VOICE
October 23, 2015
The Georgetown
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OCTOBER 23, 2015
THE GEORGETOWN VOICE Volume 48 • Issue 5
staff editor-in-chief Chris Almeida Managing editor daniel varghese Executive editors Noah buyon, christopher castano, lara fishbane news editor ryan miller assitant editors Courtnie baek, lilah burke, Liz teitz Leisure editor Elizabeth baker assistant editors Jon block, dinah farrell, brian Mcmahon Sports Editor Joe pollicino assistant editor max roberts halftime Leisure editors Mike bergin, erika bullock Sports editors alex boyd, rob ponce assistant sports editor matt jasko Voices editor graham piro assistant editor charles evain
“american gothic” by Megan Howell
Editorials
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design Cover editor megan howell editors eleanor sugrue, ellie yaeger spread editors pam shu, sophie super
Carrying On: The Path to the Dark Side Noah Buyon
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PHOTO editor JOSHUA RAFTIS
All Stressed Up Ray Gao
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copy Chief suzanne trivette editors Sharon Mo, Hanh Nguyen, Amal Farooqui, Maddi Kaigh Anna Gloor, Clara Cecil, Greer Richey, Hannah Wingett Dana Suekoff, Rachel Greene, Matthew Soens
SNAP, Crackle, DOPS Joseph Laposata
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online online editor kenneth lee social media editors sahil nair, tiffany tao
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Editorial Board chair Laura Kurek
Jesters on the Throne Lilah Burke Safe Spaces or Echo Chambers? Kenneth Lee and Graham Piro
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Bridge of Spies Finds Extra in the Ordinary Graham Piro
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editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057
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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. 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.
associate editors marisa hawley, kevin huggard, sabrina kayser, christina libre Staff writers sourabh bhat, Emilia brahm, Emmy buck, Caitlyn cobb, brendan crowley, Patrick drown, emmanuel elone, joe laposata, maneesha panja, Brendan saunders, thomas stubna, manuela Tobias, colleen zorc staff photographers Ambika ahuja, saman asdjodi, jen costa, megan howell, gavin myers, freddy rosas, Taryn Shaw, andrew Sullivan staff designers Lizzy blumburg, river davis, katie hyland, Johnny jung general manager tim annick
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
{ From the web } The power went out in ICC during my international energy policy class. Lol. @MILLERdfillmore (Ryan Miller, News Editor)
Georgetown Sports Information
IN FOCUS
Men’s Soccer Continues Undefeated Streak
Georgetown men’s soccer defeated the DePaul Blue Demons 1-0. Read more on GeorgetownVoice.com
Add a Little “Sweet” -ness First By Kathleen Coughlin ACROSS 1. One of the three bears 5. Hawaiian greeting 10. One billionth of a kg 13. First Arabic letter 14. Spoke (up) 15. Nobelist Niels 16. Impolite look 17. Puccini work 18. Tony’s British cousin 19. Fifth-year Hogwarts test 21. Neil Diamond song, in theme 23. NFL half 26. ___ carte 28. Fleshy fruit 29. Tiny tree veggies 32. Ascend 33. Brought into the world 34. Hint 36. Long, long time 37. _____Pop, Seuss book 38. Antlered animal 42. Salk vaccine 43. Band of Skulls song or
sauce, in theme 44. Defrost 46. And so forth 49. Cook’s wear 51. Magician’s prop 52. Wee bit 53. Thanksgiving, always 57. Dog’s foot 59. “Too bad!” 60. Function 62. Lynyrd Skynyrd song with Alabama, in theme 66. Solitary 67. Casual eatery 68. Possessive pronoun 69. Telephone no. addition 70. “For goodness ___!” 71. Fog DOWN 1. Buddy 2. Pub order 3. Dessert choice 4. Hair style 5. Moon craft
6. Mouth part 7. Oil org. 8. Zeus’ wife 9. Jewish month 10. On the go 11. Pants fabric 12. Salad restaurant, in theme 15. Trunks 20. WWII servicewoman 22. Leave out 23. “Take a Chance on Me” group 24. Froyo place, in theme 25. Essence 27. Binary star in Perseus 30. Neurologist’s concern, briefly 31. Term of endearment, in theme 32. Raced 35. The reason I really want candy, in theme 37. Question word 38. Old, fast plane 39. ____ the line 40. Atmosphere 41. Catch 42. Kitchen utensils
Writing Center and SEED D.C. Partner for Tutoring Program
Cedric burks
A new partnership between Georgetown and the SEED School of Washington D.C. has begun this semester. 44. Absentee 45. Farm animal 47. Shenanigans 48. Greek letter 49. _____of Two Cities 50. Colorful flowers 54. Clothes 55. Largest continent 56. Tug 58. To _____ it may concern… 61. “Golly!” 63. French affirmation 64. Married woman’s title 65. Most suffix
Last issue’s solution
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EDITOIRALS
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OCTOBER 23, 2015
Please Sir, Can I Have Some More? Sports Donations Highlight a Neglected Arts Community Two weeks ago, Peter and Susan Cooper donated $50 million to Georgetown’s Athletic Department—while construction for the $62 million John R. Thompson Jr. Intercollegiate Athletics Center is well underway. These recent donations made to the Athletics Department have highlighted how neglected the arts scene is by administrators and alumni alike. While such donations are certainly a positive for Georgetown, the university should also increase its efforts to court funds—whether from generous single gifts or fundraising campaigns—for the arts on campus. Sports are obviously a huge part of the college experience, offering students the opportunity to challenge themselves and cheer for their community. But it is hard to sit by and watch as one portion of the student body stands to benefit so much from the generosity of alumni, while many others will not. Recently, the de la Cruz family donated an undisclosed amount to finance an art gallery in their name in the Walsh Building. However, more is needed for the art community, where student clubs and faculty departments continue to be constrained by insufficient resources.
For the Department of Art, the studios on floors two and three of the Walsh building are notoriously cramped, as courses and other departments compete for square footage. Storage space is severely lacking. Art students often vie for locker space, leaving many with no choice but to schlep their supplies to and from class. Space for full-size projects is virtually non-existent, forcing students to leave in-progress works out in the open—a considerable risk. What’s more, prospective art students face a studio fee of $150 per semester. Students must also purchase their own materials for class, an out-of-pocket expense that can cost over $200. These expenses prohibit some students from taking art courses at Georgetown. Solutions could involve providing the Art Department with funds to purchase supplies to distribute to art students. Students involved with Georgetown’s theatre and music scene face challenges as well. Even with the opening of Healy Family Student Center, spaces to practice music and acting are difficult to come by and some are in poor condition. Georgetown’s Children’s Theatre practices in the Village C classroom,
a facility with restricted GOCard access that’s adjacent to the GERMS office, resulting in frequent lock-outs and noise. In New North’s Studio D, students may practice and record music, but approval is needed from the Department of Performing Arts, a process that can be more accessible to performing arts student than to those within other departments. The new de la Cruz Gallery of Art will replace Walsh’s Black Box theater, eliminating a major performance space on campus— one the Nomadic Theatre typically uses for its performances. So, the Department of Art and Art History will benefit at the expense of the Department of Performing Arts. Student-run arts groups face particular challenges, as they receive funding from the Performing Arts Advisory Council, an advisory board comprised of both students and faculty. Other advisory boards, like the Student Activities Commission (SAC), are entirely student-run . As a result, the Department of Performing Arts holds a tighter grip on the groups it funds, resulting in more oversight than student groups who receive SAC funding.
Camila Hernandez
We do not have the space here to address all the shortcomings that the Georgetown art community faces. In general, resources and space remain inadequate, reducing the visibility and accessibility of arts on campus. It suffices to say that more financing is needed. To cultivate a thriving arts community, the university should allocate additional funds from the successful “Campaign for Georgetown” and encourage well-off alumni to follow suit.
