1 20 2011

VOICE the georgetown

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GENDER STUDIES MIFFED AT ATHLETIC PRIORITY PAGE 4

IT’S A SITUATION: STREAKING IN JERSEY PAGE 7

SAY YES TO HOUSE OF YES PAGE 10

Georgetown University’s Weekly Newsmagazine Since 1969 w January 20, 2011 w Volume 44, Issue 2 w georgetownvoice.com

Business in a new direction

2 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

Vox.

Populi.

Blog it.

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comments of the week “This class actually was supposed to start with a 10 minute rant about hipsters that I built into the syllabus.”

— MIKE, “TWUESDAY TWEETACULAR: BEGINNING OF THE SEMESTER WOES”

“‘HE IS IRREPLACEABLE. WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO EN-

SURE THAT THE FUNCTIONS HE HAS PROVIDED CAN BE MOST APPROPRIATELY ADDRESSED...WE WILL NOT DO A SEARCH TO REPLACE [DR. PORTERFIELD].’

TRANSLATION: HAVE YOU SEEN PORTERFIELD’S SALARY? DAMN RIGHT, WE’RE NOT GOING TO REPLACE HIM. MONEY IN THE BANK.” — HOYA, “PRESIDENT DEGIOIA HOLDS Q&A FOR CAMPUS MEDIA”

“Glad to hear she’s going to be ok, but MAN, C/O 2014, you sure are representing this year.”

-PROUD BURLEITHER, “GEORGETOWN FRESHMAN FALLS FROM VILLAGE C WINDOW”

“ I am disappoint.”

— JOHN THOMPSON JR., “POST GAME ROUNDUP: HOYAS SLIDE CONTINUES AGAINST PITT”

back--

and better than ever.

Voice Crossword “Moving in Parts” by Scott Fligor

ACROSS 1. Skateboarding trick 6. Make ___ of (jot down) 11. Hair product

14. Actress Witherspoon 15. Last ___ 16. “Norma ___” 17. 1964 Act 19. When you’ll get there

Talk Back

blog.georgetownvoice.com || georgetownvoice.com

answers at georgetownvoice.com 20. “___ stands” 21. Theatre assistant 22. Financial aid requirement 23. Essential 25. “Disturbia” singer 27. Put in a scrapbook 31. Beer, in slang 32. Hussein’s protective detail 33. 2Pac’s “___ Up” 35. Fast Jazz 38. Eastern princess 40. Soccer shoe 42. “Gladiator” setting 43. Feather, to Catullus 45. Act introducer 47. 18-wheeler 48. Loss’s opposite 50. Kid’s baseball fields?

52. Cleveland Cavaliers’ mascot 55. Used to determine genealogy 56. “By the power vested ___ …”

57. QB Favre 59. Where the Met’s once played 63. “The House That Fire Built” band 64. 1968 Act 66. Norse healer 67. Worshipper of Vishnu 68. Model Evangelista

69. Lacking moisture 70. Longer in the tooth 71. MMA Heavyweight Champ DOWN 1. Shamu 2. Hawaiian rings 3. ___ Strauss 4. Intrinsic question 5. Moray, for one 6. Plato’s student 7. Near 8. Alternative 9. Arcade classic 10. Comes before “tee” 11. Sit-in locale 12. Consumed 13. “You can ___ horse to water…”

18. Rural

22. Green candidate 24. New England state sch.

27. Manufacturer’s suggestion 28. Actor Morales 29. Bus boycott locale 30. Looks to be 34. WWII General 36. Leave out 37. Places for jackets 39. Useless 41. Take care of 44. Help 46. Engineering magazine 49. Judge’s ruling (if a flight risk) 52. Imitated 53. Broadcasting 54. Wear down, by friction 60. Back 61. Within: Prefix 62. Food thickener 64. British medical intern

ARE YOU A LOGOPHILE? Share your love of words and help us write crosswords.

E-mail crossword@georgetownvoice.com.

editorial

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VOICE the georgetown

Volume 44.2 January 20, 2011 Editor-in-Chief: Molly Redden Managing Editor: Tim Shine Editor-at-Large: Juliana Brint Director of Technology: Ishita Kohli News Blog Editor: Geoffrey Bible Leisure Blog Editor: Nico Dodd News Editor: Chris Heller Sports Editor: Nick Berti Feature Editor: Sean Quigley Cover Editor: Iris Kim Leisure Editor: Leigh Finnegan Voices Editor: Aodhan Beirne Photo Editor: Max Blodgett Design Editors: Nitya Ramlogan, Catherine Johnson Projects Editor: Brendan Baumgardner Crossword Editor: Scott Fligor Assistant Blog Editors: Diana McCue, Vincent Tennant Assistant News Editors: Rachel Calvert, Ryan Bellmore Assistant Sports Editors: Adam Rosenfeld, Rob Sapunor Assistant Cover Editor: Holly Ormseth, Kelsey McCullough Assistant Leisure Editor: Mary Borowiec, Heather Regan, John Sapunor Assistant Photo Editors: Julianne Deno, Matthew Funk

Associate Editors: Julie Patterson, Jackson Perry Contributing Editor: Keenan Timko Staff Writers:

Gavin Bade, Thaddeus Bell, Akshay Bhatia, Mary Borowiec, Tom Bosco, Kara Brandeisky, Matthew Collins, Matthew Decker, John Flanagan, Kate Imel, Satinder Kaur, Daniel Kellner, Matt Kerwin, Eric Pilch, Sadaf Qureshi, Rob Sapunor, Abby Sherburne, Melissa Sullivan, Mark Waterman

Staff Photographers:

Helen Burton, Lexie Herman, Hilary Nakasone, Jackson Perry, Audrey Wilson

Staff Designers:

Megan Berard, Richa Goyal, Lauren MacGuidwin, Ishita Kohli, Michelle Pliskin, Amber Ren

Copy Chief: Keaton Hoffman Copy Editors:

Emma Forster, Emily Hessler, Kate Imel, Tori Jovanovski, Claire McDaniel, Kim Tay

Editorial Board Chair: J. Galen Weber

NO PASS ON COMPASS

Support businessmen and women for others Few Georgetown programs capture the spirit of the school as perfectly as the Compass Fellows program. The fellows, a group of 30 freshmen and sophomores who each create a socially conscious business, are determined to be successful while following the Jesuit ideal of men and women for others. But oddly enough, this quintessentially Georgetown program operates without much institutional support from the school.

Georgetown could become the top school for aspiring social entrepreneurs.

The school’s lone social entrepreneurship class, which Neil Shah (MSB ’10) said gave him the idea for Compass Partners, is at capacity again this spring—clearly, the enthusiasm for this subject and the demand for more instruction exists among George-

Head of Business: Kara Brandeisky The Georgetown Voice

The Georgetown Voice is published every Thursday.

Mailing Address: Georgetown University The Georgetown Voice Box 571066 Washington, D.C. 20057

Office: Leavey Center Room 413 Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057

Newsroom: (202) 687-6780 Fax: (202) 687-6763 Email: editor@georgetownvoice.com Advertising: business@georgetownvoice.com Web Site: georgetownvoice.com The opinions expressed in the Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated. Unsigned editorials represent the views of the Editorial Board. Columns, advertisements, cartoons and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of the Georgetown Voice. The University subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors.

The Georgetown Voice is produced in the Georgetown Voice office and composed on Macintosh computers using the Adobe InDesign publishing system and is printed by Silver Communications. All materials copyright the Georgetown Voice. All rights reserved.

On this week’s cover ... Social Entrepreneurship Cover Graphic: Iris Kim

town students. But a lack of support for aspiring social entrepreneurs was actually what pushed Shah and Arthur Woods (MSB ’10) to create Compass Partners in 2008 while sophomores at Georgetown.

Both had tried to create socially conscious businesses as freshmen but failed after struggling to find the guidance and support they needed to get their ideas off the ground.

Georgetown can do more to promote social entrepreneurship on campus than just offering a course on the subject. Class offerings for social entrepreneurship and related subjects should be expanded to meet student demand for such programs, and more students should be permitted to take relevant courses; Compass Fellows who were not in the McDonough School of

Business have pointed out that restrictions often prevent them from taking businessoriented classes. The Compass Fellows program cannot indefinitely rely on the Prudential Foundation funding that helped it launch in 2009. Georgetown should commit to financially supporting the program, which requires less than $6,000 a year, as George Washington University has done.

The efforts of the Compass Fellows, the social consciousness of its students, and its Jesuit ideals make Georgetown a unique place to pursue the idea of social entrepreneurship. It is no accident that Compass Fellows was the brainchild of Georgetown students. But to sustain this community, the University needs to do what it can to support the fellows and social entrepreneurs on campus.

A Modest proposal

Don’t let the Campus Plan go up in smoke On Dec. 30, Georgetown filed its 2010 Campus Plan with the D.C. Zoning Commission. The plan includes renovations to Lauinger Library, a new student center in New South, and a new athletic training facility on campus. President John DeGioia said the campus plan “represents modest, targeted growth opportunities that will meet our strategic needs for the next decade, enabling us to further strengthen our position as one of the world’s leading universities.” But for the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Burleith Citizens Association, even modest University growth has become unacceptable, and both groups have expressed strong, and unjustified, opposition to the plan.

The University’s neighbors have been neither forthright nor rational in their arguments against the 2010 Campus Plan. Now, despite the University’s efforts at compromise, such as their decision to drop the contentious 1789 block graduate student housing, local residents are continuing to

Editorial Board:

Gavin Bade, Juliana Brint, Ethan Chess, John Flanagan, Hunter Kaplan, Ishita Kohli, Tim Shine, Cole Stangler

the georgetown voice 3

present what is a very moderate plan for campus growth as a threat to their neighborhoods. Even after the scaled-back plan was revealed, CAG made unconstructive comments like, “If we fail at reversing the trend, the future of Georgetown and surrounding communities is uncertain.” In the past, members of the BCA have exaggerated the impact that the plan would have on the neighborhood by saying that the University intended to increase student enrollment by the thousands. They rarely acknowledge, however, that this figure represents a planned increase in graduate students—not undergraduates.

The University should be praised for making concessions to its neighbors in the final campus plan. But some of their compromises went too far to assuage neighbors’ concerns, such as their elimination of plans for a taller smokestack above Georgetown’s heating and cooling plant.

The University had planned to increase the height of the smokestack, located next to

Yates, so that the plant’s emissions would dissipate harmlessly in the atmosphere and not linger in the air on campus. But because neighbors vehemently opposed the larger smokestack with a factually dubious scare campaign, the University scrapped the plan rather than standing up for the health of those who live and work on campus.

There is a balance between cooperating with our neighbors and pursuing the best interests of the University. In this instance, with student health at stake and with the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval, the smokestack should have been a non-negotiable issue.

