The Georgetown Voice, 7 December 2018

VOICE The Georgetown

December 7, 2018

Local Environmentalists Oppose University Solar Project page 10

Best Albums and Movies of 2018 page 14

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DECEMBER 7, 2018

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE Volume 51 • Issue 8

staff editor-in-chief Margaret Gach Managing editor Sienna Brancato news

executive editor Jake Maher Features editor Jack Townsend news editor Noah Telerski assistant news editors Damian Garcia, Caroline Hamilton, Roman Peregrino

culture

executive editor Santul Nerkar Leisure editor Dajour Evans assistant leisure editors Emily Jaster, Nicole Lai, Ryan Mazalatis Sports editor Aaron Wolf Assistant sports editor Tristan Lee, Will Shanahan

“Best of egan” by EGAN BARNITT

opinion

contents Carrying On: Nostalgia, Inc. Lizz Pankova

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Three Months of Feeling One Step Behind Gustav Honl-Stuenkel

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Editorials

Branching Out: Georgetown’s Campaign Against Public Transport Katya Schwenk The GOOD Guys: Former Georgetown football players take on poverty in DC Beth Cunniff Here Comes the Sun? Local Environmentalists Oppose University Solar Project Noah Telerski

7 8-9 10-11

Finding His Voice: Martin Yant Looks Back on Voice Founding, Career of Investigating Peter Guthrie

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“Glad It’s Over”: Students Reflect on California Wildfires Annemarie Cuccia

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Best of 2018: Albums and Movies Voice Staff

14-15

Executive editor Emma Francois voices editor Julia Pinney Assistant Voices editors Natalie Chaudhuri, Leina Hsu Editorial Board Chair Claire Goldberg Editorial Board Sienna Brancato, Chris Dunn, Nick Gavio, Emily Jaster, Alex Lewontin, Jake Maher, Phillip Steuber, Noah Telerski, Jack Townsend

halftime

Leisure editor Juliana Vaccaro de Souza assistant leisure editors Skyler Coffey, Anna Pogrebivsky, John Woolley Sports editor Teddy Carey Assistant sports editor Nathan Chen, Josi Rosales

design

Executive editor Delaney Corcoran Spread editor Jake Glass Photo Editor Hannah Song cover Editor Egan Barnitt assistant design editors Camilla Aitbayev, Jacob Bilich, Josh Klein, Olivia Stevens Staff designers Kathryn Crager, Alex Wang, Amy Zhou

copy

copy chief Cade Shore assistant Copy editors Sophie Stewart, Neha Wasil editors Mya Allen, Emma Bradley, Natalie Chaudhuri, Brendan Clark, Kate Fin, Max Fredell, Emily Kim, Moira Phan, Madison Scully, Maya Tenzer, Kristen Turner, Megan Wee

online

Podcast editor Kayla Hewitt assistant podcast editor Panna Gattyan social media editor Katherine Randolph MULTIMEDIA editor Isabel Lord Content manager Margaux Fontaine

business

general manager Anna Gloor assistant manager of accounts & sales Eman Rahman assistant manager of alumni outreach Beth Cunniff

support

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. All materials copyright The Georgetown Voice, unless otherwise indicated.

associate editors Rachel Cohen, Brynn Furey, Inès de Miranda, Lizz Pankova, Katya Schwenk editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057

Staff writers

Kent Adams, Luis Borrero, Annemarie Cuccia, Haley D’Alessio, Jorge DeNeve, Max Fredell, Errol French, Bradley Galvin, Amy Guay, Peter Guthrie, Dominic Parente, John Picker, Zach Pulsifer, Cam Smith

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Page 3

Creedence Kehoe Revival

Sneak Peek: Voice Staff Explain Best of 2018 Picks

The last time intramural sports took place on Kehoe Field on top of Yates, Donald Trump was just a real estate developer. The university plans to change that next fall, when it will begin renovating the field surface.

Yates staff held an open house in Sellinger Lounge on Nov. 30. The open house consisted of some Yates staff members, a few students, a Voice reporter, and some artificial turf samples. Jacob Werden (MSB ’21), one of those students, said he was excited about the prospect of a new Kehoe.

“I love the track that’s in Yates, but it gets very repetitive,” he said. “I think it would be nice to have an outdoor track where you kind of get a sweeping view of Georgetown and the surrounding D.C. area.”

“You’re dead to me,” Margaret Gach, editor in chief, to Noah Telerski, news editor, who believes Incredibles 2 should not be on the Best of 2018 Movies List.

Check out the video online!

Women’s Soccer Reaches College Cup

Margaux’s Animal Doodle of the Week Overheard at Lau

“My class was cancelled because my professor was arrested.”

