Harrison leads GPSS

When Julia Harrison went to her first meeting of the UW Board of Regents, she was surprised to find a free lunch waiting for her.

"Giving an art student a free lunch is like petting or scratching a dog -- you have a friend for life," she said to the regents during their July meeting.

As president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS), Harrison knows there's a good chance she and the regents might not deal with every issue in such a friendly manner.

"I'm sure that there will be occasions when we will disagree on things, and I certainly will not hesitate to point this out," she said. "I think in this beginning period that it's just important to kind of get to know people first before you start arguing with them."

If and when the arguing starts, Harrison will likely have ASUW President Brittany Goodnight on her side. Harrison said the relationship between the GPSS and the ASUW is important, and both leaders will seldom be on opposing sides.

"I am really confident we'll have a great year together," Goodnight said. "Based on dialogues we've already had, it will be an effective year."

Harrison, a relative newcomer to the UW, is in her second year here, pursuing her master's of fine arts. She has studied around the world, receiving education in conservation science, anthropology and, currently, sculpture. She stumbled into student government last year as a way to meet people outside of the art school, and is now the voice for the graduate-student body.

Harrison is the first art student to win the presidency.

"I'm certainly a novelty," she said. "A lot of people have not met an art student or have never heard of an art student be in any sort of leadership role. People expect if you're in public policy or law or something, that this would be something you would be interested in. I think because of that, people are a little bit curious -- they're not quite sure what my stance on things will be."

Her positions on high-profile issues do not differ much from her predecessor David Nixon's, nor from those of many graduate students -- tuition is increasing faster than students can react to the increases.

"I understand that there are a lot of people who want to see tuition raised to a level that is comparable to our peer institutions," she said. "I think that some of the jumps are just too high, and at one go it's just too much to expect of students."

The regents have had unlimited authority to raise tuition for graduate students since 2002 and have increased rates for many programs by more than 10 percent with that authority. The regents said the rates are comparable to the UW's peer institutions.

As a former international student, Harrison also wants to bring more attention to homeland-security measures she says are making it more difficult for international students to study in the United States.

Not all of Harrison's top issues are ones that make headlines. She also wants to extinguish the stereotype that graduate school is an unnecessary opportunity available only for a select few.

"I've heard several times, both implicitly and explicitly, people saying that graduate education is kind of a luxury -- it's not, strictly speaking, necessary to go on and get that extra degree," she said. "I disagree firmly with that, and I think the more we can see of graduate students and the more we see what they do, both at this University and more widely in their field, then it'll just be sort of a natural argument against that idea of [graduate] education being a luxury."

In order to put graduate research on display, Harrison wants to have a brown-bag-lunch lecture series featuring graduate students, with information related to a different theme each week.

She said it is an effort to give people experience with presenting research outside their own field and to encourage more interdisciplinary thinking. An example of one week's theme could be reproduction with students studying intellectual-property rights, mold and gynecology presenting their research, she said.

As for interests outside graduate school, Harrison is interested in Japanese culture.

"I am a huge 'Japanophile,'" she said.

She lived in Japan for a year and took an art-history course on Chanoyu, the Japanese art of tea-serving, in winter quarter. She learned about the ceremony firsthand at a branch of the Urasenke, an international tea school, in Madison Park. For her final exam, she had to perform a traditional role.

"It's about opening up your senses to what's going on around you and to subtleties," she said.

Harrison also volunteers at the Japanese tea garden in the Washington Parks Arboretum and the Asian Art Museum, but she thinks she might be too busy to continue while she is in office.