Ultimately, the nature and tone of the debate lie in the neighbors’ hands. So far their response has been immature and irrational. The University should continue engaging the neighbors, but it must not play into their hands by conceding important elements of the plan. Administrators need to stand their ground on what little is left in the 2010 Campus Plan.

AUX ARMES, CITOYENS!

Tunisian uprising is a message of change

When Mohamed Bouazizi lit himself on fire over a month ago to protest the confiscation of his fruit and vegetable cart in the resort city of Sidi Bouzid, almost nobody could have predicted the immense popular uprising that would soon engulf Tunisia. After sustained protests spread across the nation and into the capital of Tunis, Tunisians— from middle class professionals to the urban poor—eventually succeeded in ousting the authoritarian United States-backed regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. The success of the uprising—a revolt stemming from massive unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, widespread corruption, and a clampdown on free speech—is an admirable example of solidarity in the face of exorbitant odds and a testament to the power of people to change their governments.

Nonetheless, the future of the provisional government remains unclear. The current co-

alition government is on the verge of collapse after several interim ministers resigned to protest what they see as continued Ben Ali influence in the newly formed government. As John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said, it is entirely possible that forces loyal to Ben Ali, or even the military itself, could take power in this unstable interim period. The reassertion of power by antidemocratic forces would be a devastating setback for the nascent popular movement. Any legitimate government that emerges should include an adequate representation of opposition forces and reflect the popular rejection of Ben Ali’s ruling apparatus.

The Tunisian revolt is likely to have larger ramifications for the Arab world—protests and similar self-immolations have already occurred in Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, and Egypt—countries where United Statesbacked regimes have maintained control

through a strong security apparatus and a crackdown on civil liberties and opposition groups. While these authoritarian regimes are not popular, it remains to be seen whether the Tunisian revolt will have the shockwave effect some are anticipating.

“Governments are certainly nervous,” Esposito said. “Many disaffected people, including youth, are expressing the desire that this be the beginning of a wave of revolts … There could be a lot of disaffection from below, but people learn to survive under these regimes. And then there’s the concern about what the cost will be [to revolt]. It’s hard to predict.”

Although the situation in Tunisia continues to evolve daily, and its final outcome remains uncertain, the Tunisian revolt has inspired hope across the Arab world and has demonstrated that authoritarian regimes do not always prevail over the will of their citizens.

news

4 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

On the Record: ANC Commissioner Jake Sticka During winter break, Georgetown University filed the final draft of its 2010 Campus Plan with the Zoning Commission. The Voice sat down with Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Jake Sticka (COL ‘13) to discuss the plan. Interview transcribed and conducted by Geoffrey Bible.

Voice: What is your response to the 2010 Campus Plan?

Sticka: I think the plan is a good one, at least from a student perspective. It gets us a lot of things that we need and want. In terms of University response to community reaction, I think it’s been one of compromise.

The University has really engaged with the community, they’ve listened, and they’ve said, “We understand we’re in a broader community and we need to make some sacrifices.”

So they sacrificed some graduate enrollment and the 1789 block.

I would hope that the neighbors would see that we’ve found a good middle ground. I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I hope it is.

With the 1789 block, were you disappointed to see that go or do you think it was a good compromise?

Is there any other way, besides their Facebook event, that you think will get students involved in ANC-related issues?

The 1789 block wouldn’t really help undergraduates. Some additional graduate housing and retail space would be nice, but I didn’t see that as a big facet of the plan that I wanted to support.

I think it was probably worth it for the University to drop it because of neighborhood concerns.

I’ve talked with [Georgetown Universisty Student Association President Calen Angert] and [Vice President Jason Kluger] a bit about getting GUSA more involved with community issues and making it more prominent. What they do on campus is important, but other student governments in the D.C. area are involved with community issues and really take a lead on these issues. I really want to see GUSA do this going forward.

[Student advocacy group] DC Students Speak has encouraged students to sign a petition supporting the plan and to go to Thursday’s ANC meeting about the plan. Are you involved with this group?

I’m involved insofar as I know a lot of the people who are doing it, and I was more involved when it was a student information group, but now that it is active student lobbying, [they] involved me to look over things a lot. I sent out invites for the Facebook event because I think it’s great and I want to see students getting involved in these meetings.

In regards to current offcampus housing, do you see it as problematic?

Not really. We just built Southwest Quad in 2003 and another 800 students came out of the community and back on campus.

If anything, the issue is improving—if there is an issue—but on the whole, among the majority of the people I speak with, students have good relations with their neighbors. If neighbors are willing to engage with students

and knock on their doors rather than call 911, then there will be much more fruitful relationships.

That’s what we see in the majority of the cases, but it’s that minority that is very loud about the problems they see.

Burleith Citizens Association President Lenore Rubino wrote that Georgetown has presented “a disingenuous, sanitized story” with respect to the Campus Plan, but President John DeGioia called the plan “modest.”

I think it’s a fairly modest plan. Without the 1789 block plan and the smokestack, graduate enrollment is the major issue of contention. The graduate enrollment expansion’s affect on the community is not that bad. There were much

more aggressive attempts to expand the graduate schools in the last ten years, and the affect on the community has been minimal. I think the University could be much more aggressive in their proposal and they have chosen not to be.

Have any of the ANC commissioners told you whether they are strongly one way or the other on the final plan?

I haven’t talked to any of them since we’ve seen the final plan. I don’t expect them to be particularly supportive, but I hope that if students do come out and show that they are part of the community, some of the commissioners will be willing to listen.

COURTESY JAKE STICKA

Athletes’ priority limits gender studies course options

by Rachel Calvert The University’s policy of priority registration for athletes places strain on the Women and Gender Studies program, according to professors and students in the department whose introductory classes are often filled largely by student-athletes during preregistration.

Last December the program’s steering committee, discussed the problems created by this priority registration policy. In prior years, concerns raised by the Women and Gender Studies program led to the implementation of a registration policy that no more than 50 percent of a class may be composed of athletes and made an unofficial promise to the Women and Gender Studies program that no more than four or five of those students would be from a single team.

D. Scott Heath, Registrar for Athletic Eligibility, Veterans’ Affairs, and Certification, said that athletes are given priority during

preregistration to accommodate their rigorous schedules. The Women and Gender Studies program, he said, is the most popular for athletes.

Jared Watkins (COL ’11), a member of the steering committee, said the policy makes it difficult for potential majors or minors to enroll in introductory courses, such as Introduction to Women and Gender Studies. The high demand for a limited number of seats, Watkins claims, combined with the priority given to athletes, prevents many non-athletes from enrolling in this introductory course until they gain priority as juniors and seniors.

The enrollment obstacle has been magnified by the recent trend of designating introductory courses as a prerequisite. The priority registration policy, Watkins said, “gums up the works,” as students are often forced to take introductory and advanced courses out of sequence.

Bonnie Morris, an adjunct professor who teaches a course

titled “Athletics and Gender,” said the difficulty of enrolling in these courses is detrimental to the program as a whole.

“For the major to be more visible and completion of the program more viable, people who want to do serious academic work in the Women and Gender Studies need to be able to get in,” she said.

Morris noticed a marked increase in interest when the University qualified Introduction to Women and Gender Studies to satisfy the Humanities and Writing II requirement for the College, the McDonough School of Business, and the School of Foreign Service.

Isabel Buchanan (COL ’11), also a member of the steering committee, credits the program’s popularity among athletes to accommodating professors.

“This translates to being very easy, which is not necessarily true,” she said.

Morris recounted an exchange where several students from the same team confronted her at the

end of a semester, explaining that they took her class in the hopes of garnering an easy grade and expressing disappointment that the class was more challenging than anticipated.

The priority registration policy also tends to interfere with the heterogeneity of the classroom, she added. According to Morris, the policy skews classroom composition where sports are dominated by students of one demographic. Her main concern is not her class might be composed of mainly athletes, but that a large contingency will be from the same team.

Watkins echoed this concern, saying that students on the same team tend to sit together. Their absence on game days also tends to be noticeable in the smaller classes.

“Students with a genuine interest are going to be affected by that imbalance,” Buchanan said.

The difficulty lies in gauging genuine interest, Morris added, as well as in balancing the desire

for new students to be exposed to the field.

Heath said the registrar examines the distribution in each class during preregistration. When a small class is weighted with athletes, the office encourages some to find an alternate course. He said the registrar’s office pays close attention to athletes enrolled in Women and Gender Studies classes, as this department has expressed the most concern.

Several solutions to this issue were proposed during the December steering committee meeting. Among them was the suggestion that professors not allow an electronic waitlist for their class, so students must express interest to the professor in person. Another was to contact athletic officials, asking them to limit how many athletes from the same team enroll in a given class. Nonetheless, some remain frustrated.

“It’s simply a question of are other Georgetown students not being fairly accommodated,” Morris said.

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the georgetown voice 5

DeGioia responds to “nutty” NY Times story

by Jeffrey Niedermaier Last week, University President John DeGioia responded to a New York Times article that accused Georgetown Law Center of using deceptive tactics to improve its U.S. News and World Report rankings, calling the accusation “nutty.”

The Jan. 8 article reported that Georgetown Law announced to recent graduates three newlycreated temporary jobs in the admissions department. The posts would last six weeks and begin days before February 15, the date at which a graduate must be employed to count toward his or her school’s score for the competitive “nine-month employment” category in the U.S. News survey. Georgetown, the article implied, like many other schools, takes advantage of definitions in the surveys, which “seem open to abuse.” It went on to describe University contacts as disorganized and vague in their responses, claiming to have “lost track” of the alumni who took the jobs.

“That I frankly think is kind

of a cheap shot,” DeGioia told a Voice reporter in an interview last Thursday. “I think that fundamentally there is a profound issue at stake in the article which didn’t get the kind of sophisticated and appropriate account that it deserves.”

Dr. William Treanor, who joined Georgetown Law as its new dean last August, previously affirmed that one of his primary goals was to help students find work. He outlined his aspirations in an Aug. 19 interview with Georgetown Law magazine.

“A big focus of mine will be doing everything I can to see that students have all the placement opportunities they deserve,” he said. “And that means figuring out where the opportunities are now—small and medium-size firms, public interest positions, regional markets, federal and state clerkships, opportunities in government—and exploring them in ways we may not traditionally have done.”

DeGioia defended the nature of the jobs with which Georgetown Law provided its alumni.

Divide and conquer ANC 2E

Most students know Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners as the people who shutdown late-night haven Philly Pizza. This incident shows that the ANC has wider powers than its “advisory” moniker might suggest, and their authority touches many aspects of student life. At the same time, however, the current composition of the commission undercuts the student voice.

Local law requires D.C. agencies to give ANC Commissioners’ opinions great weight. The ANC’s lobbying power was particularly apparent when their opposition to the 2000-2010 Campus Plan prompted the Board of Zoning Adjustment to cap Georgetown’s enrollment and force the University to publicly disclose information about student conduct—a move which a judge ruled illegal after four years of litigation.

