PhD General Assembly

Meeting STIP-HF

Time: 28 January, 11:00–12:00

Place: HF bygget

Members of the STIP-HF board present:         

Christina Videbech (Secretary)
Dinara Podgornova
Are Bøe Pedersen

Agenda:

1. Introduction of STIP-HF to potentially new members

Christina shortly introduced Stip-hf and the projects, they have been involved in during 2019.

Concerns were raised by some prospective board members that they didn’t know much about Stip-HF and their activities, due to a lack of communication with PhDs outside of the board itself. This is not an unreasonable criticism, as much of the current board is both in the second half of their PhD work and has been relatively preoccupied with the duty work guideline revisions and organizing the PhD meeting.

Kimberly (FFU, work group for duty work) informed the new board about the various organs in contact with Stip-HF, and offered some suggestions as to which activities they could engage in, and briefly described the objectives and process of the Duty work guideline revisions.

The newly elected  and re-elected board members will meet at a later time with Wassim and Christina to ensure some overlap of knowledge and practical information, while at the same time deciding who should be the new leader and secretary. It is will be left in their hands whether or not to continue using Microsoft Teams for internal communication or not. Christina will train the new secretary in how to operate the Stip-HF webpage.

2. Election/confirmation of new board

Confimed. No vote was necessary due to the number of candidates.

Results:
Stepping down:
Christina (AHKR)
Wassim (IF)
Are (LLE)

Re-elected:
Dinara (SKOK)
Mikkel  (LLE)

New:
Runa Falck (IF)
Emily Maddox (SKOK)

The board will meet on Feb 7 and decide who is to be chair and secretary.

3. Miscellaneous

It was decided that Mikkel, Dinara, and Emily will attend the lunch with the dean regarding future phd seminars on feb 5.

Mikkel inquired about the implementation of the HF PhD programme guidelines and the by now infamous «minor revisions» rule, in particular the wording that permits it, but at the same time implores the committee not to make use of it. Our stance here remains the same as before, that this is a bizarre implementation of the rule that disadvantages PhDs at UiB, and – more recently – that the process by which these guidelines were approved was decidedly messy and not very in tune with the notion of democratic university politics. It was never actually voted on by the Faculty Board, while FFU – being an advisory organ – was not allowed to vote for it either, yet it seems to have somehow passed.  We strongly suggest Stip-HF pursue this, and aim to have the guidelines properly voted on by the Faculty board. We suspect the position of the Vice Dean (who argued for the current implementation) is not a majority view.