Eye in the Sky Boston University Monitors Social Media to Predict Campus Crime During the shootings at Umpqua Community College, Texas Southern University, and Northern Arizona University, the Georgetown University Police Department (GUPD) was put on high alert for any suspicious activity on campus. These tragedies and GUPD’s reaction highlights a reality of campus security—much of it occurs after-the-fact. What if GUPD could predict an active shooter event before it happened? Boston University is using new technology to do just that, creating both an interesting and troublesome precedent for university law enforcement. Since 2012, 143 school shootings have devastated communities across the nation. Every university has procedures to deal with such events: Georgetown works with the Metropolitan Police Department to assess local threats. GUPD also collaborates with university mental health administrators to identify individuals at risk for violent behavior. Meanwhile, Boston University’s Police Department (BUPD) has begun to monitor social media networks to bolster it ability to identify potentially threatening individuals and prevent them from doing harm.
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Last January, BUPD unveiled new software to monitor nine social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and Yik Yak. This online tool tracks posts on these sites and flags those containing words associated with violence. In particular, the software reviews social media posts that have the location services feature enabled. Once a suspicious post is flagged, BUPD can pinpoint exactly where that post originated. The software then creates a “geofence” around that location, enabling the BUPD to conduct real-time analysis of all subsequent posts made in that area. Moreover, BUPD’s software monitors the social media activity of anyone in the vicinity of BU’s campus—meaning BU students and faculty, as well as individuals passing through the area, can be tracked. BUPD’s software is not only useful for identifying potentially violent, unstable students, but also local criminals. For a school like Georgetown where crime frequently occurs in the surrounding neighborhoods by actors unaffiliated with the university, BUPD’s software is appealing.
But, the BUPD’s software raises at least as many problems as it solves. The software is certainly a powerful predictive tool, but it is also a possible invasion of students’ privacy. BU’s news and information website BU Today reported on the software days after the shooting in Roseburg, Ore. The initial reporting, however, fails to mention whether the software can access only public posts, or any type of post. Even if the software only accesses public posts now, what if later models are able to view posts intended for “Friends only” audiences or private messages? The software is also likely to flag false positives. Many people use social media to rant; fortunately, not as many people shoot up schools. As a result, police might waste considerable time and money on false leads. In addition, students might have police records only because of their word choice on social media. It is also unclear whether BUPD developed the software itself or purchased it from an external vendor, which would clarify the possibility and ease of this technology appearing on other campuses. Given these concerns, this Editorial Board finds BUPD’s software in need of more
Ellie Yaeger
development before it can be truly effective in its aims—especially if other universities begin to adopt similar programs. Currently, the online tool appears to hold the potential to combat very serious threats that campuses across America face, but its implementation needs improvement. If Georgetown were to one day consider use of such software, we urge careful analysis and vetting of the product. BUPD’s software provides an intriguing functionality to combat issues of campus safety, but it also adds to the ongoing debate in our country about safety at the sacrifice of privacy.
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
The Path to the Dark Side
Carrying On: Voice Staffers Speak
Forcing Hate Out of Our Lives
I can be a bit of a hater. I always have been, and perhaps I always will be. In middle school, I called myself a “nonconformist” (my sole act of nonconformity was boycotting Hollister and mocking those who didn’t), and in the future, I’ll probably call myself a “cultural critic,” which will primarily entail me judging people for giving their business to Starbucks while I pay too much for some fair-trade cold brew nonsense at an independent coffeeshop. I’m really just dancing around the label, though: “hater” suits me. My experiences at Georgetown have given me plenty of ammunition for my hater-dom. My day-one exposure to new and scary things like Republicans, Vineyard Vines, and people who are actually religious brought out the hater in me, and, among my friends at least, I’ve tended to wear my disdain on my sleeve. Trust me when I that say the list of things that have seriously irked me on the Hilltop is long and ever-expanding. The thing is, I’m not particularly proud of this, and I have therefore endeavored to rid myself of my hater ways through the healing power of song and film. Join me on my odyssey.
“Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” – Taylor Swift, “Shake It Off ” This song—in particular, this lyric—is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about haters. That fact in itself is a testament to just how irritatingly viral Taylor Swift Incorporated is (I mean that pathologically, not positively). I digress. Yes. That is correct, Taylor. Haters do hate. But let’s give America’s
pop princess a little more credit here. I think the people Swift pays to write her songs Swift is getting at a few interesting things here. Firstly, there’s an unspoken postscript to this lyric: “Haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate [no matter what you do].” The implication, of course, is that you should “do you,” because you’ll catch flack either way. Evidently, a lot of people have taken this message to heart, because, as a soonto-be-ex-hater, I can confirm that hating a behavior or trend doesn’t put a stop to it. People I know are still Instagramming their brunch. Secondly, there’s a reason Taylor says “hate” five times here, and it’s not because she needs to flesh out a chorus (okay, it is). She’s saying that all haters do is hate, on reMay Li peat, ad infinitum—and, boy, that sure sounds like a sad existence.
“Everybody hating, we just call ‘em fans though.” – Fetty Wap, “Trap Queen” Pithy. Profound. Proof enough that Fetty has got it all figured out. This lyric is a shot across the bow to haters like me. By hating, Fetty explains, haters are only giving those they hate the attention and the authentication they don’t want to dole out. To use an extreme example, consider the Westboro Baptist Church, whose members paid a mercifully brief visit to Georgetown last semester. I worry—and I think Fetty would too—that, by vocally expressing my disdain for the WBC (I stood outside at the front gates wearing a gay pride shirt and used close to, if not all, of Carlin’s seven dirty words), all I accomplished was to validate the group’s efforts. Hating, I think, is really a twisted for m of admiration: it’s an admission, however underhanded, that someone or something merits a reaction. For those things that tr uly deser ve hatred (and the WBC, we can all agree, is one such thing), the best way to make them go away is probably by deploying ignorance, not ag gression. (See also:
“Screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it.” – Kanye West, “Power” and “They see me rollin’ / they hatin’...” – Chamillionaire, “Ridin’ ft. Krayzie Bone” ) “And when you hate, then you’re bound to get irate.” – will.i.am, “Where Is The Love?”
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I know you whipped out the ol’ rhyming dictionary for this one, will.i.am., but point well taken. Not only is hating ineffective, as Fetty and Taylor have shown; it’s bad for your health! To check this, I typed “hating” into WebMD’s “Symptom Checker” tool—it turns out that I might have Mad Cow Disease.
“Let the hate flow through you.” – Emperor Palpatine, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of The Jedi Mmm. Tempting offer, Palpatine. But look what it did to you (and your skin). Sith-lightning induced dermatitis aside, Palpatine’s saga really gets me thinking. I have tended to demonize what I dislike at Georgetown, to make them out to be representative of some kind of monstrous wrong, such that they resemble, metaphorically, the Emperor. In my militancy, though, I give those I disagree with reasons to demonize me in turn. For instance, I’ve always been crystal clear about my feelings on a woman’s right to choose, and I have long been resentful of the fact that a certain slice of campus openly and vocally disagrees with me. I couldn’t (well, I refused) to understand the view opposite my own, and I assumed the worst of those who held it. Because I made no secret of that, they probably assumed the same of me. My experience in political advertising this summer gave a lot of exposure (albeit, initially unwanted) to the other side’s views, and I came to realize that many—but not all—folks go to bat on this issue because, for them, it’s a matter of the heart, not abstract policy. I still am in wholehearted disagreement with the same group of people on the subject of abortion, but I can better see them as people, not retrogrades, now that I’ve dropped my gut-level disdain. I’ve taken a softer tone in my conversation with said people, and so far, it’s been a twoway street. Of course, the divisions raised by abortion seems as intractable as ever, but surely we can all agree that seeing compassion in those who disagree with us is a better starting point for any debate. If there is one thing that haters like me should take away from pop culture’s musings on the subject, it’s that hate is not the most productive way of airing and addressing your grievances. There are certainly things worth hating—big things, like restricted access to healthcare, and little things, like study abroad blogs. Haters need to find better ways of needling them. Graham Greene, the famous twentieth-century British novelist, once wrote that “hate is a failure of imagination.” I think he’s right. But what do I know? I have Mad Cow Disease.