But even though students account for a large portion of Georgetown’s population, they remain sorely underrepre-

sented on the commission. The average ANC single-member district contains around 2,000 people. According to the University, there are 5,053 beds on campus, meaning that students should be allotted two commissioners. Yet only one of the seven commissioners on ANC 2E, Jake Sticka (COL ’13), is a Georgetown student. Furthermore, his district only includes New South, Alumni Square, and Villages A and C. The other on-campus residences are gerrymandered into no less than three different single-member districts.

Considering how much power the ANC has over the daily lives of Georgetown students, it is unfair that students are underrepresented in that body.

Residents argue that because most students are not registered D.C. voters, they should not be allowed seats commensurate with their numbers. However, the federal census counts all residents, even non-citizens, for the purposes of representation.

In fact, about 14 percent of the

DeGioia claims the Georgetown Law Center offers employment to help alumni, not aid national rankings.

“We’ve hired a number of folks,” he said. “In fact, any student who wanted a position that wasn’t hired, we basically offered a research position at the law school this fall. It doesn’t pay a lot, but it’s employment. It’s very important to retain employment after graduation in the legal market.”

DeGioia also noted that law school applications at Georgetown were up seven percent in recent years in spite of the unnerving

statistics. Alumni employment figures were up from their record lows of previous months as well, but administrators and students alike recognize the larger, transformational problem.

“The problem is definitely not limited to [Georgetown] Law,” said an alumnus of the law school familiar with the temporary program, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “It’s also just one symptom of much larger

Georgetown ANC’s population is non-citizens, according to the American Community Survey.

Georgetown students—most of whom are U.S. citizens and live, work, learn, and volunteer in this community—are at least as deserving of representation as diplomats and other noncitizens.

Gathering the 25 signatures necessary to declare a candidacy is difficult, as few students are registered to vote in D.C.

cycle, and residency requirements work out, commissioners must live in D.C. for two summers and forgo studying abroad.

In reality, this is not necessarily the case. It is possible for a commissioner to retire before his term is over. If a commissioner vacates his seat more than six months before an election, the ANC must hold a special election in that single-member district within ninety days.

There are admittedly limits to this accommodation. Commissioners that retire early may leave their constituencies without representation for up to three months. This is not a loophole that potential commissioners should consider lightly, but it is acceptable to occasionally take this more fluid view of ANC terms in order to get a viable pool of candidates. The structure of ANCs is not necessarily inviting to student representatives, but it is critical that we receive adequate representation.

As unjust as this situation may be, it will continue as long as students fail to advocate for

Saxa Politica

by John Flanagan

A bi-weekly column on campus news and politics However, two Hoyas won seats in the 1996 ANC election, a reminder that students have overcome this hurdle before.

Another argument residents could make is that there would not be enough student candidates to run in the ANC races.

This is a fair point, but only because of the current understanding of what it means to serve as a commissioner. Students have been told that because of the way the two-year term, election

PICASAWEB

system-wide problems that affect law schools, state bars, [and] law firms.”

School administrators seem to agree. Although DeGioia wrote off the more scathing parts of the article, he acknowledges the challenge Georgetown Law has in store in future years. But he has hope for the future.

“Our law school’s done an extraordinary job at transforming,” he said. themselves. In the wake of the 2010 Census, students have an opportunity to set the record straight. Later this year, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans (D), who represents Georgetown along with a host of other neighborhoods, will appoint a task force of registered voters to redraw ANC boundaries. Council Chairman Kwame Brown (D) and At-Large Councilmembers David Catania (I) (SFS ’90, LAW ’94), Phil Mendelson (D), Michael A. Brown (I), and Sekou Biddle (D) may also appoint one member to each task force.

This task force will make its recommendations for the modification of ANC boundaries, including the breakdown of single-member districts, by mid-October. If students want to end the discriminatory gerrymandering in ANC 2E, they must register to vote in D.C. and ensure that the ward task force gives students the two seats on the ANC that they deserve.

Want to know the what John’s gerrymander looks like? Find out at jflanagan@georgetownvoice.com

sports

6 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

Fighting Irish deliver Hoyas a crushing blow

by Adam Rosenfeld The Georgetown women’s basketball team (14-5, 2-3 Big East) got to South Bend expecting a tough fight against No. 11 Notre Dame (16-4, 5-1 Big East) on Tuesday night, and the Fighting Irish gave them more then they could handle.

The No. 16 Hoyas fell for the second time in three games, this time in convincing fashion: 8058. The defeat showed that, while Georgetown is becoming a power on the national scene, the squad still has a long road to the top of the Big East.

The Fighting Irish came out of the gate swinging and landed multiple blows to the usually stout Georgetown defense. Notre Dame made four three-pointers before the 12-minute mark of the first half, lifting the Irish to an early 13-point lead.

“Watching the film, we know that we need to do a better job of locating the shooters on defense,” head coach TerriWilliams Flournoy said. “We just didn’t find the open player and we gave up shots.”

Despite the slow start, the Hoyas showed resilience with a 10-0 run midway through the opening half, bringing the score to 24-22—the closest the Hoyas would get for the rest of the game.

The Irish closed the half with a run of their own. Sophomore guard Skylar Diggins scored six of her 17 first half points in the final three minutes to give Notre Dame an 11-2 edge in the closing minutes.

While Georgetown managed to keep the score to single digits throughout much of the first half thanks to some defensive adjustments, the Hoyas left six crucial points on the board by missing the front end of one-and-one free throws on three straight

possessions. With the missed opportunities and strong Irish shooting, the Irish took a 45-33 lead into the half.

The Hoyas responded to the adversity of the first half by coming out of the locker room strong.

Junior forward Tia Magee scored six of Georgetown’s first eight points after a scoreless first half, bringing the score back to single digits. But the turning point of the game came five minutes into the half when a technical foul to Adria Crawford halted the Hoyas’ momentum.

After the foul, Notre Dame went on an 8-0 run, eventually putting the game out of the Hoyas’ reach.

Ultimately, the game came down to shooting—Georgetown’s defense was unable to contain Notre Dame’s hot hands. Four Irish starters scored in double figures, and Notre Dame shot 54.2 percent from the floor, including a blistering 57.1 percent from behind the three-point arc.

The Hoyas also struggled on offense, shooting a mediocre 43.1 percent from the field, and only converting 41.2 percent of their free throws.

“On offense, it’s more about taking care of the ball and not making mental mistakes,” Williams-Flournoy said. “We also allowed 31 points off of turnovers which really hurt us.”

Despite the lopsided final score, there were bright spots in the game, namely Sugar Rodgers and Rubylee Wright’s play. Rodgers led the Hoyas with 15 points and notched a team high six rebounds, while Wright added 13 points of her own.

The solid performance is nothing new for Rodgers, and has garnered national attention for her play during the first half

JACKSON PERRY

Rodgers has led the Hoyas all season, but she wasn’t enough against the Irish.

of the season. Last week, Rodgers was named to the prestigious Wooden Midseason Top 20, a list comprised of the nation’s top performers from all classes and conferences. Rodgers currently leads the team in scoring with 19 points per game and is second in the Big East in the category.

While the sophomore has been a consistent performer, the loss to Notre Dame reinforced the fact that the whole team will need to step up as Georgetown enters the teeth of their Big East schedule.

“In this league you can’t dwell on a loss, you can only learn from it and look to improve in the next game,” WilliamsFlournoy said. “The Big East is one of, if not the most, challenging league in the nation. Every night we are playing a top team and many nights we’re going up against ranked teams. There is never a night off, so under those circumstances, we know there will always be challenges.”

The team’s next Big East challenge comes this weekend against Villanova. While the

Wildcats are unranked, Williams-Flournoy is quick to point out that they present unique challenges to her team.

“Villanova controls pace, which will be a challenge,” she said. “They shoot and immediately get back in transition sometimes not even looking for an offensive rebound. In that sense, we’ll need to do a good job in our half-court offense and take care of the ball.”

The Hoyas look to even up their Big East record against the Wildcats on Saturday at home, with game time scheduled for 2 p.m.

the Sports Sermon “You guys are little bitches.” —Former New York Giants wide receiver Amani Toomer talking to his roller hockey opponents.

The top teams won’t remain unscathed either. On ESPN’s Big Monday, UConn slipped by Villanova, and Pittsburgh beat Syracuse to keep its perfect conference record intact. The two games, decided by an average of five points, emphasized how tight the competition is. And it was no coincidence that both winning teams happened to be playing at home.

In the Big East, home teams are 33-15, showing the value and rarity of a road win in college basketball’s pre-

to be. I’m sure Coach John Thompson III would love to A win is a win. It’s as have that West Virginia game simple as that. After havback, and maybe the last few ing a near-heart attack while minutes of the St. John’s game, watching the Hoyas eke out but the Hoyas could be in a a win Tuesday night against worse spot. Right now they sit Seton Hall—which is now a in 11th place, but they are only weekly occurrence—I real1.5 games behind fourth place ized that although the team Louisville. No team is really played poorly for much of the out of reach. Even Pittsburgh game, I was happy with the is beatable. result. Sure, Seton Hall isn’t The Hoyas can take solthe cream of the Big East crop. ace in the fact that the seaBut it doesn’t matter. son is far from over. In such The conference’s regular a competitive league there season is always a bloodbath, is room to move up quickly. with many elite Things are hardly teams doing damrosy over in McPete Rose Central age to each other.

Donough—the Da bettin’ line That has continHoyas have been Dookies Margin ued to hold true dreadful defenHoyas this year, but in a (favorites) sively and they (underdogs) (duh!) different way. Yes, can’t hold onto the league has elite Jay Aaron Cheese Please the ball on ofteams like Pittsfense—but if they Tomlin Footwork Rex burgh, Villanova can overcome France Underpants these weaknessLance and (as much as I hate to say it) Syraes, play better at cuse, but from first place Pitt mier conference. Of the Big home, and steal some road all the way down to last place East’s seven ranked teams’ wins, Georgetown will find DePaul, the Big East is as bal- losses, 10 of 12 have come themselves near the top of the anced as ever. on the road. So if you think Big East standings—which With the first third of the Georgetown’s wins at Rutgers would be impressive, considseason over, only the Pan- and Seton Hall weren’t big ering their poor start. thers remain undefeated in wins, think again. Not only The Hoya faithful needs conference play, and their did it show that the Hoyas to step away from the ledge smallest margin of victory could win a road game in the and relax. No one can predict (four points) came at the Big East, but it demonstrated how many wins Georgetown hands of basement dweller maturity and an understand- will have at the end of the Providence. St. John’s, who ing of how hard it actually is season. Maybe the Hoyas’ isn’t even ranked, crushed to accomplish. rough start in conference No. 16 Notre Dame on SunNobody in the Hoyas’ camp play helped them develop a day. This is the same Notre wanted to start the conference new appreciation for wins Dame that got manhandled season off 3-4, especially after after their sweep of Rutgers by unranked Marquette, but an out-of-conference sched- and Seton Hall. Four of their also beat Georgetown and ule that saw them go 11-1, but next seven games are against Connecticut. Any team can that is where they stand right ranked opponents—so we’ll win on any night. now, and it isn’t a bad place find out soon enough.

by Nick Berti

sports

georgetownvoice.com

Swimming downs American

by Rob Sapunor The Georgetown men’s and women’s swim teams made a splash in their return to competition, with both beating American University in their first meet of the semester. However, the women’s squad also lost to James Madison University. The Hoyas posted strong times, and two more women qualified for the Big East Championship in February.