Question of the Week:

John Picker

The Georgetown women’s soccer team reached its second College Cup of the past three years in 2018. Though they lost in the national semifinal, the Voice would like to congratulate the team on a historic season and eagerly awaits what is to come in the future.

Voice Staff Transitions IMDB

Is the new Disney Lion King live action?

The Georgetown Voice’s general board turned over last week, as it does every semester.

The board elected Margaret Gach (SFS ’19), formerly the publication’s managing editor, to be the new editor in chief.

“I thought this was an a capella group,” Gach said. “But I’m in too deep now.”

All eyes were on The Hoya’s high-profile transition, and campus news coverage of the Voice was thin. The Caravel’s silence was deafening.

At press time, the incoming 145th editor in chief of Georgetown University’s newspaper of record since 1920 could not be reached for comment.

Hot Diggity Dog

EDITORIALS

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Speak Out: Protect Survivors and Reject Proposed Changes to Title IX The Department of Education has released new Title IX guidelines—rules about how cases of sexual assault can be handled by schools. The release on Nov. 16 comes over a year after they repealed many of the existing regulations issued in 2011 and 2014 and put interim guidelines in place.

This editorial board finds the new proposed guidelines unacceptable and urges the university and Title IX office to take a rapid, strong stance against them. We encourage students to make their voices heard by attending the final university listening session on Dec. 10 and independently submitting comments to the Department of Education.

These proposed changes would create barriers for survivors to come forward with their stories and will make the decision to do so more arduous than it can already be. Any changes to Title IX should make reporting easier, not harder, for survivors of sexual assault. These new regulations are a complete reversal from the mindset of the two previous presidential administrations, and it is a turn for the worse. The burden of living through a sexual assault is painful enough without the government making it harder to penalize the persons responsible.

The new guidelines depart significantly from the Obama-era 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter and the 2014 “Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence.”

They change the definition of sexual assault, limiting its scope to, “Consistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent, unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the school’s education program or activity.”

This significantly narrower definition creates greater room for survivors to doubt their own experiences and could make it more difficult to prove an assault has happened.

The preponderance of evidence standard is currently used to determine a case’s outcome, meaning that the accused must be “more likely than not” to have committed the assault. With the new guidelines, schools will be able to choose to either use preponderance or the new “clear and convincing” guidelines, which would make the burden of proof much higher. Guilt would be decided based on at least

a 75 percent likelihood of committing the crime, as opposed to the previous 50 percent standard.

Under another proposed change, incidents will only be reported to the Title IX office if they have a connection to the school, like if they happen on campus grounds or at school-recognized events. This is a clear reversal from the “Dear Colleague” letter, which said universities should protect students assaulted off-campus from further harassment. For example, the proposed regulations offer fewer protections for students attending off-campus parties. Specifically at Georgetown, this creates a loophole for assaults at fraternity and sorority events, as Greek life isn’t recognized by the university.

Finally, the new guidelines will allow cross-examination to test the credibility of parties and witnesses. Obama-era guidelines strongly discouraged schools from allowing parties to personally question or cross-examine each other during hearings and asserted that the process of cross-examination can be traumatic.

This editorial board is concerned with Georgetown’s ability to deal with these changes. The university has yet to fill the post of Title IX Coordinator, which has been vacant since June, and, as of Dec. 5 when this issue went to print, the Title IX office has not responded publicly to the proposed guidelines. We urge the Title IX office to provide a comprehensive explanation of how these proposed changes would affect the student body. Although university President John DeGioia has announced that the university will be making an official comment either on its own behalf or in conjunction with relevant universities, he did not provide much explanation for what the administration is doing and how it will affect current students.

DeGioia did, however, announce a series of listening sessions hosted by the university, during which any member of the university can voice his or her opinions, potentially affecting the official comment the university will submit. Two of three have already taken place, but the final one will be held on Dec. 10 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the Healy Family Student Center Social Room. Although some attendees felt disappointed by the way the sessions were run, it remains a valuable avenue for students to share their opinions. Individuals and groups may also submit independent comments directly to the Department of Education on the pro-

posed regulations until Jan. 28, when the comment period closes.

Above all, students need to be active in voicing their thoughts regarding regulations that favor the respondent rather than the complainant, and the Department of Education has a responsibility to address the comments submitted to them.

This editorial board will submit a version of this piece to the Department of Education, which can be accessed on our website and used by any student or campus organization as a template for their own comment. We encourage people to acknowledge their anger and emotions. Speak out. Do not let awareness of this issue fade away as the news becomes less timely and as we go on break.

These drastic changes could make the difference in whether one’s rights are protected by their school or one feels safe reporting their experiences.

Not only are the changes a step in the wrong direction, but the 144-page document which outlines the new regulations is time-consuming and difficult for the average student to read. The university has a responsibility to provide more answers for students. Some questions we had as a board include: What constitutes conduct that occurs within its “education program or activity”?