BY NOAH BUYON
He is a junior in the College.
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VOICES
All Stressed Up Raising the Curtain on a Hoya’s Life
Should you find yourself having a genuinely relaxing and easy day, it’s easy to believe that something is off.
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OCTOBER 23, 2015
They say that hindsight is 20/20. As my time on the Hilltop began, I wanted to get as involved in campus life as possible. Unfortunately, when I reflect on my experience, I realize that I may have committed a little too much. I signed up for five classes, became a member of DC Reads, and joined a theater group. I soon realized that I had become part of a crowd. The student body at Georgetown constantly feels the need to be perfect. This pressure can manifest itself in many different ways. But thanks to my part in theater, I soon learned that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it can even be positive. As a freshman, I quickly picked up on the fact that people here definitely try, consciously or not, to glorify stress. Should you find yourself having a genuinely relaxing and easy day, it’s easy to believe that something is off. Now that I have discovered the theater program at Georgetown, I can confidently say that those days of full relaxation are completely behind me. I love theater. In fact, if you were to ask anyone who graduated from the same high school as I did, they would tell you that the theater is precisely where I spent most of my time outside of class. I am by no means a hotshot actor. I have discovered the precious and intricate elements of theater that lie backstage, and I intend on staying there, at least most of the time. I designed the lights for eight shows back in high school. So, I thought it was time to try something different in college. That is why I gladly accepted the offer to be assistant stage-manage for her in the fall production of War With the Newts in the Department of Performing Arts. Naïve as I was, I entered the Georgetown theater department completely underestimating the amount of effort it would demand. From the lack of large posters and frenzied promotions, like those you see from big clubs on campus (The Corp, Blue & Gray... you name ‘em), I thought maybe theater at Georgetown was not such a big deal after all. In addition, the position Assistant Stage Manager signaled to me that this job shouldn’t be a huge time commitment, and that it could not possibly be a complex role. Well, I was wrong. With a 25-hour-per-week rehearsal schedule, Newts soon became a heavy load. But that did not stop me from loving this stressful endeavor. Theater at high school, although intense and spectacular in many of its own ways, was small in comparison to the scope of the project I am currently undertaking. I am honored to be working with some of the most brilliant and gifted people in an extremely challenging yet meaningful environment. Our director has a creative talent that is beyond the scope I would ever have encountered in high school. Thanks to the people involved, I have actually fallen in love with this show, and with theater again. Before I started at Georgetown, I convinced myself that I should put theater aside and move on to trying new things. But I knew at a place like Georgetown, where opportunities are scarce, I was not going to let the chance to work with the department slip by. Like I said, with opportunity comes responsibility, and in my case, a rather hefty one. Stress is unavoidable in this scenario. But I have gradually come to learn to appreciate the stress and this show I am working on. Who knows? Maybe someone I know will one day sail out of Georgetown and become the next Bradley Cooper. Through actively pushing my limits daily, I have begun to appreciate my work in theater in new ways. Assistant Stage Manager, a position I initially dismissed and believed to be simple yet burdensome, has brought me to see the opposite. It led me to learn that, although I have chosen to push myself in my freshman year, I ultimately am doing something I love. Georgetown has provided me with the opportunity to take on stress more
introspectively and understand that I do not have to view theater as a stressor or something that is taking away from what little free time I have. Instead, I have grown to see theater as a form of expression for my soul, as a place where I belong, and as an art I can appreciate. Theater is something that gives me time to simply get carried away and be immersed in a world of creativity and extension. Against the business of our academic lives we all have here at Georgetown, it seems essential to me that we all find and retain something key to our identity, be it GU Democrats, GAAP, or even the juggling club! Should it ever become too stressful, try to see it in a different light. It may have
Patricia Lin
taken me a while, but I have found my quintessence and a group of people I can genuinely connect with. I really appreciated what Dean Chester Gillis told me the other day when I went to his home for dinner. He said, and I’m quoting roughly as accurately as I can: “The people you meet at Georgetown will be the people that dance at your wedding.” I am certain when I say that I have never intended on coming to Georgetown just for a degree. When I look back in the future, I hope I can say that I willingly put myself through the stressful months of theater, in order to meet and befriend some of the most brilliant people. Stress, for what it’s worth, is glorified here at Georgetown. But that should not prevent it from being a positive thing. Amidst all of the crazy classes and work I am doing, I just want to leave you with this: Sleep is for the dead. But sleep just enough, and you can go on enjoying the Hoya experience truly and meaningfully.
BY RAY GAO
He is a freshman in the College.
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
Serial Confusion for Off-Campus Residents For a Friday night, it was a pretty mild party. For one thing, the only music was coming from my iPhone; for another, all the guests were seated around my kitchen table. But the knock on the door came all the same. The Student-Neighborhood Assistance Program- or SNAP- has a reputation that precedes it far before you hear the knock on your door. They’re the bad guys, the embodiment of neighbors who resent our very presence, and a larger symbol of the added stipulations placed on students living off campus. To be fair, most of the adjustments to off-campus life are adjustments to the real world that the university has little to do with. Last year, living in an on-campus townhouse, I had to take out my own trash, or my trash wouldn’t get taken out. This year, living in a townhouse off campus, I have to take out my own trash, or I’ll be arrested. Considering I probably should have been arrested for the things I did in Blue House—which I am legally forbidden from commenting on by an injunction from the Supreme Court of New Zealand—this change is stark and unforgiving. SNAP, as mentioned before, is a good symbol of the relationship off-campus seniors have with their community. They may have a villainous reputation, but most of their off-campus knocks aren’t write-ups, but well-intended warnings to students who are rowdy. I learned this while talking to the Office of Neighborhood Life as I investigated what had happened as a result of the knock on my own door. But that wasn’t how it felt in the moment, when a university official was addressing me in my own home telling me to turn down my music and that he was going to file a report about the incident. What did that mean? Was I being written up? Was off-campus life so restrictive that six people listening to unamplified music was enough to get written up? Fortunately, it was not, but it was enough to make me realize that I was a special subclass of resident. Double trash violations are a good example of how the university treats seniors like children. If off-campus seniors get cited by the city for
leaving bins out or taking trash out improperly, they also get cited by the university, and these citations come with community service . When I checked into the Office of Neighborhood Life for my meeting, every other check-in besides mine was for trash violations. This is patently ridiculous; any other resident of the neighborhood would only pay the fine from the city, and to have the university running around checking on students seems micro-managerial and overbearing. When you move off-campus, the university requires that you register your off-campus address and attend an off-campus living info session. But what extra responsibilities do students who live outside of SNAP’s boundary (Burleith, West Georgetown, Foxhall and the Cloisters) have? What about those few students who live in Rosslyn? I now wonder where the imaginary line is within which the university will bother to care if you’re noisy. The university only cares about these neighborhoods because they’re the only reason things like SNAP exist: the neighborhoods hate us and they have all of the power. Not only is this too politicky for the average student moving off-campus, they also have no say in the matter. So going forward, it’s worth looking at a few things you can do to improve your off-campus life. One of the best decisions I’ve made this year was getting to know my neighbors, a young couple with an adorable toddler. Talking to them is not only personally enjoyable, it’s also the single best thing I can do to prevent noise complaints. It also helped me put myself in their shoes; if I were them, I wouldn’t want loud college students waking up my kid either, especially not if what’s waking him / her up is a verbal storm of rather creative curses. Living off campus has also allowed me to explore my new local area and learn about a new part of Georgetown. Up further on my part of 33rd Street are some hole-in-the-wall art galleries, Perhaps best of all, we’re right next to both Pizza Movers and Manny and Olga’s. We’re trying to befriend the perpetually-drunk workers so they’ll just let us cut through their back alley to save time. Prior to moving, I also bothered studying up on where my new address was in DC. Not all off-campus addresses are in the same vicinity; Houses in Burleith and West Georgetown can be 10-15 minutes away from each other. My own address is only a 10 minute walk from Dupont Circle, which has led to several Sunday mornings at the Dupont Farmers Market. What’s more, the bus routes right next to my house take me right to the south side of the circle, or up into Glover Park. Being off campus may have cost me proximity to campus, but it has allowed me to be a much more active citizen of Washington, D.C. at large. Being an off-campus student has undeniable drawbacks. Some are inevitable, but many others are unfair exploitations of the vastly disproportionate power dynamic between longer-term residents and students, who won’t be around long enough to complain. Despite this, I’ve learned to view living off campus as the training wheel version of being a real adult with his own place. As of next year, that is what I’ll have to be. So while I won’t stop complaining about the parts of off-campus life that I see as grossly unnecessary, it’s also important to put it in the context of all of the benefits gained. Even knowing all the downsides, I’d live off-campus again in a heartbeat.