It was the first time back in the pool for the team since the Patriot Invitational in Fairfax, Va, where the men placed fifth and the women came in fourth.

It was also the first time all season that the Hoyas swam in their own pool.

Sophomore Amy Balanfonte had a standout performance at the meet, qualifying for the Big East Championships in the 50 m freestyle and the 100 m free-

style in her first meet back since she broke her foot at the start of the season. With two meets still to go, all but seven members of the 44-person swim and dive team have qualified for the championships.

The meet against American had another special meaning for the swimming and diving team as it was the first meet since freshman Michelle Konkoly fell from her Village C window on Jan. 11. Despite a tough week coping with the accident, the team still competed last Saturday.

“It was great to see everyone swimming for themselves and swimming for Michelle at the same time,” senior men’s co-captain Keenan Timko said.

(Disclosure: Timko is a contributing editor for the Voice).

As the season approaches the finish line, the seniors on

SHIRA SAPERSTEIN

The Hoyas are trying to gain momentum before the Big East Championships.

Don’t stop believin’

After the New York Jets upset playoff victory over the New England Patriots on Sunday, Jets linebacker Bart Scott was tracked down on the field for an interview. The outspoken defender didn’t mince words.

“Anybody can be beat,” he yelled. “Felt great. Poetic justice.

We know we were a much better team and we came up and represented ourselves.”

Scott ranted on, dissing the Patriot defense and calling out all those who didn’t believe in the Jets. It was an epic tirade, but it was hardly unexpected. In fact, it may have been more surprising if Scott showed a degree of humility.

Scott’s insult to New England, that their defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed, probably doesn’t even

make the top-five in the war of words between the conference rivals. The Jets led an all-out verbal assault on the Patriots in the week leading up to their matchup, a barrage of bravado that seemed a bit unjustified after New England dominated New York 45-3 back in December. But somehow, head coach Rex Ryan and the Jets backed it up with a convincing victory of their own. Maybe modesty is overrated.

Since appearing on HBO’s Hard Knocks in the preseason, Ryan and the Jets have developed a well-deserved reputation as the NFL’s most brash and overconfident team. Ryan, who emerged as a profanity-spewing, snackloving star on Hard Knocks, never played it safe with his proclama-

the team reflected back on their past four years. Only four men and three women have remained on the team this long, and they are preparing for their final home meet in McCarthy Pool, which will take place this Saturday against George Washington.

“It’s bittersweet going into this final meet because as much complaining [as] we do during practice, we wouldn’t stick with it for four years if we didn’t love the sport,” women’s co-captain Mallory Kiplinger said.

Although the Hoyas have a number of seasoned veterans, head coach Jamie Holder is in the middle of his first season on the Hilltop. It is never easy to start off fast with a new coach, but Holder is becoming more comfortable with his team.

“I think over the course of the season the team has come to trust me more because of the success that we’ve been having,” he said.

His goal for the meet against George Washington and the meet at Maryland on Feb. 5, is to have the rest of the team qualify for the Big East Championships.

At the same time, the team’s focus is on setting new personal records and continuing to improve in preparation for the postseason. The meet on Saturday promises to be a heated contest, as the teams were very evenly matched last year.

“Georgetown and [George Washington] swimming is an M Street rivalry fiercer than that of Qdoba and Chipotle and every bit as spicy,” Timko said. “The air outside might be cold but the swimming is going to be hot.”

tions, predicting a Super Bowl for a squad that backed into the playoffs with an 8-8 record in 2009 (albeit one that made it to the AFC Championship Game).

A season’s worth of saberrattling reached its peak leading up to the Patriots game, with Ryan taking subtle shots at like-

Backdoor Cuts

by Tim Shine

a rotating column on sports ly MVP Tom Brady and declaring the matchup to be all about him versus rival coach Bill Belichick. His players got in on the act too, none more aggressively than cornerback Antonio Cromartie, who had a succinct description of Brady: “He’s an asshole. Fuck him.”

the georgetown voice 7

FAST BREAK For the first half of their game against Seton Hall on Tuesday, the Georgetown men’s basketball team looked poised to continue its recovery from a disappointing Big East start with a comfortable win. The Hoyas had the result they wanted 20 minutes later.

But getting the win was anything but easy.

Georgetown (14-5, 3-4 Big East) bounced back from a 19-2 Seton Hall (8-11, 2-5 Big East) run early in the second half to pull out an 80-75 victory in the closing minutes. After scoring 25 points against Rutgers on Saturday, Austin Freeman once again defended his status as Big East Preseason Player of the Year with an incredibly efficient 28 points.

But after exiting the locker room for the second half with a seven point lead, the Hoyas nearly collapsed, allowing the Pirates to outscore them by a 17-point margin over an eightminute stretch. The run gave Seton Hall a lead it would not relinquish until the final two minutes of the game.

The final half was reminiscent of their previous conference losses to St. John’s and West Virginia. In both of those games, a favored Georgetown squad hung tight but could not surpass its supposedly inferior opponents, leading to a couple of close losses. Unlike in those games, however, the Hoyas avoided potential misfires and played strong down the stretch to prevail.

Also unlike in previous losses, Georgetown got a bona fide star performance from Freeman.

Plenty of hours of ESPN programming were filled by commentators questioning the wisdom of the Jets trash talk, considering the drubbing they faced during their last trip to Foxborough. But on Sunday Ryan made his critics do what he could not— shut up—by giving a relatively dominant performance against a 14-2 team that had won eight consecutive games by an average of three touchdowns.

Perhaps commentators should not have been so quick to dismiss the Jets’ strategy. After all, more often than not, confidence is looked at as a barometer for success in sports. When Georgetown men’s basketball team went on their slide, the posters on fan message board HoyaTalk were looking for poor body language as a cause of poor play.

The senior guard shot 10-for-13 from the field with three treys while going perfect on his five free throw attempts. He added five rebounds, three assists, and a block for good measure. Freeman passed Allen Iverson to become Georgetown’s 13th alltime leading scorer.

Freeman got help from fellow senior guard Chris Wright, who had 17 points, six rebounds, and six assists, and sophomore forward Hollis Thompson, who scored 14 points. Jeff Robinson led the Pirates with 21 points.

The Hoyas never trailed by more than seven, but they weren’t able to put themselves over the top until Seton Hall senior forward Herb Pope (16 points, nine rebounds) fouled out with 2:11 left in the game.

The foul allowed Freeman to make two shots from the free throw line, and after a defensive stop, Georgetown tied the game when center Julian Vaughn scored easily without the Pirates’ dominant big man defending him. That was the Hoyas’ last field goal, but they hit six of seven free throws in the final minute to win the game.

It wasn’t the way the Hoyas wanted to win the game, but after losing three straight to drop to 1-4 in conference play, they were surely happy to finish a two-game sweep of their New Jersey road trip. As for the flaws that allowed them to give up a 19-2 run, they have a long seven days to correct them before a rematch with St. John’s.

—Tim Shine

Of course, confidence isn’t the be-all and end-all of sports. It ultimately comes down to talent, not to mention strategy and execution. If a few drives went differently on Sunday, or the Jets didn’t have some of the best players in the NFL on their roster, the Jets would have been a laughingstock for their foolish belief they could defeat the mighty Patriots.

But to turn around an old saying, I’d rather have my teams speak up and display their confidence than keep their mouths shut and leave some in doubt.

Maybe they don’t have to go as far as Cromartie and Ryan, but I wouldn’t mind hearing Austin Freeman take a couple shots at Kris Joseph in a few weeks.

Talk about your love for feet with Tim at tshine@georgtownvoice.com

feature

8 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

feature

georgetownvoice.com

Social entrepreneurship: Cash with a conscience

by Keaton Hoffman Most business students with entrepreneurial ambition wait until after they have graduated to start their companies, but that didn’t stop James Li (MSB ’13) and his partner Yeo Zuo from starting their own business as college sophomores.

Having been involved with community service projects

since high school, Li sensed a disconnect and a lack of trust between non-profit organizations and the donors who fund them. In May 2010, he and Zuo founded a consulting firm, RE:action Strategy Group that aims to help non-profits and other social entrepreneurs improve relationships with their

Courtesy of COMPASS FELLOWS

What’s my name again? Compass fellows connect.

Courtesy of COMPASS FELLOWS

First class graduates of the Compass program always point north.

donors through social media, events, photos, and videos.

Though not even a year old, the group has already worked with non-profits like the Corp, BuildDC, an entrepreneurship-focused college preparation program, and WellDone, which works on clean water projects in West Africa. Li, Zuo, and the rest of their team of 12 college students are optimistic that their venture can both increase giving to nonprofits and be a profitable business in the long term.

“For most of us in RE:action it’s not just a college project.

The ultimate goal is to get it to be a full-fledged business that we can seriously launch as we graduate,” Li said.

Li is a part of Compass Fellowship, an organization founded by Georgetown graduates Arthur Woods (MSB ’10) and Neil Shah (MSB ’10) in 2009 to help student entrepreneurs get their business ideas off the ground. The group concentrates on promoting “social entrepreneurship”—the idea that business ventures can be dedicated to improving the world or helping other people while still being profitable.

Part of the reason for the group’s success is the increasing appeal of social entrepreneurship to both students and investors. Sarah Stiles, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Georgetown, who defines the concept as “a holistic approach to positive change predicated on the notion that each human being, as well as the natural world, is worthy of love and respect,” says the idea is on the rise nationally.

While social entrepreneurship is gaining ground across

the country, Stiles said Georgetown’s Jesuit values made it a natural place for a social entrepreneurship program like Compass to take off.

“Georgetown is uniquely positioned to lead the social entrepreneurship movement in Washington,” she said. “Being a Jesuit university, Georgetown has always couched its educational mission in terms of love and social justice and those are terms that have been conspicuously absent from what has been ‘business as usual’ in the United States.”

The program takes 15 freshmen through a year-long process intended to provide them with the tools and mentorship they need to form viable companies. At the end of the year, the 15 students present their ideas to potential investors in hopes of making their projects actual businesses. About half of last year ’s inaugural group of students received funding to realize their ideas.

The companies are diverse in scope, ranging from a baked goods delivery service to a group that specializes in investing in socially conscious Iranian companies, but all of them attempt to blur the line between non-profit and forprofit businesses. Several are already looking to expand beyond Georgetown.

