Last week, the Illinois Student Senate, or ISS, received complaints from its Graduate and Professional Affairs Committee for not considering the graduate student voice when deciding to implement a $1 fee per student to fund the ISS.

At the meeting Wednesday night, the ISS considered funding a graduate student mixer. Many ISS members who supported funding the mixer considered the event a friendly gesture towards the graduate student population.

Rosa Rosas, the only graduate student representative present at the meeting, expressed her concern about graduate students’ opinions of the ISS.

“I don’t want to say we look bad (to the graduate student community), but we have to represent them well,” she said.

Sponsor of the resolution, study body President David Pileski, encouraged support for the event. He explained that due to a snafu in planning, ISS had not been in contact with the organizers of the event.

“It was getting to the point where we (ISS) looked bad because we weren’t responding,” Pileski said.

Like Rosas, Pileski feels that ISS should sponsor the mixer to improve ISS’s reputation with the graduate student population.

Opposition to funding the mixer also involved concerns about reputation, but focused on ISS’s reputation among the general student body. Jackson Garvey, internal vice president of ISS, warned the senate not “to become an organization that just gives out money.”

The ISS has yet to decide if it will fund the mixer or not.