VOICES
SNAP, Crackle, DOPS
Was offcampus life so restrictive that six people listening to unamplified music was enough to get written up?
BY JOSEPH LAPOSATA
He is a senior in the College. Erin annick
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OCTOBER 23, 2015
Andrew Sullivan
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
Jesters on the Throne
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How a Joke Ticket Took the Georgetown University Student Association by Storm By: Lilah Burke
It started with the campaign video. Two young men in suits smile for the camera over patriotic music. “My name is Joe Luther,” one begins. “And my name is Connor Rohan,” says another. “And we are running for GUSA President and Vice President.” The Luther-Rohan ticket [Full disclosure: Connor Rohan is a former Voice staffer.] began entirely as a joke. “A Luther-Rohan administration would end this living nightmare that we call home,” Rohan says in the video, posted in February. “We’re going to make Georgetown perfect, and you’ll never ever have a problem again. Ever.” Joe Luther (COL ’16) and Connor Rohan (COL ’16) were then the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the Georgetown Heckler, a satire website targeted at the Georgetown campus. “The objective was to go in and basically be the Heckler in person, in the flesh, up there on the debate stage,” said Luther. They campaigned on terminating the fencing team, the emergency steam whistle, and Georgetown’s “bone-chilling necropolis,” the Jesuit graveyard. “We’re here to annihilate anything you don’t like,” says Rohan in the video. Eager and beaming, the Luther-Rohan ticket highlighted and satirized everything GUSA executive campaigns had become for the student body: self-important competitors, opaque organization, and empty promises. The two snowballed in popularity. They made more videos, a website, and a kissing booth in Lau. Their critique of inane GUSA politics resonated with many students. At no point was it ever serious. “Absolutely not,” says Rohan today. At some point things got ahead of them. “We’re improvisers,” Rohan said. “And in improv, what we’re supposed to do is play to the top of our intelligence, which essentially means, if you don’t know something, pretend like you do and act like you do … We’d go into interviews with The Hoya and the Voice and think ‘We’re gonna f*cking bomb.’ And we’d just spin things. We’d just talk.” “And people would eat it up,” said Luther. “A lot of people believed in what we were campaigning on, which was not the objective at all.” Student support was growing. After the vice-presidential debate, they knew they couldn’t go back. “I wanted to drop out at that point,” said Rohan. “I thought, ‘F*ck, we f*cked up. We’re too far in.’ And I couldn’t. There was no alternative.” They had no plan and no budget. Neither had ever been a part of GUSA. But they gained The Hoya’s and the Voice’s endorsements. The apathetic voting block became their asset. An FAQ on their Facebook page asks, “If I don’t give a shit, can I still vote?” Answer: “Yes, and you are our most important demographic.” And then they won. “I was terrified,” said Rohan. “It became real when we won.” They saw themselves as hard workers. They had no choice but to take these jobs they never wanted and do them to the best of their abilities. “Neither of us are going to half-ass anything we do,” Rohan said. “On the night we won I said, ‘It’s unbelievable the Georgetown community could elect two people with no platform and no budget. And you’re really lucky it’s me and Joe because if it weren’t, you might be f*cked.’” Far behind every other candidate, the pair had to quickly catch up to figure out what exactly was going on at Georgetown, which mostly meant meetings. “When Connor and I first started this job, we didn’t have time to go to the bathroom,” said Luther, laughing. “Remember when we kept going from meeting to meeting having to pee?” “We had to understand the nuances of the issue before we could develop tangible action. And we had to consult with relevant stakeholders,” said Rohan. “We had interviews with over
120 people and we met with every single one of them. And we made our decisions [for the cabinet] from there.” The two came in with no initiatives and had to develop them later, when they became entrenched in the issues. Luther said administrators appeared to be surprised they were actually doing their jobs. To help out, they staffed their cabinet with those they thought were intelligent and competent. Former competitors Abbey McNaughton (COL ‘16) and Will Simons (COL ‘16) are their chief of staff and communications director, respectively. McNaughton, who was involved in GUSA before taking the position, has had a stronger role in policy-making than previous chief of staffs. “I was very honored,” McNaughton said. “You can see that their concerns, their work, their efforts are very genuine, and I think that that makes it easy to work with them.” Today, seven months later, Luther and Rohan are still in the executive chair and GUSA continues to function. They appear like any other student leaders, though a bit more eccentric. Rohan is fidgety and energetic. He’ll sit, then stand, then sit down again, finally settling for his feet on the table. He speaks in quick and loud bursts of thought. Luther is more tranquil and doesn’t swear quite as much. He introduces himself with his horoscope. However odd they appear, Luther and Rohan know the issues now. They know the players in the game. They can eloquently list off their accomplishments to the media because they’ve had to many times. According to Rohan, they’ve succeeded in implementing the three tenets of their “Let’s Not Get Screwed Again” campaign: prioritizing maintenance, student input, and off-campus living in campus master planning. They have increased the number of students on the Georgetown Community Partnership Steering Committee from one to three and have worked on housing studies to strategize maintenance issues on campus. Additionally, because of their efforts, the new campus plan is not set to increase the number of students required to live on campus. The pair has also made progress on mental health and sexual assault issues, which they have always been careful to treat sensitively. “The topic Joe and Connor were never joking about was mental health and student well-being, and I respected that,” said Todd Olson, Vice-President of Student Affairs. The two signed a Memorandum of Understanding in September, which committed the administration to reforming sexual assault policies. The pair has also developed the Mental Health Open Forum, which took place earlier this month, and a mental health focus group of students. The group will work with Counseling and Psychiatric Services to make recommendations to university administration. According to Rohan, their leadership has increased gender parity within the student government and worked to involve cultural groups often left out of GUSA workings. Still there are difficulties. “There are roadblocks in every issue. A lot of them are financial,” said Rohan. They mentioned the slow-moving nature of Georgetown bureaucracy. “There are some meetings where we’re waiting months in advance to get an answer on something,” he continued. GUSA’s still potent reputation can also be damaging. Luther says the organization of the group baffles him. “There’s no power in GUSA, but we have separation of powers. What the Senate does, what their committees work on, is the same thing we have secretaries for.” “What we’ve learned a lot is that it’s about persistency,” said McNaughton. “Just because you are not seeing big tangible outcomes doesn’t mean things aren’t changing or you’re not making an impact that will affect a lot of students.” The roadblock that makes Luther and Rohan the most anxious, though, is student engagement and transparency. “I think that we have good policy underneath our belts. But … we want
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Luther and ROhan became gusa insiders overnight with their spring 2015 win people to care about GUSA and what it does or should do. And they don’t,” said Rohan. “And that’s the fault of just a ton of baggage that the organization has. And it’s our fault for not focusing on that aspect as much as we should.” After their win, the two emphasized engagement and transparency over all else. “A lot of people do not like GUSA,” they wrote in a March op-ed to The Hoya. “We understand that because we used to be the loudest among those ranks. But now we are GUSA. Now we have the unique ability to transform the culture of this institution.” They proposed a grassroots approach to administration, driven by student voices. They critiqued “GUSA’s failure to inform, engage, and inspire the student body in the past.” The Luther-Rohan administration was supposed to reanimate GUSA’s culture and reputation, and imbibe the organization with humor, transparency, and student voices. According to both Luther and Rohan, this has been one of their administration’s biggest disappointments. “We’ve done really well as GUSA President and Vice President,” said Rohan. “We haven’t done really well as Joe and Connor.” After the campaign, the two lost the time they had been spending on image building and student engagement. “We were thinking of very creative ways to engage people and make them laugh… Now we are spending our time doing what is the typical GUSA mold,” said Luther. By their own admission, Luther and Rohan are not the joke candidates anymore. They are an effective GUSA President and Vice President pair only in the ways other administrations were before them. “I don’t like it,” said Rohan. “People elected us. We’re no longer those people. Now we are what people didn’t want. We are now the people that people didn’t elect.” “It’s one thing to be shouting from the back row hilarious jokes” said Luther. “It’s another to be at the stage.” Since the election, the two have outsourced communications to their team. Craig Levites (COL ‘17), current Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown Heckler, is their “Minister of Fun,” in charge of incorporating humor into communications. While Luther and Rohan