Junho Lee (MSB ‘13), whose talent agency Apollo Talent helps student musicians schedule concerts at restaurants and bars in D.C., has plans to expand to Howard, American, and George Washington Universities and to establish a tutoring service at D.C. public schools for students interested in music. Angela Morabito

(SFS ’13) is already moving to expand her Headlines clothing brand nationally. Selling scarves and other trendy accessories branded as “smart wear for smart women,” her company donates a percentage of its profits to global literacy initiatives.

“I am totally impressed,” said Adjunct Lecturer William Finnerty, who works for UBS and teaches a class on entrepreneurship at Georgetown.

“Compass is such an amazing organization both by the pace at which it’s growing and the quality of the fellows. Having had a chance to see what they were putting together, I had to get on board.”

Finnerty now serves on the board of directors for Compass.

The idea of blending positive social change and making profits isn’t new. Compass Fellowship’s founders, Woods and Shah, began social entrepreneurship projects during their time at Georgetown.

But without any outside assistance, Woods’s farmer ’s market delivery service and Shah’s fair-trade tea distribution company didn’t make it off the ground.

“We had no idea what we were doing,” Shah, who currently serves as the Compass Partners executive director, said.

Simple resources, like the know-how to file tax returns or connections with other D.C. entrepreneurs, would have been invaluable to them as undergraduates, Shah said.

“We started [Compass] because we wanted to build the program we wish we would have had,” Shah said. “We developed a program for stu-

HELEN BURTON

Funky fresh: Sweet Green has redefined fast, healthy, and casual. dents based on a student’s perspective.”

In addition to Compass Fellowship, Shah, and Woods created Compass Incubator, a free consulting firm which provides marketing, finance, education, and information technology services to students who apply.

Compass Incubator was attractive to students like Compass’s D.C. regional director Nabil Hashmi (SFS ’12), who study other subjects but have an interest in business.

“Being in the [School of Foreign Service] and being an International Political Economy major, I was interested in business, but I really had no outlet for learning more about it,” he said. “There’s really a demand for learning more about business and social entrepreneurship amongst students.”

Now in its second year, the program has already spread to Tufts, American, George Washington, and Indiana Universities. Next year, Shah plans to extend the program to roughly twenty schools in San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Ultimately their vision is to create an international fraternity of socially conscious entrepreneurs

whose community will represent the idea that business can change lives for the better and still be profitable.

Though barely over a year old, Compass has already attracted the support of a few powerful figures, from regional tycoons like Andy Shallal, founder of the U Street restaurant and bookstore Busboys and Poets, to national leaders

like Blackboard Inc. CEO Michael Chason.

Student fellows say the high caliber of people involved with Compass has been an integral part of the program’s success.

“Everyone has the common language of being passionate about social causes at a very base level,” Li said.

Li and 29 other undergraduate entrepreneurs have benefited from the community support provided by Compass over the past two academic years, but Georgetown’s most successful social entrepreneurs had to start their projects without such assistance.

In 2007, Nicolas Jammet (MSB ‘07), Jonathan Neman (MSB ‘07), and Nathaniel Ru (MSB ‘07), dismayed by the lack of healthy food options in the Georgetown neighborhood, decided to found Sweet Green, a salad and frozen yogurt restaurant whose mission is to provide “food that fits” by using local and organic ingredients, minimizing its environmental footprint, and building positive relationships with the surrounding community.

Though they did not have the benefit of the guidance and mentorship of a program like the Compass Fellowship, Jammet credits the strength of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, particularly the advice from Finnerty, his former professor and current mentor, as a huge inspiration. “[Finnerty’s class] really gave us that spark that combined a curriculum learning with real life experience,” Jammet said.

By using biodegradable

Courtesy of COMPASS FELLOWS

Compass Partners founders Arthur Woods and Neil Shah.

the georgetown voice 9 utensils and recyclable bowls, Sweet Green has begun receiving attention from national media sources. Its introduction of Salad Blasters, reusable salad bowls, is an example of Sweet Green’s win-win-win business model—making decisions that are good for the business, the customer, and the earth.

“Our ultimate goal is to change the way people think about eating healthy,” Jammet said.

Unqualified successes like Sweet Green are few and far between among start-ups, but they are nevertheless inspirations to the current crop of Georgetown undergraduates interested in entrepreneurship. These aspiring entrepreneurs dream of turning their passions and personal causes into viable businesses that contribute to society.

“It’s really important to us that our ventures are not just financially sustainable, but that they’re also intended to create a wider change,” Marcy Humphrey (MSB ’13), one of the original 15 Compass Fellows and a mentor to the current class of fellows, said.

As a mentor, Humphrey is responsible for connecting with the next class of Compass Fellows by providing guidance through the entrepreneurial process. Specifically, mentors help plan weekly module events and hold small group meetings with the fellows to answer questions, brainstorm startup ideas, and receive feedback about the program. This mentorship element of Compass was huge for Li. “The mentors for Compass were basically my mentors not only for my business, but also

for my freshman year,” said Li. Though Li’s advisors were the program’s founders, Woods and Shah, this first class of fellows has really stepped up to provide some structural integrity to the mentorship process, which is central to the Compass Fellowship program. And now, with graduates of the program serving as mentors for the next cycle of Compass Fellows, the supply of mentorship and advice is sure to continue in the long term.

The ultimate goals of the society are to operate much like a fraternity with a network of alumni supporting and expanding the Compass community. Though still in its fledgling stages, the emphasis on the legacy and the continuity of the Compass Fellowship are clear.

“When you become a Compass Fellow, you’re a Compass Fellow for life,” Li said.

Whether or not Li’s RE:action Strategy Group or any of the other Compass projects become lasting, profitable business, the fellows will leave Georgetown with a philosophy uncommon in business— that money is not the most important motivator.

“There’s a good quote from the book Good to Great

by Jim Collins that says that things like money and finances are like the blood and the food. They’re necessary to live, but they’re not actually the reason you live,” Li said.

“It’s the same thing for a company. Business at the bottom line keeps us alive, and it’s fun, but in the end it’s really the whole social aspect that allows us to recruit great people and have a lot of fun while doing it.”

MAX BLODGETT

Professor William Finnerty spells out entrepreneurship at GU.

leisure

10 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

Yes puts the fun back in dysfunctional

by Leigh Finnegan In a pivotal scene of House of Yes, two reunited former lovers, a little drunk in a room that’s rife with sexual tension, begin a bizarre, morbid, and extremely uncomfortable role-playing session. She’s Jackie O, decked out in an iconic pink suit and pillbox hat, and he’s JFK. A fake gun blast goes off, “JFK” collapses onto the couch in feigned pain, and Jackie rushes next to him for support.

Then, they have sex.

If you’re not cringing to the point of convulsion, that’s because I have glossed over one critical detail about these death-loving former partners—they are fraternal twins.

While dysfunctional families have always been a hot theatrical topic, House of Yes, a Nomadic Theatre production showing in the Davis Center’s Devine Studio Theatre Jan. 20-29, follows a family that is disturbingly screwed up. Hostility, violence, and, yes, incest all ensue when son Marty (our JFK) comes home to his wealthy Washington, D.C. family one stormy Thanksgiving with his new fiancée, the blonde and squeaky-clean Lesly, who hails from a farm in Pennsylvania. This stings Jackie O, his inexplicably Kennedy-obsessed twin sister whose recent stint in a mental institution should have lasted a hell of a lot longer than it did. As the

“Ok, let’s do it. But only if you leave the sweater vest on.”

Julianne deno

play progresses, Lesly withstands Jackie’s acerbic antagonism and learns the horrifying secrets of this family—who, as playwright Wendy Macleod once explained, has “never been said no to.”

A play with such disturbing and heavy subject matter was an ambitious undertaking for director Lucy Obus (Col ’11), who said that the play’s “unconventionality” was a major reason for her choice. And while the production could have easily turned out weird or gimmicky— it contains more straddling and disrobing than you would expect to see at a school that makes you walk to Wisconsin Avenue for condoms—it is not only successful, but disconcertingly enjoyable.

The success is due largely to remarkable performances from every member of the five-character cast. By far the most fascinating and intricate of the screwy ensemble, Sasha Wilson’s (COL ’11) Jackie O’s character is hostile, jealous, sometimes oddly sympathetic, and always certifiably nuts-o.

Wilson embodies her character’s nuances sublimely, frequently wearing a twisted grin that is

Julianne Deno

Cheer up man, it’s not like you banged your sister ... Oh. Awkward. straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

But with all the play’s unsettling aspects—and there are quite a few—House of Yes will make you laugh. Jackie O has her funny moments amid her outbursts of insanity, but the real comic relief comes from Marty and Jackie’s pitiable younger brother, Anthony, played by Robert Duffley (COL ’13). Anthony is awkward and confused about women, which is not too surprising given the household he grew up in. But through his refreshingly non-incestuous weirdness, he provides a good deal of adorable comedy,

particularly in his lovey-eyed interactions with his brother’s confused fiancée. Mrs. Pascal, the family’s free-spirited and unapologetic matriarch played by Catherine Razeto (COL ’13), provides similar levity, despite her enraging, nonchalant attitude towards her children’s actions.

When the final lights go down on House of Yes, the audience is uncomfortable. But it’s Black Swan uncomfortable—unsettled, for sure, but also intrigued and entirely satisfied. But be warned—you might never see a clip from the Zapruder Film the same way again.

Watch art get unstuck in time at the Smithsonian

by Mary Borowiec Time-based art is on the rise. The formerly little-known movement, consisting of art that changes as you view it, is rapidly gaining popularity among contemporary artists. A clear reflection of the ways in which technology has influenced society, the time-based genre presents a marriage of art and technology that makes for a dynamic visual experience. And with the December opening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s new gallery, “Watch This! New Directions in the Art of Moving Images,” the trend has gained even more momentum.

“Watch This!” stands out from your typical art gallery experience, packing an impressive array of multimedia pieces in an unassuming studio space.

The new gallery is the first step of a Smithsonian-wide initiative to expand its inclusion of film, video and media arts. Though it features just nine works from the

genre, it effectively highlights the wide range and styles of video art, from Peter Campus’s use of video overlay to form a moving portrait in Three Transitions,

from the rise of Nintendo to the modern day.

While the video art genre might not appeal to the “back in my day, bread cost a nickel” set

ting diodes, stand out as two of the gallery’s most striking pieces.

In his depiction of Grand Central Station, Campbell uses what appears to be a hardwood floor—

smithsonian american art museum

If you wanna be with me, baby there’s a price to pay, I’m an outline of a man in a bottle...yeah you get the idea. to the manipulation of an illustrated 3-D movie scene in Kota Ezawa’s LYAM. The gallery also serves as a historical survey of time-based art. With pieces from 1969 to 2009, “Watch This!” clearly narrates how the form has developed as technology advanced,

of Smithsonian patrons, the exhibit is an absorbing compilation of some of the most prominent artists of the style, which openminded viewers will enjoy. Jim Campbell’s Grand Central Station #2 (2009) and Reconstruction (2007), which utilize light-emit-

actually composed of transparent plastic—which reveals LEDs flashing underneath, creating the semblance of shadow-like figures moving throughout the station.