Can Georgetown modify the guidelines? Will the university be held legally responsible if they don’t follow them? How will this affect Georgetown students specifically? We shouldn’t have to be asking these fundamental questions. It is unsafe for students to be unaware of where they are protected by their university and where they are not. If we as students can’t understand these guidelines, then how are we supposed to know exactly how they will affect us?

We encourage students to speak up about why Title IX should not lower thresholds for perpetrators and raise barriers for students when choosing whether to undergo the stressful process of making a complaint. It shouldn’t limit the definition of sexual assault, but broaden it. It shouldn’t restrict the scope of universities to investigate, but expand it.

Confidential Resources

Health Education Services (HES) sarp@georgetown.edu Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS) 202-687-6985

Increase Transparency and Re-evaluate Priorities in Tuition Increases The first Hoya Roundtable of the 2018-19 academic year, held on Nov. 5, addressed the current tuition rate and projected increases. Provost Robert Groves and university representatives attempted to answer questions and provide rationale behind the university’s decision to increase the 2018-19 tuition by 3.5 percent, along with increasing other costs. This editorial board believes it is imperative that the administration increases transparency and specificity regarding tuition raises so that the student body has a better idea of where its tuition dollars are going.

Groves explained at the roundtable that projects like field renovations, improving arts spaces, and making changes to other areas around campus will impact tuition. The university will also allocate over $200 million for financial aid, its largest investment ever. These are deserving recipients, and affordability should always come first, but if tuition keeps rising, so should the focus on improving deteriorating housing, increasing facilities and maintenance staff, and bettering the Student Health Center. How our tuition dollars are spent should take into account student priorities as much as possible, and students must hold the university accountable by voicing their opinions on tuition hikes.

In an email to the undergraduate student community on Jan. 17, 2018, Groves announced the tuition increase and

included a chart to demonstrate what percentage of the university’s budget would be allocated to the following areas: “Instruction,” “Financial Aid and Graduate Student Support,” “Student Services,” “Institutional Support,” and “Other Support Expenses.”

These categories are vague and explain very little in terms of spending allocations. While the university publishes a lengthy annual budget breakdown, these documents are difficult for students to find and are not often publicized. The administration must increase transparency and accessibility of information regarding tuition raises.

Between 2015 and 2017, Georgetown’s tuition rose from $46,200 to $51,720. For the 2017 fiscal year, tuition rose by 4 percent, and for the 2018-2019 academic year it rose by another 3.5 percent, to $53,520. Students are living in dorms infested with mold and mice. The administration must prioritize the unhealthy living conditions of its students over more flashy projects when distributing tuition dollars.

We acknowledge that our endowment is markedly smaller than comparably ranked institutions, as Georgetown is 61st in collegiate endowments in the U.S. as of 2016. Nearly half of Georgetown’s revenue is generated by student tuition. However, the problem is not how much money we have but rather that Georgetown does not always use its money in a way that prioritizes students.

DECEMBER 7, 2018

According to the 2017 budget report, the university invested $32.6 million in new construction on buildings such as Arrupe Hall and the Thompson Athletic Center, while the university spent only $12.1 million on renovation and improvement project expenditures. In that same year, room rates for Main Campus housing increased between 3 and 7.6 percent. With a three-year on-campus living requirement, students are forced to pay increasingly high rents for dorms with subpar conditions.

George Washington University has implemented a tuition freeze, which does not cover room and board, but does mean that the tuition a student commits to paying when entering their first year of school will not increase during their time at GW. But the administration wrote in Jan. 2017 that such a program is not ideal, though the document did not sufficiently explain why. We believe Georgetown should seriously consider implementing a similar program.

This editorial board is asking the university to keep the student body informed on how and why tuition is rising, yet students also have a responsibility to hold the university accountable for what their money is going toward. Students must not become complacent and accept the yearly pattern we’ve come to expect: yet another tuition hike. Hoya Roundtables are a step in the right direction for the university, but more students must attend. We must care about where our tuition dollars go and make our concerns known.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Delaney Corcoran

A few weeks ago, I came across some ’80s Russian pop-rock songs and was instantly transported back to my childhood.

These were the songs that my parents played in the car, the ones that woke me up on Sunday mornings, the first albums on my fourth-grade MP3 player. I was overjoyed but also overwhelmed with sadness and longing, realizing that I had become an easy victim of the charitable nostalgia triggers of Spotify.

The beauty of nostalgia is its elusiveness––it can’t be confined to the categories of positive or negative emotion. Unlike anger or joy, it’s often a mix of both warm, happy feelings and deep melancholy. But sometimes wistful remembrance is more sweet than bitter, especially when it’s collective. Looking through old photos is easier when you’re with the people who are in them, and recalling a painful class is funnier when your former classmates are there to share the memories.

