petition

To the Office of the President at Sabanci University,

As SU graduate students and scholarship receipients, we have been informed of new regulations regarding the scholarships through an e-mail sent by Ayşe Ötenoğlu dated April 4, 2012 and titled “Graduate Funding.” As the signatories to this petition, we would like to express our concerns about the new regulation and ask for a meeting with Prof. Dr. Nihat Berker, the President of Sabanci University.

Our concerns regarding the new regulation are as follows:

1) The new regulation brings two changes to the existing system. First, the monthly stipend for PhD scholarship holders is extended to cover a 12-month period. Second, whereas previously scholarship holders not living in university housing were offered a transportation fee of 500 TL, added to their stipend in cash, under the new regulation the fee will be given as travel credits that can only be used through student ID cards. As a result, the new fee will only cover transportation costs incurred to Gürsel service shuttles running between the Sabancı University Campus and İstanbul and it will be limited to weekdays and twice a day only.

2)      We appreciate the university's decision to extend monthly stipends to 12 months, based on the recognition that this is the standard practice in scholarship providing universities, both in Turkey and abroad, and that PhD students are expected to work on their own research and/or engage in systematic readings that further familiarize them with their fields during the summer months.

3)       However, we regard the changes made to the scholarship (salary) payments of both MA and Ph.D students, with the new transport fee implementation, as a deduction from our payments. Both tuition fee waivers and monthly stipends are offered in exchange for research or teaching assistant assignments. As such, they are not provided as “benefaction” to graduate students, but they are payments made to graduate students, who have been previously evaluated as meeting certain criteria, in exchange for their work as assistants.

4)      The payment of 500 TL made to scholarship holders who live off-campus used to be added to the monthly stipend as a cash payment. Any changes to this payment will mean overturning an already existing right of the graduate students, who have been admitted to the program based on these conditions.

5)      Furthermore, referring to this dedicated amount as “transportation support” overlooks the fact that students who donot or cannot live on campus for multiple reasons have to pay rents for their accommodation outside of the university.

6)      In addition, offering transportation support solely as credits in student cards means that Gursel shuttles are the only feasible option of transportation. However, there are students who wish to arrive at the university by means of public transportation or their private cars. Even in the case of transportation by Gursel shuttles, an extra amount of money has to be spent in order to reach the pick-up and drop-off locations of the shuttles as students travel to and from their homes. This new implementation completely ignores both means of transportation other than Gursel and the non-shuttle transportation costs of the students who use Gursel shuttles.

7)      We believe that as things stand, the situation is already unfair for the TAs, who contribute significantly to the educational activities of the school through assistantships and projects, but cannot use the personnel shuttles. The new transportation regulation will only bring an additional burden for us.

8)      The fact that the non-transportation part of the scholarship has been extended to 12 months but kept at the same amount for the next year shows that there will be no inflationary increase regarding the scholarships. As a result the real amount of the reduction in the scholarship is in fact greater.

Our Proposals and Demands:

9)       Considering other practices both in Turkey and abroad, we expect that scholarships be extended to 12 months without any cuts under the name of “transportation charge”.

10)   We request that the scholarships given to both masters and Phd students working at Sabanci University be increased in proportion to the rise in tuition fees of graduate programs.

11)  We request that Sabanci University adopt the practices of other private universities in Turkey as its standards. As a standard of good practice, one can name among others Koç University, which provides its students free meal cards to be used at lunch, year-round scholarships, and additional cash support for students who do not reside in the dormitories.

12)  With these concerns and considerations, we – graduate student representatives from different faculties – would like to request a meeting with our Rector Prof. Dr. A. Nihat Berker.

Respectfully,