In this same style, Reconstruction uses lights flashing in a pattern to create the astonishing illusion of

cars and people moving across a dark street.

One of the most remarkable time-based art pieces, Nam June Paik’s “Electronic Super Highway,” is not featured inside the gallery itself. Located in the museum’s permanent Modern Art Collection, Paik’s piece comments on the prevalence of the media in society through a map of the United States with neon wires and televisions of varying size, each displaying videos representative of each of the 50 states. For those who leave the gallery unconvinced of timebased art’s merit, Paik’s work will leave them in awe of the ways in which technology has transformed our culture.

“Watch This!” will not satisfy all artistic tastes, but this addition to the American Art Smithsonian marks the rise of a new genre in contemporary art. After seeing an exhibit that is so clearly rife with talent, traditionalists may find themselves unexpectedly drawn to the art of the digital age.

georgetownvoice.com

“We are noodle folk. Broth runs through our veins.” —Kung Fu Panda

the georgetown voice 11

Seth Rogen won’t save you Reviews, Haiku’d

by Heather Regen While scheming up his vigilante alter ego, Britt Reid, the man behind the mask in The Green Hornet, muses to his sidekick that the crime-ridden streets of Los Angeles need more than a mere superhero.

“The city needs our help,” he declares. “We could be heroes! We will pose as villains to get closer to the bad guys. That way, no one will suspect we’re really the good guys!”

Evoking Batman’s similarlyminded decision to be “whatever Gotham needs me to be” at the end of The Dark Knight, Reid, played by Seth Rogen with far less gravity and much less style than his dark-caped counterpart, grasps that Los Angeles needs him to play villain rather than hero. With Rogen at its core, this makes The Green Hornet, though enjoyable, far more of a comedy than a superhero flick.

Although its protagonist is a masked crime-fighter, The Green Hornet, for better or for worse, cannot truly be grouped in with the rest of the superhero movies. Although based on a late 1930s radio show and later a comic, the 2011 interpretation of The Green Hornet is pure Seth Rogen. More congruous with Pineapple Express than Iron Man or The Dark Knight, it seems Rogen hopes action will take a back seat

to comedy. The movie is chock-full of one-liners, but the best comedy grows out of the many bromance moments between Reid and his stalwart sidekick, Kato (Jay Chou).

Though Cameron Diaz appears as Lenore Case, Reid’s secretary and love interest, her presence only works to detract from Reid and Kato’s chemistry.

Despite its comedic elements, however, the movie maintains many of the standards of today’s ever-present comic-based superhero blockbusters—masks, sidekicks, gadgets, and explosions. Kato slows time as he targets each enemy’s weak point, incapacitating his assailants with roundhouse kicks. The Hornet’s car, the Black Beauty, finds itself in numerous chases, adding to the movie’s visual appeal. In one

Blue Valentine It’s rated R now Without cutting the blow job.

So bring the children!

The Dilemma Here’s the dilemma: Overdose on Kevin James Or just hang myself.

Season of the Witch From Coen Brothers To lame fantasy movies, What can’t Nic Cage do?

Country Strong If you like country And enjoy fine cinema, Stay the fuck away.

No Strings Attached Natalie Portman Silences her Oscar buzz.

(With Ashton, at least.)

The Rite Anthony Hopkins Might exorcize your demons, But then he’ll eat them.

If you think that gun’s big, you should see his ... stamp collection.

But still no wireless?

This week, speculation has been mounting about the possible release of the iPad 2 this April—just one year after that of its groundbreaking predecessor.

In a world where innovation and change in consumer technology are moving faster than ever, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to realistically keep up with every new product that promises to change their lives. Many are convinced that that next year’s new gadget is going to drastically improve our lives. But the truth is, these new tools only change how we do things, and not necessarily what those things are.

For the better part of history, universities’ most important resources were on paper. The university library was the lynchpin of this infrastructure, containing its vast wealth of information on millions of pages.

standout scene towards the film’s end, Kato rides the Black Beauty through a glass elevator, slicing the car in half as it careens up a skyscraper, dodging bullets and sending out showers of sparks.

Requisite ejection seats launch the super-duo out of the Black Beauty and over downtown Los Angeles, as fireworks of rubble beautifully explode below them.

As a fun, albeit not incredibly intricate action movie, The Green Hornet excels. For an action-based blockbuster, the plot moves swiftly, with just enough depth to guide Kato and Reid through their adventures while avoiding what might have been a montage of explosions à la Transformers. For Seth Rogen fans, The Green Hornet is worth a watch, if only for its comedy—and maybe its exploding cars.

“Research took so much longer, Sigita Clark (SLL ’81) said.

“Teachers would put holds on books so that people couldn’t take them out. For course selection, you would get a card that would be like your ticket. It was a paperwork nightmare.”

Compare Clark’s experience to that of Rob Pegoraro (SFS ’93), a technology columnist for Washington Post, who described the way laptops changed the typical college ritual of pulling all-nighters a decade later.

“Before the arrival of laptops, I remember people would bring an entire Mac Plus or Mac SE in some padded backpack and do their all-nighters in Lau … Maybe at the start of my senior year or my junior year people started showing up the first round of Mac PowerBooks.”

As we all know, nearly every student in Lauinger these days

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does his or her work on a laptop. Students still pull all-nighters, though, and run into very much the same problems as their predecessors from decades ago—a more portable computer will not make your argument stronger.

It was around the time of Pegoraro’s senior year that tech-

internet irl

by Nico Dodd

a bi-weekly column about the Internet nological advancement really began to accelerate. Matthew Pescatore, a graduate of the University of Vermont, recalls how he and his classmates would use the landlines in their dorm rooms as underclassmen, but by the time he graduated in 2006, cell phones had almost completely replaced them.

So, we’ve got cell phones, laptops, Internet access. Getting

—Brendan Baumgardner, Leigh Finnegan, John Sapunor work done should be a breeze these days, right? Wrong.

Though the tools have changed, the curriculum, largely, has not. Even though technology is advancing, we are still trying to solve the same problems.

It’s this kind of rapid obsolescence that poses such a dilemma to a university’s information technology infrastructure.

Big moves need to be planned strategically so that the University doesn’t invest in something that’s deemed useless soon after its installation. It’s a good thing that whole Department of Public Safety officers on Segways never caught on.

During the late 90’s, the University invested millions of dollars in IT. Gelardin New Media Center opened in 2001, and simultaneously UIS installed e-podiums in labs.

These are huge developments, which cost buckets of money to build and organize. When tech-

nology evolves as quickly as it does, it’s important to predict what can still be of value in five years. One year’s revolutionary innovation is the next year’s Sony Aibo.

It can be easy to cite other universities’ IT successes as their biggest advantage. We can gripe and complain that lack of a campus-wide wireless network puts us at a grand disadvantage to students at schools that do, but that would be missing the point. It’s better to focus on solving the problems at hand than to get bogged down in a game of catch-up.

We can close down the bookstore in favor of e-readers, digitize the library, and give every student an iPad, but nothing is going to read the books for you.

Think Nico is outdated? No way! Email him at ndodd@georgetownvoice.com

leisure

12 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

C r i t i c a l V o i ces

James Blake, James Blake, R&S Records Well before he even announced his debut LP, James Blake’s narrative was written.

The 22-year old London producer put out three of the most buzz-worthy EPs of 2010, and his prolific release of these experimental but highly melodic dance tracks earned his debut a preemptive label of “groundbreaking” before anyone had heard a single note—James Blake would own 2011 no matter what James Blake sounded like.

This isn’t the first time the British press has celebrated a new musician so confidently, but Blake’s proven skill in a wide array of dance music made him an unusually trustworthy bet. His three 2010 EPs navigated through the nebulous post-dubstep scene, ranging from R&B-tinged two-step

(CMYK) to a haunted take on purple music (The Bells Sketch) to soulful dub (Klavierwerke), united by remarkable production with a refreshing appreciation of silence and space.

Not one to sit still, Blake takes on yet another guise on his first full-length album.

Showing more of his soulful side, James Blake belongs more to the category of “singer/songwriter” than that of “dance.” Though its sound is still uniquely and recognizably Blake’s, the songs have more traditional structures—and Jamie Lidell-esque vocal balladeering—and are a far cry from the delightfully arrhythmic dance music for which he earned his reputation.

The record is not more of the same, and that is no problem.

What is a problem, though, is just how frequently the songs on James Blake fall flat. Lead single “Limit to Your Love,” a cover of an unremarkable Feist song, is a cheesy take on Talk Talk. The “Lindesfarne” suite is nearly identical to Bon Iver ’s terrible vocoder experiment, “Woods,” and the dreadfully dry “Give Me My Month” lacks the typical sound that made even the worst of Blake’s previous tracks worth a listen.

It’s not all bad though.

“To Care (Like You)” perfectly bridges the gap between his cut-and-paste beginnings and this new approach, and “The Wilhelm Scream”—all fuzzedout synths and longing—is far and away the best track he’s ever done. On top of that, the album offers an easy in to Blake’s singular style. It offers a simple route to understanding what exactly he’s doing—and why it’s so groundbreaking.

Voice’s Choices: “To Care (Like You),” “The Wilhelm Scream” —Matthew Collins

Tennis, Cape Dory, Fat Possum Records Escapism is a prevalent theme in today’s music scene (I’m looking at you, Katy Perry enthusiasts). But how many

Lil Wayne’s swag with Bieber’s youth

Once on the cutting edge of social and political commentary, lately rap music has become boring and stagnant.

Rappers like Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame make millions by pairing pedestrian lyrics with grandiloquent beats. Lucky for disillusioned listeners, there is now Odd Future, an unconventional rap crew out of Los Angeles made up of 11 teenagers.

Odd Future, also known as OFWGKTA, or Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, has gained major hype in the rap scene, both for their avantgarde rhymes and their unusual business practices. All 10 of Odd Future’s albums and mixtapes have been posted for free download on the group’s Tumblr. They have resisted major rap labels’ undoubtedly

impressive courtships, choosing instead to remain independent artists with complete creative control over their work.

The success of this method is a testament to the impact that the Internet has made on music, as this small crew of teenagers can produce, record, and distribute their own music across the world all with a single laptop. The success of their records only fuels their hate for the industry, and adds to the almost punk vibe of their image.

Although there music has quality, Odd Future does have a gimmick—youth. No member of the group is older than 23, and some, like Earl Sweatshirt, one of the team’s most prolific writers, are only 16.

