Graduate students gathered outside the Events Center on Friday morning to protest a meeting held by administrators that was not open to students.

The Graduate Students Employee Union (GSEU) and the Graduate Student Organization (GSO) organized the protest outside of the building, while Provost Donald Nieman, the directors of graduate studies and department chairs discussed the stipend proposal. The announced stipend changes would increase incoming graduate students’ stipends, while current students would maintain the same salary.

According to Toivo Asheeke, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate studying sociology, the meeting was held for the administrators to discuss the recent protests for unequal stipend increases for graduate assistants (GAs) and teaching assistants (TAs), and the administration wanted this meeting to be held without the graduate students.

“Honestly we’re upset because we weren’t even told about this,” Asheeke said. “We believe that if there is a meeting about GA and TA issues, we need to have some representation there.”

According to Asheeke, rumors about the meeting swirled amongst the graduate students early last week until professor Dennis O’Hearn, chair of the sociology department, confirmed the gathering.

The administration allowed one GSEU and one GSO member to attend the meeting once word spread. The students picked the representatives they sent to the meeting, and each was given five minutes to speak.

Sarah Marcus, the GSO representative at the meeting and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate studying biology, said that the GSO has done their own calculations, and determined that splitting the stipends equally would provide a significant raise to GAs and TAs.

“My plan is to remind the chairs and the administration that this is going to negatively affect recruitment,” she said. “Poor morale is not going to bring in the good students they’re looking for.”

She said that there were no responses to her statements, but she hopes that the administration was receptive.

Shehryar Qazi, a representative at Friday’s meeting for the GSEU and a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate studying sociology, said she has never seen the union as mobilized previously.

“It’s coming to a point in time when we need to start taking publicity measures to let the world know, and undergraduates coming in, how this University treats its GAs and TAs,” he said.

While the graduate students cannot strike, they can use union defense funding to generate negative publicity for the University by going to schools and speaking badly about Binghamton University’s administration.

“One you get bad publicity, you can’t take it back,” Qazi said.

According to Qazi, New York state pays the base stipend for GAs and TAs, and the rest is paid by the University. The graduate students have been told by the state to talk to the University about raises, and the University has told them to talk to the state, so progress has been stifled.

According to Asheeke, Friday’s protest was also held in response to the broader lack of transparency and democracy at BU.

“At the same time, its also not just about us right now, in the present tense,” he said. “We’re seeing decisions being made on this campus, on a lot of different issues — sexual assault issues, Title IX violations, some of the Students For Change issues — you see a lot of decisions being made closed door, undemocratically,” he said. “… We want to govern ourselves with the administration.”