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OCTOBER 23, 2015
Andrew Sullivan
emphasize that the communications team has done a great job, they say the tone has somewhat evaporated. “In the long term I don’t think we’ve done a whole lot to change what GUSA is and how it communicates,” said Luther. “GUSA still kind of has that ‘GUSA sheen’ to it … We haven’t translated what we did during the campaign to what GUSA is as a whole.” At some point, Luther and Rohan became so entrenched in learning the business and completing the duties of the GUSA executive, they left behind what got them elected. “There are so many expectations on what we should be doing,” said Rohan. “And we have adhered to them. We’ve adhered to them very well. But I think it’s our job at this point to break out of those expectations because I think that they’re harmful to the larger organization … We became so caught up in actually learning the institution of Georgetown and the institution of GUSA that we became absorbed in it … We have the autonomy to really do what we want and we don’t have to be like they were in the past.” The two are working on delegating responsibilities to free up time and hopefully making progress on engagement. “The little victories, the little changes, the little policy shifts, attitude shifts, those kinds of things that take a lot of effort to get done, are not things people might notice every day,” said McNaughton. “It comes off like GUSA isn’t as involved because it’s not as visible. And I think that’s something that Joe and Connor and I really want to focus on in the second half of the term, making sure that people feel a stronger relationship to GUSA than they have in the past.” “One of the most powerful things we can do is make people care again,” said Rohan. “We said we were going to do that and we didn’t.” Luther and Rohan have until March to do what they said they would. Even though their YOUtopia was satire, it was one many students wanted to believe in. It was something the pair began to take seriously after the election. “A bottom-up approach, driven by people and not foreordained policy, is what GUSA needs to be truly representative and inclusive for all students,” they wrote in their March op-ed. “The success of this project is not guaranteed.”
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
SAFE SPACES OR ECHO CHAMBERS Understanding the Discourse Surrounding Georgetown’s Political Climate by Kenneth Lee and Graham Piro
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n April 16, 2015, at the invitation of the Georgetown University College Republicans (GUCR), Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute studying feminism and American culture, gave a lecture in a Healy Hall classroom titled, “What’s Right (and Badly Wrong) with Feminism.” Some students filed along the back wall of the classroom and quietly held up multicolored signs that read, “Trigger Warning: Anti-Feminism,” and “I’m expressing my right to free speech; that doesn’t mean I’m infringing on hers.” Other students opened up a “safe space” in a Maguire Hall classroom to support sexual assault survivors who were emotionally triggered by Sommers’ talk. According to GUCR President Amber Athey (COL ’16), what happened before the event on Facebook was more revealing about the protesters’ attitudes toward her organization. Two days before, commenters on GUCR’s Facebook page asked the GUCR why they had invited Sommers, and whether they would provide a trigger warning because Sommers had previously written articles criticizing the concept of rape culture. A trigger warning would alert the lecture’s participants that Sommers’ lecture could contain potentially distressing material, in this case, for sexual assault survivors. Athey thought that
sexual assault survivors were able to decide whether they could attend GUCR’s event, so she did not think it required a trigger warning. One of the groups protesting the event, H*yas for Choice, was especially outspoken against Dr. Sommers’ speech. “H*yas for Choice, as a group, had a discussion about our feelings on the university bringing Christina Hoff Sommers as a speaker, and [we] found some of her past work to be offensive,” Michaela Pepi-Lewis (COL ‘18), the vice-president of H*yas for Choice, said. “We did feel the need to make a note that we did not agree with the message that was being presented.” Sophia Kleyman (COL ‘16), the president of H*yas for Choice, defended the trigger warnings that were presented by various campus groups before Sommers’ speech. “H*yas for Choice and other students that were involved protesting [the speech] wanted to create a safe space for students who did feel triggered by the event in a way that [GUCR] didn’t really account for and were reluctant to accommodate for,” she said. The morning before her lecture, Sommers tweeted, “Georgetown student asks if my talk will have trigger warning because of its ‘potential to re-traumatize survivors,’” with a link to the GUCR Facebook event on her Twitter account. According to Athey, Sommers’ Twitter followers proceeded to
defend Sommers on the event page and engaged with students about whether the event should go on, and whether safe spaces and trigger warnings should be provided. “The day before the event, I was on Facebook probably for the entire day just watching what was going on, and it was very stressful,” Athey said. After the lecture, Athey took down the Facebook event page because both sides were still arguing with each other. According to her, members of the GUCR board have been reluctant to invite another speaker like Sommers to campus, fearing the potential backlash. “To be perfectly honest, what happened with Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers was exhausting,” she said. “We’ve had people concerned that they just don’t want to go through this again, because it’s so much work.”
The need for mental safety in college
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n the past year, several national media outlets have published widely-shared op-eds about the “selfinfantilization” of college students. Inside and outside the classroom, these authors say, college students are apparently demanding political correctness and protection
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from discussions and ideas that offend the identities they associate with. On campus, trigger warnings have become a point of discussion, especially in light of the Sommers event. Their usage has called many to question how they can be compatible with the values of free speech that have been traditionally associated with the college experience. Even President Obama has chimed in on the phenomenon. “I’ve heard of some college campuses where ... [students] don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women,” he said to an audience at a high school in Iowa during a town hall last month. “And I’ve got to tell you … I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.” Athey believes that trigger warnings should be used in cases involving victims of PTSD and survivors of sexual trauma, but that they should be limited. “Something that is offensive is not triggering and it’s not harmful,” she said. “So in the case when you’re having a talk about feminism, there shouldn’t be a sign that reads ‘Trigger Warning: Anti-Feminism.’” Too often, she says, trigger warnings like those can become political statements. “It’s not shielding yourself from potential trauma or harm,” she said. “It’s shielding yourself from a viewpoint that you don’t agree with, plain and simple.” The principle of trigger warnings is also potentially in conflict with efforts to foster an environment of free speech on campus. “It’s making it seem like not only do you disagree with people, which is the point of having debates, but that somehow what someone else is saying is violent and that you need protection from this kind of speech,” said Michael Khan (COL ‘18), the president of Vita Saxa. “It makes it seem like it sets a dynamic where there’s tension, people are afraid to engage because you’re making this harsh accusation.” Pepi-Lewis, however, defended the logic behind trigger warnings. “A common misconception is that leftist groups will request trigger warnings or some kind of safe space because they disagree with the message,” she said. “I think it’s important to point out the difference between offensive material and retraumatizing material...It’s not about being offended or disagreeing with the material, it’s about being retraumatized by it.” Kleyman compared the situation to an event providing accommodations for students with disabilities. “This is a conversation that could be triggering to students,” Kleyman said.
