned by housing (as it is now), and can be cleaned additionally for a fee (like now). The difference here would be that the Events Coordinator can approve and reject events directly and organize the room’s usage themselves and that GISA would be the ones to request additional cleaning of the space, rather than charged as a fait accompli. 

In order for this system to work, GISA would also need to come up with incentive structures and enforcement mechanisms to make sure that its rules around the space are respected. Currently, there are recurring issues of students using the space and leaving it in poor condition, especially when they do not book it ahead of time. If GISA has to be covering the expenses of cleaning the room or is placing the blame on initiatives that happened to host events on the days where these instances occur, then there is quickly a problem. At the same time, GISA should not restrict the common room to only booked events, as this quickly defeats the purpose of a common room. 

There are issues with PCR. It does not have the infrastructure for hybrid meetings. It is stuffy. There is very limited control over the lights. Currently only Picciotto Residents can consistently access it. No one knows how to connect to the speakers. That being said, to have a space of GISA’s own, where students are free to organize the events as they want and control the layout would open so many opportunities for GISA.

One such opportunity could be the implementation of a GISA Bar, every Friday, for a few hours in PCR. This bar would play music and serve drinks at student prices, allowing GISA to obtain additional funds for its activities and creating a regular social gathering for students. 

4. Executive Master’s Integration

There are, I believe, around 50 students at IHEID who are in one year MA programmes, such as the LL.M. in International Law or the MAS in Sustainable Finance and Development. These students, despite attending The Institute for a whole year, are not members of GISA, because they fall under Executive Education. They do not have any class representatives, any dedicated budget, and none of their (extremely high) tuition goes towards GISA, so they do not have membership. 

As a result, these students often feel sidelined, as they do not have their own events or activities and they cannot be part of GISA. While they can still attend events and participate, they cannot formally be members. Furthermore, their participation means that they are taking away from budgets that have not been designed to include them and to which their tuition is not contributing. 

For years, GISA has requested that they be integrated into the association, have their own class representatives, and contribute to the budget. While the Direction has never been explicitly opposed to this proposal, in fact even expressing support at the end of last year, there has always been pushback by the International Law Department, which handles the LL.M., and the Executive Education branch. While different reasons have been cited, the most likely reason is simply that they do not want to give GISA the 15 CHF per student they would be required to. Unlike other Executive Education programmes which are much shorter, these one year Master’s students are normal full-time students in all but name. 

The integration of these students would increase GISA’s budget to match the demand and amount of students it services, allow for new class representatives, and give the GISA Board, and probably the Vice-President of Master’s specifically, the authority to advocate on their behalf on a variety of issues. There is an argument to be made that there should be a separate Vice-President of Executive Education, but I have already advocated for enough new board members here.

5. Funding

It is no secret that GISA has a funding problem. With the number of students growing and an increase in the ambitions of an expanding roster of initiatives, GISA’s funds are being stretched thin. As a result, it is essential that GISA find new ways of obtaining funding.

Most other student associations have outside sponsors for events, such as a Dominoes’ Initiative Fair (a bad example as GISA is BDS compliant). Many within the current and previous board have already talked about and attempted to create similar partnerships with outside organizations. There were attempts at financial partnerships with a few companies, the most successful one being LCF, but these have tended to fall through for one reason or another. 

Expanding the number of these partnerships would be an effective way of making money. In order to find these partnerships, however, GISA needs to market itself better to these sponsors, by highlighting its size and its methods of communication and by targeting organizations that would have a real chance of benefitting from working with GISA, such as nearby businesses or services that students would find useful. GISA also needs to make sure that it follows through on the promises it makes to these organizations. All of this being said, I would be reluctant to look for too many sponsors, as this might cause conflicts of interest or dilute GISA’s services to students if they are too busy focusing on meeting the demands of partners. 

Other sources of funding can include the GISA Bar discussed earlier and The Institute’s proposal that GISA run the IHEID Merch Store. For reference, this proposal stipulated that GISA would take over The Institute’s struggling merch store and run and expand it, in exchange for a percentage of the profits. Currently, this proposal is in early stages of implementation but the percentage in question is far too low given the work that would be required to manage the store and the fact that The Institute should be responsible for it. The merch store would also permit GISA to sell its own merch, and might even facilitate initiatives doing the same. 

There are also issues with the current way that money is being redistributed. As a rule, GISA receives 15 CHF per student. This money goes towards funding initiatives. Separately, GISA receives money for Class Representatives. This is equal to 10 CHF per student for MADIS and PhD students and a lump sum of 1800 CHF per cohort of the MINT Programme, to be redistributed equally. In practice, this means that MINT Class Representatives receive around 7 CHF per student, compared to MADIS’s 10. This distinction becomes worse the more MINT students are admitted, as this lump sum does not increase. Furthermore these budgets are often not used in their entirety and the remains usually go towards the Grad Party or are spent on unnecessary events that Class Representatives organize just to use the money. 

If there was a lump sum, based on the number of students, distributed to all Class Representatives equally, this would be an improvement. If the amount of money Class Representatives received was around 8 CHF per student, that would also free up more money to go to initiatives, which benefit all students and are better able to provide services or social activities to students. This number, I feel, would still allow the Class Representatives to engage in their own activities without money that could be used elsewhere languishing earmarked in the GISA Budget. 

More fundamentally, however, as GISA’s role and work expand, and in particular as The Institute begins to expect more and more from GISA and Initiatives and delegates more tasks to GISA, not to mention rising inflation, it is essential for The Institute to free up more funds for its students and increase GISA’s budget. 

The Statutes outline GISA’s mission as being “1. Represent students in front of the various bodies in and out of the Institute. 2. Promote friendly relations between the students and the Institute. 3. Support the organisation of events […]. 4. Support the activities organised by the different autonomous student initiatives […]. 5. Publicly endorse Civil Society Movements and Campaigns, if requested and approved by the Members […]” (GISA Statutes, Article I, Section 2). As the world and The Institute face a multitude of challenges in the coming years, it is essential that GISA function at its full potential in order to fulfill that mission. This is not an exhaustive list, but I firmly believe that implementing these changes over time, or at least aiming to approach them, is essential to the continuing abidance by that mission and should be the goal of this and all GISA Boards.