To the Editor:

I was pleased to read of your support for GESO’s agenda in these pages on Friday (“For GESO, the medium distorts the message,” 2/4). The issues that GESO has been committed to over the last few years — diversity, child care for graduate student parents, a more equitable relationship with New Haven and support and training for graduate teachers — are ones that are deeply important to me as an undergraduate. And at a time when, as Friday’s editorial so accurately pointed out, “graduate student life has plenty of room for improvement,” it is critical that we have groups like GESO holding Yale accountable to the ideals it publicly espouses — ideals like diversity, quality of teaching and equality of experience. Indeed, I would argue that a university whose tenured faculty includes only one black woman and that fails to support the graduate students who do much of the teaching here, has lots of “room for improvement.” And isn’t that really the point? This is not about Yale being a bad place, but about the fact that, with the right priorities and a real commitment to change, it can be a much better one.

Tasha Eccles ’07

Feb. 7, 2005