An organization should provide a “safe space” for me if I attend an event where speakers hold views that are contrary to mine.
“In the same way that events need to be able to accommodate students with disabilities, they also need to accommodate for potential trigger situations.” Kleyman continued to explain that if the organization cannot or does not want to provide a safe space, then they should at least be receptive to other groups who are willing to provide one. However, the vast majority of students who support trigger warnings do not want to restrict free speech for the purpose of protecting people’s sensibilities. “I think the phenomenon of trigger warnings is exaggerated,” said Matthew Gregory (SFS ’17), president of the College Democrats. “People are saying that everyone is going to start using them, and every extracurricular and every single class is going to use trigger warnings all over.” Conversely, other students have argued that they may not be so necessary. “I think it’s pretty irresponsible to go to an event that you know is going to give you psychological damage, regardless of whether or not there’s a room to escape to,” Athey said.
Triggering dialogues in the classroom
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rigger warnings are also starting to find their way into the classroom dialogue. According to Jonathan Ladd, a professor in the Government department who teaches a class on politics and the media, Georgetown does an effective job of creating a conducive environment for free speech in the classroom. “I’ve never seen a problem with that at Georgetown,” he said. “I don’t think that anybody in class, liberal or conservative, really disputes that you may want to make people feel more comfortable...you want questions that might make people less nervous.” Despite this, Ladd admitted that he has found that the majority of students who have been the most outspoken and active outside of the classroom, in his experience, have been liberal. “There’s no way for me to really tell if there are other conservative students who are nervous about talking,” he said. He also said that he’s never had the experience of a student coming up to him and telling him that he or she was too nervous to speak up in class. Professor Hans Noel of the Government department also commented on the political makeup of the student body. He explained that he conducts a survey in his class in which students can self-identify whether they are liberal or conservative. The results are generally varied, but he said that there are a number
dx+24+7985100 Strongly Agree 8.4%
Disagree 34.7%
Agree 27.5%
Strongly Disagree 29.4%
Source: Voice’s Political Values Survey
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of students who identify themselves as extremely liberal, but almost no students who identify as extremely conservative. “You’ve got both sides, but there are a chunk of conservatives who are just not there,” he said. On the other hand, Marcia Chatelain, a History Department professor who teaches courses on race relations in America, said that she used trigger warnings in class with success. “I’m sensitive to the needs of all of my students. I think that when you take great care in creating community and treating people with respect, difficult conversations are less scary because you’ve invested in building the trust that you need to really engage these classroom topics,” she said. According to Dr. Chatelain, trigger warnings can be a call for a deeper understanding of the relationship between student and teacher. She pointed to a specific example because many of the courses she teaches involve racial violence, death, and destruction of peoples’ lives and communities as a result of racism. “[Trigger warnings] doesn’t mean that students today are soft, or that they aren’t smart,” she said. “It means that as we evolve, we have a more sophisticated understanding of the needs of people and we want to meet people where they are.” She continued to say that trigger warnings challenge professors to figure out how to teach difficult material while making sure that students do not feel diminished by what they are discussing. Dr. Chatelain mentioned that she teaches a book about sexual violence, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, and that the book is very explicit about experiences that women had during the Civil Rights movement. She lets students know that they are about to read a book that contains several instances of sexual violence, as a sort of trigger warning, and that if they find anything disturbing or alarming, there are resources on campus to reach out to. “I’ve had students say that they appreciated me recognizing that this type of material can have an impact,” she said.
When conservative students appear to be a minority at college
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he root causes of the growing prevalence of trigger warnings and safe spaces may lie in the political atmosphere of a college campus. In July, Athey published a widely-read post, “No Climate for Conservatives at Georgetown,” on The Right Way, the blog for the GUCR. Citing the backlash the GUCR received from inviting Sommers, she alleged that an environment on campus exists that discourages free expression. “Liberal students at Georgetown University have created a toxic and hostile environment for conservatives,” she wrote in her article. “The attitudes expressed by militant, left-wing Hoyas are incredibly dangerous to a productive university atmosphere, one that is supposed to champion free speech and diversity of opinion.” In an attempt to investigate the student exchange of political discourse, in September, the Voice conducted an unscientific survey about Georgetown students’ political values. Of the 320 anonymous responses the Voice collected, the vast majority of them agreed or strongly agreed with views supporting the funding of Planned Parenthood, the recent Casa Latina proposal at Georgetown, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. (See a breakdown of the survey’s results on the back page.) Additionally, in an effort to contextualize the results of the survey, the Voice reached out to many student groups on campus. Of those groups, the Black Leadership Forum, members of
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
“I just feel like even in debates and when we hold events, people just make jokes about us and pretend we’re just something to laugh at.” -Amber Athey the Black House, and some members who participated in the Last Campaign for Academic Reform either declined or did not respond to requests for comment. When asked about her blog post, Athey offered instances of when she felt targeted for her conservatism and her inability to make many friends when she lived on the second floor of New South during the 2012 presidential elections. “I just came home one day and there was a drawing of male genitalia, and excuse my language, it said, ‘I heart to suck Obama’s dick,’” she said. “I don’t doubt that I was being singled out for my views.” The incident did not affect her much, but she worries about freshmen who come in and fear that they could lose friends because of their conservative views. “That’s when it becomes a problem because you’re suppressing these people who are genuinely afraid of the consequences of being a Republican,” she said. “There isn’t a space for conservatives anymore. I just feel like even in debates and when we hold events, people just make jokes about us and pretend we’re just something to laugh at.” One explanation Athey offered for her treatment was that there is a pervasive stereotype of Republicans as consisting only of old, rich, and white males. Alex Robledo (COL ’17), who identifies as Republican, felt the same. “There are people from all walks of life that identify either way, and so it’s just unfortunate that Republicans, for whatever reasons, have this image clinging to them, that they’re just one way, when the truth is much more diverse than that,” he said. “My mom came from China. She came to this country with a suitcase and $2,000 in cash in hand—by no means rich, nevertheless conservative, [and she] identifies as Republican. Those people definitely exist. Same for Democrats.” Gregory said that Athey had spoken with him about her feelings of being persecuted. Yet he believes that Georgetown remains a campus that does its very best to foster open dialogue. “If you want to be in this real world, you have to deal with the criticism,” he said. “And if you say something that people say is misogynistic here at Georgetown, if you go out into the real world and say that, people are going to say the same thing too. And if you don’t accept that, then you shouldn’t have a place in politics, because that’s the reality of the situation.” He also challenged the generalizations in Athey’s claims that liberal students are responsible for aggressively stifling dialogue on Georgetown’s campus. “When you’re talking about your friends, your fellows, your classmates, and say that they are all ‘hell-bent’ on oppressing conservatives, it seems to me like an extreme exaggeration and
it just doesn’t seem … [like] something that you can really take that seriously,” he said. Other groups that hold traditionally conservative views have felt marginalized as well. Khan spoke to the resistance they’ve encountered from students and the university. “A lot of our pushback comes from faculty themselves,” Khan said. “I don’t think that there’s a general atmosphere [on campus] that’s very willing to talk about these issues and give the other perspective. The whole point of a university is you come and you’re exposed to views that are contrary to your own.” Khan also said that Vita Saxa has heard chants containing lines such as, “Hey pro-lifers don’t lie, you don’t care if women die.” Gabriella Munoz (COL ‘18), the vice-president of Vita Saxa, spoke about a specific example of a negative reaction from the student body. A pregnant woman was at the Vita Saxa table in Red Square, and Munoz said that she overheard students remarking on that fact. “[The student said] ‘Oh my gosh, they have a pregnant woman there,’” Munoz said. “A lot of people see that if we have a kid at our table or somebody’s pregnant that it’s a marketing thing, but [they] really just happen to be there.” “H*yas for Choice is able to distribute their condoms and contraceptives in dorms,” Khan said. “There are certainly people in the administration we work closely with and student health who are great and some Jesuits, but on a large scale there’s a total reluctance.” As the leader of a pro-choice group at Georgetown, Kleyman said that her organization does not experience much resistance from the student body. “I feel like being pro-choice is not really a minority in and of itself, studies have shown that a majority of Americans are pro-choice, especially college-aged students,” she said. However, Kleyman also said that as a group unrecognized by the university, H*yas for Choice faces logistical challenges in its work. Last year, they gained the ability to access storage space, to reserve classrooms, and to use printing services due to a partnership with the Georgetown University Student Association. “The biggest challenges we see...a lot of the suppression that we face comes from that status, as unrecognized,” she said. “Where we’re allowed to table, where we’re allowed to hand stuff out, things like scheduling events is always really hard for us. Getting rooms reserved is always a difficult process because we can’t go through the normal means that access-to-benefits groups can.”