(Unfortunately, following last year ’s release of his impres-

sive LP EARL, Sweatshirt has been locked up in a juvenile detention facility. The gang often laments his absence in their blog and YouTube posts.) In a way, Earl is the underground’s own version of Lil Wayne—his

Banger management

by Matthew Decker a bi-weekly column about music rhymes are abrasive and his swagger off the charts, much like the 16-year-old Wayne.

But in place of Wayne’s overthe-top production and megalomania, Earl favors minimal electronic drums that cannot overpower his gritty flow.

Odd Future’s unofficial leader is the mystifying Tyler the Creator, who at 19 has developed a unique voice and

artists actually live out the messages of their songs about the teenage dream? Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, the married couple who make up Tennis, are some of the few who do. After losing patience for their nine-to-five jobs in landlocked Denver, they sold all of their belongings to buy a sailboat and break for the eastern seaboard. During their eight months alone on the Atlantic coast, they decided to document their journey by writing music, which would later become their debut record, Cape Dory. However, this travelogue concept album would be nothing more than folly if its lofi dream pop did not capture their precious story.

The cover of Cape Dory—a doppelganger of ‘80s singer Lisa Hartman’s LP—hints at some of Tennis’s influences. Their minimalist rock is built around surfguitar riffs and breezy melodies, but the true asset to Tennis’s sound is frontwoman Moore’s golden pipes. With simple harmonies, her voice perfectly bridges tropical rhythms with girl-group doo-wop.

Cape Dory’s ten tracks are vignettes of their voyage, often recounting their stops along the coast, like “Baltimore” or style many artists struggle for decades to find. His superbass voice drives introspective rhymes about growing up in a broken family and about his own insecurities. Tyler is the only Odd Future rapper who moves past the rest of the crew’s braggadocio and into true lyrical narrative, and he is helping pave the way for the rest to grow as musicians. His rhymes attack the status quo proudly, and he has said of the group, “I created OF because I felt that we were more talented than 40-year-old rappers talking about Gucci.” Tyler ’s rapping is, above all, full of the iconoclastic rebellion of adolescence, aiming at the complacency of modern rappers.

Today’s rap charts are dominated by bumping dance anthems with little true lyrical or musical value. Many rappers are decades removed

“South Carolina.” On “Marathon,” the album’s lead single, Moore shares the beautiful but eerie experience of their first time sailing at night over woozy keyboarding that breaks into a Best Coast-esque chorus. The beat of “Bimini Bay” pumps like a gently swaying boat, while Moore’s siren voice moves it with disarming beauty.

Tennis is wise to keep the record length just over 30 minutes—its songs don’t stray far from the same sleepy serenity and nautical poetry. After a few tracks, Riley’s guitar and Moore’s start to mesh together so much that it becomes difficult to discern between songs.

Even though Tennis arrives at a time when the market for retrofitted girl-band outfits is a little over-flooded, the abundance of competition doesn’t seem to hinder them too much.

Filled with effortlessly dreamy sound and a unique story, Cape Dory is a voyeuristic peek into a couple’s sabbatical at sea that never loses its intimacy.

Voice’s Choices: “Marathon,” “Bimini Bay,” “Take Me Somewhere” —Luke Howley

from street life but are still quick to rap about it. Odd Future stands out because they are completely connected to their aesthetic—from their blog to their YouTube channel, they are in total control of their sound and image. While Rick Ross raps about hang gliding in Costa Rica, Odd Future rhymes about ditching class and skateboarding.

Odd Future’s rise to fame— Source named them as one of the hottest mix tapes of last year—reminds audiences that underground rap is alive and thriving. While many are content to be force-fed the top-40, it’s nice to know that there are still those willing to stand out, critique the status quo, and demand more.

Tell Matt how you got locked up in a juvenile detention facility at mdecker@georgetownvoice.com

page thirteen

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the georgetown voice

An Open Letter to Andrew W.K.

Not long ago, a member of our staff shared with a number of us a story from his youth, a story that has stuck with him, in which you are a central figure, although it certainly escapes your memory as you have no doubt been involved in countless like it. As it goes, this young writer was attending a show in Scranton, Pennsylvania where you invited the boisterous crowd on stage. Filled with excitement, our young writer scrambled forwards and prepared to hurl himself through the air into the open arms of the crowd. But before he could, you reached out and grabbed him. You pulled him in close with a sweaty arm wrapped around his head, so close that your glorious, greasy locks glanced against his cheek, and whispered these words: “Everything is going to be okay.”

ANDREW W.K.'s PARTY TIPS: 1. Don't count your chickens before they've partied.

2. Walk like a machine gun.

3. Whenever you eat a banana, tell Andrew W.K. about it.

And you know what? You were right. Your hurled our young writer back into the bubbling mass of revelers, and everything was okay. It was more than okay, it was phenomenal. It was the kind of wild, transcendent bliss that only occurs when hundreds of friends thrash about with reckless abandon. It was the one thing that you have encouraged above all else.

It was a party.

We also like to party here at the Voice. And we want to party with you.

You see, we respect the unabashed enthusiasm and relentless positivity with which you approach partying. Your Party Tips on Twitter have inspired us to up our game when it comes to throwing down, and we’d like to invite you to let us know how we’re doing.

A great man once wrote, “Used at the right time, a fistful of confetti can blow minds.” That great man was you, and it was awesome.

We won’t lie to you, you aren’t the first celebrity we’ve reached out to. But you are clearly the best. Last year’s party for Lil’ Wayne was certainly a blast, but general disinterest and a prison sentence kept him from attending. But in retrospect, he may not have been the best choice of celebrity celebrator. We don’t have access to that much cough syrup. And last winter, in a moment of regrettable desperation, we reached out to Snooki, who in turn referred us to her publicist. Apparently Snooki doesn’t party unless she’s getting paid.

But you, Mr. W.K., embody exactly the kinds of good times that we at the Voice aspire to.

Over the years, we like to think that we’ve thrown some pretty good parties. We’ve had traditional college parties of bacchanalian overindulgence. We’ve eaten dozens of animals at rockin’ back yard barbeques. When things start to drag on newspaper production nights, we’ll throw on some Andrew W.K. and have a 3 a.m. energizer party. But should you decide to join us, we are prepared to pull out all the stops to for one all-time, gut-wrenching, party-till-you-puke bonanza.

We’re talking tables sagging under the weight of mountains of nachos. We’re talking high-fives so hard that they break the sound barrier and the sonic boom causes everyone for miles around to spontaneously start partying. You want spandex? You got spandex. There will be shots of whiskey and there will be fresh made horchata, and everything in between. We won’t settle for a simple fistful of confetti—there will be stadium grade confetti cannons that would put the Flaming Lips to shame. And the pit of dancers will be so sweaty that a thousand Sham-Wows couldn’t dry them adequately.

So what do you think? You name the date, and we’ll set it up. And in the meantime, we’ll keep on partying in your honor.

Anxiously partying until your response, The Voice

voices

14 the georgetown voice

january 20, 2011

A student’s search for artifacts a century after rediscovery

by Kate Imel I always imagine that great wonders in this world are discovered intact, uninhabited, and preserved. I imagined that American explorer Hiram Bingham stumbled upon Machu Picchu much like Disney explorers unearth El Dorado or Atlantis, but as I sat on a large stone slab—perhaps once monument to a priestly order or perhaps just a stone—I learned Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu was actually a rediscovery.

In 1911, Bingham was led to the Incan city of Machu Picchu by local farmers familiar with the ruins. In fact, when he arrived Bingham found a family squatting in one of the buildings. Not uninhabited and perhaps not totally untouched, Machu Picchu was nonetheless incredibly intact.

Today, Machu Picchu consists of 90 percent of its original structure, making it a strong candidate for one of the new wonders of the world, a status the site achieved in 2007. Though the site boasts 90 percent of it’s original structure, it

lacks the majority of the artifacts that tell the story of the culture.

These missing artifacts reside in New Haven, Connecticut.

My own rediscovery of Machu Picchu began in a small office in Cusco, Peru where I sat with my friends Kelsey and Rachael as our guide, Oscar, broke down our trek on the Inca trail. We listened, hoping that a semester of excess had left lingering remnants of our athleticism. We began our trek the next morning at 6 a.m., stuffing an embarrassing amount of makeshift breakfast sandwiches into our backpacks, and three stops and two hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of our trail with a young British doctor, a couple in their fifties from New Zealand, and two guides.

Three days later we entered the town Sayaqmarka, or Hidden Town, alone and uninterrupted.

The stonewalls wound in a labyrinthine tangle on the cliff’s edge, over which we could spot only the tips of the Andean mountains above the mist and steam that creeps up after the sunrise.

I felt much like Bingham must have upon entering Machu Picchu. Though thousands had been there before me, the ability to enter this place, to touch the walls, and the absence of ropes and “Do Not Enter” signs created a sense of discovery. An unfortunate fact in our own country is that we cannot usually experience ruins without the contamination of ropes and lines, limiting our ability to rediscover this particular history, or any history for that matter. Though the the restrictions are meant to protect us, and the site, they corrupt the experience. Though Machu Picchu is not devoid of restriction, it nonetheless allows visitors the ability to wander, to explore, and to rediscover independently.

Unfortunately, when we finally reached Machu Picchu the absence of any remaining artifacts from the Incan people was noticeable. What we often forget when we learn of the discovery of the world’s wonders by explorers like Hiram Bingham or Howard Carter is that these incredible sites are often left in ruin, empty shells

without any remnants of the culture that once lived there. Today the treasures of Machu Picchu reside at Yale University, brought back to the United States by Bingham to be studied a century ago.

Though Bingham, unlike many explorers of his time, received the approval of the Peruvian government to take the artifacts, a timeline was never established for their return. During the presidency of Alejandro Toledo, between 2001 and 2006, the country renewed its focus on honoring the heritage of the indigenous peoples of Peru, intensifying the dispute.

The dispute escalated in the months leading up to the final agreement, even making its way to the street in the New York City marathon, which featured American and Peruvian runners wearing t-shirts with the slogan, “Yale, return Machu Picchu artifacts to Peru.”

This year not only marks the centennial of the rediscovery of Machu Picchu, but also a return of the artifacts of Machu Picchu,

which will reside in a museum in Cusco. Yale and the Peruvian government reached an agreement in late 2010 to begin to transport the 4,000 artifacts (though according to Peru the number of artifacts Yale has is roughly 40,000 ) from Yale to Cusco.

Entering the ruins by way of the Inca trail on the way to Machu Picchu was an unforgettable experience. To know the history of a place and then to experience it is much like blowing the dust off an old book—in this moment unknown, but on some level familiar. Soon the artifacts belonging to Sayaqmarka, Machu Picchu and the Peruvian people will be home where tourists, or rather explorers, can rediscover a more complete history of a culture rather than the empty shell of ruins filled only with stories and imagination.

Kate Imel is a junior in the College. She cried tears of joy when Rose returned the necklace to the sea.