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closed-minded, someone who is overzealous to the point where there is no dialogue, there is no compromise. There is just forceful ideology,” he said. During his administration, Rohan, with GUSA President Joe Luther, has addressed issues ranging from endorsing the diversity course requirement proposal to working with university administrators on a memorandum of understanding for reforming sexual assault and medical leave of absence policies. From his experiences, he says that there is a culture of anger born from the injustices that these activists are attempting to address, which sometimes makes having a dialogue with them difficult. Rohan admitted to being uncomfortable speaking about the tactics students who wanted change used throughout his interview with the Voice. “The discomfort I’m feeling [in this interview] is a fear of retribution. It’s because if I don’t have the right vocabulary, if I don’t have the right ideology, and if I don’t fall into the campus social media dialogue perfectly, there is always criticism and usually not constructive criticism,” he said. “It’s like The Tea Party of the Left, in that it’s my way or the highway.”
The meaning of social justice in political discourse
n the past year, Georgetown’s campus has confronted itself with issues of race and identity. Students have traveled to Ferguson, Mo. in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, staged a die-in at the annual Christmas tree lighting in Dahlgren Quad, fought for the creation of the university to provide a Casa Latina, and supported a proposal for a diversity course requirement, which the Main Campus Executive Faculty passed in April. As some students have devoted themselves to campaigns for change on campus, others have expressed concerns about the tactics they have been using. The term ‘social justice warrior’ has surfaced to describe people who promote socially progressive views. GUSA’s Vice-President Connor Rohan (COL ’16) said that he has experienced stressful times when he did not find it easy to work with social justice advocates. [Full disclosure: Rohan is a former Voice staffer.] “A social justice warrior is someone who takes social justice and ostensibly strives to be open, but in doing so is extremely
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“The discomfort I’m feeling [in this interview] is a fear of retribution. If I don’t have the right vocabulary, if I don’t have the right ideology, and if I don’t fall into the campus social media dialogue perfectly, there is always criticism and usually not constructive criticism.” -Connor Rohan
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“The dominant system relies on conformity, it relies on quietness, it relies on maintenance of the status quo. For the majority of people who are not facing pretty explicit violence in their daily lives, it’s pretty hard to understand that there’s violence going on around us and violence happening in all of our interactions.” On the other hand, Vincent DeLaurentis (SFS ’17), a member of the Georgetown Solidarity Committee and an organizing coordinator for H*yas for Choice, does not view the term “social justice warrior” as a derogatory one. “We are doing battle. These systems are killing people everyday, these systems are actively working to oppress us and to stop us from doing this type of work,” he said. He added that that Georgetown’s student body has a difficult time accepting the need for confrontation and argument as legitimate tactics for political organizing work. “Students are so concerned with this pre-professional culture and this faux-discourse of respect and mutual exchange,” he said. “The dominant system relies on conformity, it relies on quietness, it relies on maintenance of the status quo. For the majority of people who are not facing pretty explicit violence in their daily lives, it’s pretty hard to understand that there’s violence going on around us and violence happening in all of our interactions.” Patrick Musgrave (COL ‘16), a former chair of the GUCR, disagreed with this concept of violence. “I frankly don’t go for that sort of language, saying that interpersonal interactions get violent. They get violent when somebody hits somebody,” he said. “[The word is] co-opted not for its meaning, but for its shock value.” Musgrave explained that such sentiments made it difficult to have conversations about sensitive topics. When he chaired the Student Activities Commission (SAC), he was initially not in support of a black pre-law society because he thought that a group should help all students, no matter who they were, enter law school. While he later understood the merits of having a black pre-law society,
I believe that an organization supported by Georgetown’s funds should not invite a speaker that holds views contrary to mine.
which has since prospered as a SAC group, he said that he had no racial motivation, and did not like being called a racist for those thoughts. “I think too many people take skepticism as an insult,” he said. He believes that Georgetown’s students needed to separate emotion from political discourse. For Josue Coronado (COL ’18), the Latinx Leadership Forum’s media chair, it’s impossible to separate emotions from the Casa Latina proposal that he and other students have been advocating for. “You feel emotions, because you have lived it, you’ve transferred into this fight for a house, a space for inclusivity on campus … These are issues that we feel and because we feel them then they are true,” he said. Having grown up in Hiram Clarke, a low-income community in Houston, Texas, Coronado said that as a Latino student, he lives and faces a systemic ignorance of the Latinx experience everyday at Georgetown. He recalled a difficult experience from his macroeconomics class. “The professor was trying to make an example, he was like, ‘Imagine if you were poor.’ A couple of my friends next to me were like, ‘Yeah, imagine, right,’” he said. A particularly upsetting time was when the same professor and some of the other students laughed at Mexico’s murder rates when they were comparing different countries around the world. “That really angered me because other people’s misery shouldn’t be something we laugh at,” he said. Coronado dismissed perceptions that people who fight for social justice are too sensitive or too politically correct. “If you are upholding ignorant or bigoted beliefs, in essence, if they do hurt other people, then that’s wrong and we should be to call you out on that,” he said.
dx+0+210042 Strongly Agree 0.0%
Disagree 30.0%
Agree .9%
Strongly Disagree 69.1%
Source: Voice’s Political Values Survey
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-Vincent DeLaurentis Echoing Coronado’s views, Gregory said that in this day and age, it is common sense for someone to not be homophobic, racist, or sexist in their speech or writing. “These old age characterizations of folks as whatever stereotype you want to pick out—they’re wrong,” he said. “If someone goes out there and says something bad about Jews, or blacks, or gay people, and it’s so obvious, then, yeah, there should be a backlash, because as informed citizens of the 21st century who attend a great university or in one of the cities of the world, yes, we should be enlightened. We should be informed.” DeLaurentis thought that it was impossible to equate the discomfort that his political work generates to feelings of oppression. “Oppression looks like you being poor, it looks like you being killed by the police, it looks like you being denied reproductive healthcare. Oppression doesn’t look like you getting upset because I yelled something at you,” he said.
Reconciling political differences
T
o productively engage with someone who holds an opposite opinion, Musgrave said that students needed to conduct themselves with dignity when expressing their views. “We would love it if, say, H*yas for Choice, instead of holding up these vile signs outside of the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life, we would like if they would come in, go to the breakout sessions, and then ask tough questions [to] our speakers,” he said. “Ultimately, on a college campus, you get attention by conducting yourself with dignity and not yelling and screaming and doing these slogans and stuff.” Musgrave acknowledged that college is a place where your views are challenged. He arrived at Georgetown as an ardent supporter of the death penalty. After engaging in discussions with the death penalty with the Catholic community, he said, “I’ve seen that if you’re going to be pro-life, you have to be prolife all the way.” Gregory, too, believes in open expression and criticism as a part of the learning experience. He spent the summer working at the Embassy of Israel in Van Ness for a government that opposed Obama’s Iran deal. Although he personally supported the deal, he still enjoyed his internship. “If you go through college hearing only what you want to hear, you’re not going to learn from anything. You’re going to emerge from college unprepared for the real world, where you’re bound to encounter people who disagree with you,” he said. For Coronado, inviting people to understand others who come from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds is key to being women and men for others. He wishes that society had a better view of the work that social justice activists believe they are carrying out. “I think we should all be activists. I think we should fight for equality, fight for something that is owed to people, out of the simple fact that we’re all human,” he said.
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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE
LEISURE
Bridge of Spies Finds Extra in the Ordinary By Graham Piro Although Bridge of Spies is set during the Cold War, it is a surprisingly timely film. Director Steven Spielberg’s new release repeatedly challenges the legal representation of enemy combatants, a question that America’s justice system has struggled with throughout its history—from John Adams representing the British soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre to the rights of captured terrorists in Guantanamo Bay. This theme’s prevalence throughout the movie helps make the story feel relevant. In the more than capable hands of Spielberg, Bridge of Spies triumphs as both a historical piece and a drama. Bridge of Spies is set in 1957, and flawless production design certainly sends viewers back to the ‘50s, particularly during the scenes set in Russia. Spielberg blends CGI and practical sets to recreate war-torn Berlin, and the atmosphere heightens the tension of the negotiations between the protagonist, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), and his Soviet counterparts. Hanks is perfectly cast as Donovan, the ultimate ordinary man. It’s the type of performance that Hanks could give in his sleep, but he still does a sublime job of reflecting Donovan’s inner turmoil as he tries to balance his work with his family’s safety. Donovan, an insurance lawyer, is an extremely moral character who fights for the rights of Rudolf Abel, a captured Soviet spy (Mark Rylance). The relationship between Donovan and Abel is one of the highlights of the film. The two develop a mutual respect as the plot progresses, and Abel becomes an extremely sympathetic character by the time Bridge of Spies ends. There’s a certain sadness that permeates Rylance’s performance, and Spielberg takes pains to establish Abel’s humanity. The film begins with an extended, non-verbal sequence that introduces his character, and it’s almost a surprise when he is revealed to be the spy in the first five minutes. Indeed, he’s no evil Russian genius, but instead a very relatable and respectable human being. The primary conflict concerns Donovan’s need to reconcile protecting his family with doing his job. A scene involving an attack on his home is one of the more startling moments in the movie, although Spielberg restrains from making it too intense. The aftermath of this scene is extremely telling of Donovan’s character. When the officer chides him for defending a Soviet spy, Donovan simply says he’s doing his job, just as the police officer should be doing his. Donovan is clearly a man of principles, and these types of interactions throughout the film show his devotion to doing the right thing. Underneath the driving conflicts, small details serve to enrich Hanks’s performance. A running joke throughout Bridge of Spies is Donovan’s inability to adjust to the chilly German climate. He has to trade his overcoat away for directions through Berlin. This seems like a relatively useless plot point, but it serves to further illuminate Donovan’s humane, almost ordinary character. He is far from a typical hero, and his aversion to cold illustrates how out of place he is in a dangerous city.
IMDB
It’s the human element in Bridge of Spies that keeps it grounded. There’s very little talk of politicians or leaders, and the central conflict is low-stakes, yet intense. Spielberg directs with restraint, shying away from big set-pieces and preferring to take a slow-burn approach. There are some intense scenes littered throughout, but they serve to drive the characters and plot forward instead of dominating the film. For example, the crash of the U2 spy plane is tightly edited and pulse-pounding, but it does not feel out of place in the character drama. This focus on dialogue-driven scenes makes the movie drag at parts, but it pays off in character development. Bridge of Spies succeeds because it glorifies the ordinary man. Donovan works as a seemingly bland insurance lawyer who does not pretend that he leads an exciting or dangerous life. When he’s thrust into the responsibility of negotiating for the lives of two Americans, he accepts the task at hand, not because he wants the fame or glory, but because he believes that it’s his duty as a man of the law. He struggles with reconciling this job with the danger he puts his family in, but in the end, he manages to do the right thing. The film reflects that, in a global struggle between two superpowers, what really mattered were the everyday people who made a difference in whatever way they could.
Critical Voices: Thank Your Lucky Stars Beach House, Sub Pop By Michael White It’s been a prolific past month for the Baltimore-based band, Beach House. Their newest release, Thank Your Lucky Stars, dropped just a few weeks after the group released another full-length album, Depression Cherry. Yet unlike their earlier release, this new collection of songs feels like it was rushed out of the studio. Although Beach House’s work ethic is admirable, Thank Your Lucky Stars is a mostly drab foray into uninspired dream pop territory. Beach House delivers their usual combination of glossy indie pop, yet sacrifices strong songwriting to follow the trendy sound of detached and reverb-soaked coffee shop jams. Most of the tracks have more focus on the spacey production than the instruments themselves. Pretty echoing vocals can only carry each song so far before everything becomes a sleep-inducing drone. “All Your Yeahs” has beautiful keyboard sounds, but painfully boring melodies. The fact that all of the songs have slow tempos demonstrates a lack of urgency throughout the album. The word that comes to mind is lackadaisical, with lifeless vocal performances that make ears yearn for Beach House’s earlier material. There are a few upsides to Thank Your Lucky Stars — two, to be exact. “Marjorette” and “She’s So Lovely” are two well-written songs. The first track attracts listeners with an arpeggiated guitar melody and higher register vocals, but the song isn’t repetitive like the rest of the album. It’s also not a bad song for making out with your thick-rimmed-glasses-wearing
significant other. “She’s So Lovely” is an intriguing, and far from the stereotypical declaration of love, with insightful lines like “Everything about her/Mannerisms of another,” providing plenty of detail and personality when describing the subject of the song. Unfortunately, these two songs don’t make up for the rest of Thank Your Lucky Stars. Hopefully Beach House will add more to the equation for its next release.
Voice’s Choices: “She’s So Lovely”
“Majorette,”
B-12.00 -- Trim to 10.00Wx11.00D - CMYK - Georgetown
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Results from the Voice’s Political Values Survey
The Voice conducted a survey gauging Georgetown’s political values. 320 students responded to questions addressing different hot issues on campus.
I support the free distribution of condoms by H*yas for Choice and its members to students.
I support the defunding of Planned Parenthood by Congress.
12.3% 23.0%
71.2% 14.1%
strongly disagree
disagree
30.5% 34.2% strongly agree
agree
strongly disagree
disagree
9.1% 5.6% strongly agree
agree
Georgetown should have gender-neutral bathrooms.
I support Kim Davis in her refusal to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
12.3% 23.0%
76.9%
strongly disagree
disagree
30.5% 34.2% strongly agree
agree
A required diversity class is a necessary part of Georgetown’s curriculum.
strongly disagree
13.4% disagree
2.5% 7.2% strongly agree
agree
I support the creation of a “Casa Latina” at Georgetown University.
13.2% 31.7% strongly disagree
strongly agree
26.3% 28.8% disagree
agree
15.2% disagree
84.8% agree