A petition to the Academy on behalf of How to Train Your Dragon

by Aodhan Beirne I’ve never been big on award shows, nor do I consider myself a movie buff. I admit that I have made bets on Oscar ballots, but I would be willing to bet on anything, as long as I can make it a competition among my family or friends. This year, however, I plan on following the Academy Awards with as much passion as I bring to family-night Scattergories. How to Train Your Dragon, reeling from its defeat

at the Golden Globes, will most likely go head to head with Toy Story 3 for Best Animated Film.

Benefitting greatly from the legacy of its predecessors, Toy Story 3, the finale of Disney-Pixar’s magnum opus trilogy, is a brilliant end to a beloved story.

It does not, however, stand up as a classic on its own. Though I concede that Toy Story 3 was great, How to Train Your Dragon was better.

Though I’m sure that How to Train Your Dragon will not

I’m going to make the Academy an offer they can’t refuse.

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receive its proper recognition, I am equally sure that it deserves to win Best Animated Feature, if not Best Picture. Its G rating belies its wit and surprising depth. It may be marketed as a children’s movie, but it develops themes more profound than any other children’s movie I have ever seen, Toy Story 3 included.

What struck me initially about How to Train Your Dragon were its 3-D effects. The scenes in which the protagonist Hiccup flies with his newly befriended dragon are extraordinary and rival any 3-D scenes to date. If Avatar had an original story and heart, it would be How to Train Your Dragon.

It was only toward the end of, however, that I realized just how powerful the movie actually was. The story focuses on the atypically heroic and aptly named Hiccup, a pacifist who, after befriending the most feared dragon in his town, refuses the tradition of killing a dragon as a rite of passage. He is ostracized as he continues to forge his friendship with Toothless, the benign dragon.

As it turns out, all dragons but one are benign, and eventually Hiccup’s talent for training dragons garners him respect and vindication. The pivotal scene of the movie comes after the battle in which the

town defeats the one dragon still threatening them. Hiccup, having finally proven his heroism in battle, steps out of bed.

He looks down, and he sees a prosthetic leg, added after the injuries he sustained in battle.

There is a moment’s hesitation before he looks up, undaunted by the magnitude of his sacrifice, and tries to walk outside to the townspeople whose lives he had saved.

Hiccup’s physical sacrifice is what defines him as a bona fide hero and separates the movie from Toy Story 3. Hiccup can never escape the price of his heroism. The tragedy of his sacrifice will continue to haunt him and the town that vilified him. The notion of heroism, and the price one must pay are not watered down, as they often are in Pixar movies. The audience cannot feel sadness for Woody when he loses his hat if they have seen Hiccup lose his leg. Hiccup is comparable to The Lion King’s Simba, who also must prove his strength in the face of loss and tragedy.

Though the ending of Toy Story 3 is poignant, all parties are for the better. Andy goes off to college, and the toys will bring unlimited happiness to another child. Buzz and Woody are saved from every mishap and escape unscathed. It is one-dimensional, and ends al-

most exactly as anyone who has followed the Toy Story trilogy would expect it to. There’s nothing to keep you thinking after the credits roll, while I found myself wondering about Hiccup’s fate with his tragically acquired disability.

How to Train Your Dragon gracefully merges excitement and depth, while Toy Story 3 lacks the latter. Unfortunately, I think the Academy will discredit How to Train Your Dragon because of its fantastical premise and special effects, while Toy Story 3 will float to victory because of the greatness of the trilogy, and Pixar’s unimpeachable movie record.

I’ll be watching the Academy Awards this year, and for the first time, not to ensure my prognosticating superiority over my siblings. I’ll be watching for vindication. How to Train Your Dragon, like Hiccup himself, is an underdog, discounted and pushed aside by popular opinion despite its greatness. Inspired by Hiccup, I may even be willing to guess against Toy Story 3, sacrificing my Oscar ballot bet for what I think is right.

Aodhan Beirne is a junior in the College. Don’t get him started on the terrible and unjust ending of Up.

voices

georgetownvoice.com

the georgetown voice

15

Late bloomer close to realizing her gasoline fight dream

by Kelsey McCullough For most people, their sophomore year of high school was a time of sweet sixteen parties and the increased independence that came with learning how to drive.

For me, it was the year I had no friends and watched Zoolander every weekend.

With all the talk of Zoolander 2 coming to theaters around fall 2012, I cannot help but think

back to sophomore year. If I really stop to think about it, I can recall a few weekends when I gave Zoolander a rest. I was occasionally lucky enough to score an invite from my parents to go to a party or dinner with them and their friends. Unfortunately, not even my parents wanted to hang out with me every weekend and I was often left at home with my dog, Merriweather. A typical Friday night in my 16-year-old life

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There’s more to college than being really, really, ridiculously good looking.

Big Brother: Leo’s Edition The Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall is many things to many people. It is a study spot, a breeding ground for awkward situations, a prime observation point for Like A Little posts, and a veritable feast of subpar foods. Regardless of how students view Leo’s, it is one of the most familiar places on campus.

Yet in the past three years our dining hall has been through many changes, from the removal of norovirusinducing Grab’n’Go to the addition of a salad and wrap station. The most noticeable and most discomfiting change to Leo’s has been this year ’s crackdown on students’ ability to serve themselves. Students have been yelled at for letting the vegetarian curry

serving spoon come near the meat lasagna on their plates, for bringing a plate they have already used to get a second serving, or for delicately picking up a lone cookie or garlic roll without using tongs.

I won’t defend these practices as the most hygienic, and I am guilty of committing all of them on a number of occasions. But unassuming meateaters can’t be expected to be overly careful in keeping vegan utensils “uncontaminated.” There’s nothing wrong with conserving water by reusing dishes if they don’t get particularly dirty in the first round of food. And if I have the dexterity in my fingers to grab a cookie without touching the others, why do I need to use tongs?

Let the Voice be your voice. We accept opinions, letters to the editor, personal experiences, and creative writing that are exclusive to the Voice. Submissions do not express the opinion of the board of the Voice. The Voice reserves the right to edit submissions for accuracy, length, and clarity. To submit, email voices@georgetownvoice.com or come to the Voice office in Leavey 413.

Opinions expressed in the Voices section do not necessarily reflect the views of the General Board of the Voice.

included some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, calling my 85-yearold grandparents—because they were the only people I could think of who would be home on a Friday night—and watching Zoolander.

When I regale my current friends (yes, I do have friends now) with high school stories, they don’t understand why, of all movies, I would watch Zoolander repeatedly. What they do not understand is that when you do not really have any friends, the last movie you want to watch is something like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which does nothing more than remind you that you are sitting at home with your dog, rather than spending your weekend with your four best friends or your European boyfriend. So I settled on Zoolander, because, like me, Derek Zoolander was what most people would call a loser, and his ability to turn left and redeem himself in the modeling world gave me hope that one day I might be redeemed in the social world.

After sophomore year, school was better, but it was far from a John Hughes movie. I stopped thinking I would be happier at the Derek Zoolander School for

There is a reasonable explanation for why an ordinary student would not think twice about the actions so frowned upon by Leo’s employees. Yet we are constantly reprimanded by the new, seemingly permanent “food police” standing behind the serving trays to watch us meticulously as we serve ourselves. They are not wont to give friendly re-

Carrying On

by Julie Patterson A rotating column by Voice senior staffers

minders, instead taking a tone that suggests that we know these unwritten rules by heart and are blatantly disobeying them.

I don’t know when these food-serving rules became institutionalized, but when they did no one bothered to inform the students. Surely if these rules were publicized on the Georgetown Dining website, posted at the entrance to the dining hall, or sent out in a mass email to the students, there would be greater acquiescence. Instead, there is only

Students Who Can’t Read Good than at the school I was currently attending, and by the end of junior year I even had a group of girls at school that I considered to be close friends. By the time I graduated, I had come to peace with the fact that my high school days were not my glory days, and I looked forward to being able to leave it all behind as I started at Georgetown.

At the start of freshman year at Georgetown, conversation with new friends often went back to stories and memories from high school, since college had just barely started. I was trying to make friends and avoid having Georgetown be anything like sophomore year, so when telling people about my high school days, I painted a generously rosy picture. I knew that starting college, I had to be better at making friends than I was in high school, especially since my parents would not be around to invite me to their parties, and the thought of watching Zoolander without even my dog around to keep me company was too much to bear. I feared that stories of my late nights with Derek Zoolander, Hansel, and Merriweather would not quite live up to the

scolding by watchful employees whose reproaches makes us feel like infants.

We pay a too egregious rate for meal plans to be reprimanded as we shovel bulkpreparation food onto our plates. If these regulations are to promote greater hygiene in the dining hall, I am of course supportive. But hygiene has never seemed like a priority at Leo’s. During cold season I watched an employee cough, mouth open and uncovered, while preparing salads. In my sophomore year, I found a metal washer in my fried rice.

Employees frequently scoop fallen vegetables off the counter near the food trays and place them back in the tray.

It seems as if Leo’s is attempting to shift the blame of its reputation for inadequacy to the students. By placing an employee behind each food service line to point out when students are not practicing perfectly sterile food service practices, Leo’s is creating a façade of cleanliness while continuing damgerous practices such as allowing sick employees to work and replacing foods that have fallen from their tray.

tales of raging house parties, so I kept it to myself.

Luckily, housing placed me in New South where, with one hundred people on a floor, it was difficult to not find people to be friends with. Moreover, the hallways on weekend nights proved too loud to watch movies. My Zoolander days finally seemed to be behind me. I started to laugh about those times and stopped caring about whether I was “cool” or not in high school, and quickly realized that no one else cared either. To my surprise, sharing my story with people did not kill conversation the way I thought it would, and during my freshman year I actually did watch Zoolander one night, but this time I was with other people.

Five years after sophomore year the release of Zoolander 2 looms large, and the way my social life has been trending, I might even have a friend or two who will want to go see it with me.

Kelsey McCullough is a junior in the College. If you want to see Zoolander 2 with her, she’ll be ripping out her underwear at Thirds.

I have no personal issue with the employees who do the policing. I know they are simply doing their jobs. But you have to wonder whose idea this was. Was it the brainchild of the pajama-pants wearing chef I always see wandering around at lunch? Perhaps the concoction of the female manager who is overly fond of sweater vests?

Or just a suit-wearing exec in a cushy Aramark office somewhere, straining the usually friendly relationship between students and employees?

I’m not implying that Leo’s should allow students to grab food with their hands and dip the vegan broccoli spoon into a vat of beef chili. But if Leo’s is serious about hygiene, they need to change some of their own practices before they expect students to change theirs.

If not, it’s only a matter of time before rebellion in the form of a floor-wide food fight incites a revolution within the world of Leo’s.

Julie Patterson is a junior in the College. Next on her Georgetown food hitlist are the vending machines in the Southwest Quad.

New Year’s Resolutions...

will YOU keep yours?

The Voice’s new year’s resolution is to put out the best paper this campus has ever seen. It’s a resolution we definitely intend to keep. And this is just the beginning...