Part of the sadness in nostalgia is the realization that whatever you’re remembering is confined to the past, that it will never replay in the same way. The communal nostalgic experience, however, alleviates this problem, convincing us that because we’re looking back on the same events, they live on in our shared consciousness. The validation of our own memories by other people can make them more pleasant to reflect on, more real. Social approval can affirm and even alter our perception of reality, and its effect on nostalgia is no different.

The collective experience of nostalgia has flourished in the age of social media. Platforms like Twitter and Tumblr are home to viral tidbits of relatable childhood moments: reminiscing about favorite snacks, movies, and weirdly specific perils like forgetting to take the chicken out of the freezer before your mom comes home. These posts are ultimate internet wholesomeness, sparking social connection and bonding between fellow millennial strangers.

In a less wholesome response, technological titans have started to formally automate nostalgia by commodifying it.

Facebook offers yearly reminders of pictures, statuses, and the beginnings of virtual friendships; Google Photos sends weekly emails encouraging you to “Rediscover this day one year ago”; and Spotify annually compiles a list of the music you listened to last year.

And don’t forget wrung-out franchises like Star Wars that refuse to quietly retire into the world of memorabilia and Netflix movie marathons. What else but the sweet, sweet profitability of nostalgia could make Hollywood repeatedly hire new actors to beat the same cliché plot to death? As if that wasn’t enough,

VOICES

Nostalgia, Inc. Carrying On: Voice Staffers Speak nearly every year for the past five years, Disney has been announcing reboots for every childhood film they can think of, from Beauty and the Beast to the Lion King to Mulan.

Musical artists also seek to evoke our longing for the past.

Take Ariana Grande’s recent hit, “Thank U, Next,” a song about moving on from breakups and prioritizing yourself over men.

Its music video pays tribute to four teen comedies from the early 2000s, only one of which (Legally Blonde) actually corresponds to the topic of the song—the rest were solely selected for their nostalgia factor. As expected, people ate it up.

The experience of nostalgia usually requires a trigger— something that sparks our memories of the picturesque past.

Movies, songs, and photos, all of which are now accessible to us in an unprecedented volume, prove to be the perfect memory joggers and also the perfect mediums for brands to use for their own agendas.

Of course, melancholic rumination about the past is not necessarily bad. Nostalgia can inspire people to create beautiful art and literature, and from a psychological standpoint, studies show that it can help them feel more connected to their loved ones, strengthen their sense of self, and make life transitions smoother. And when experienced collectively, it’s arguably even better. I often feel lonely in the process of my own nostalgia because not many of my friends share my cultural heritage, and when I have the chance to reminisce with those who do, it’s a joyful and special moment.

But what happens to nostalgia when it’s capitalized and automated? Social media, especially for younger generations, is a platform for carefully curated versions of the self. Thus, the “On This Day” posts regurgitated on Facebook and the collages of old pictures on an Instagram feed aren’t really memories––they’re carefully picked tidbits of a persona created in a virtual space, representing only the most attractive and attention-grabbing aspects of ourselves. While brands have always exploited emotional responses for profit, now Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram encourage individuals to do the same by bringing in social currency in the form of retweets and likes.

These exaggerated people-brands can’t possibly be as multifaceted and complex as the identity of a real person, yet the “memories” they display become a crucial part of how we understand our own identities. Memorializing your self-concept as the ideal, neatly packaged person you are online complicates the process of personal growth. How can we envision and work

towards the future when the curated past keeps popping up and obstructing the view?

But corporations that try to imbue us with their own version of collective nostalgia represent a different and arguably even bigger monster than the personal memory-mining of Google Photos and Facebook. The constant bombardment of Disney reboots, popular toys, and “vintage” products creates the dangerous idea that our warm memories, and thus parts of our identity, must be tied to things available for purchase. Bonding over having seen the same mass-market cartoon is easy and immediate, but it ultimately makes shared nostalgia less personal and unique.

The entire farce culminates in the garish façades of Disney World, where adults can, and do, pay $100 to wait in lines, ride mediocre roller coasters, and interact with princesses and fictional mice while being fully aware that they are actually minimum-wage workers. Around 5,000 people a year go a step further and get married there, letting the voracious behemoth of corporate nostalgia guzzle anywhere from $3,500 to $180,000 from their bank accounts.

It’s impossible to divorce all of our memories from material things, but there is a difference between finding nostalgia in personal objects and having it spoon-fed to us by corporations looking to profit. There is an uncomfortably coercive current running through franchises that insist on reminding us what our childhood memories are and should be.

Nostalgia is a personal, complex, and delicate experience that evokes the ephemeral nature of every moment in our lives.

To corrupt it with computerized permanence and corporate greed is to strip it of its ethereal beauty.

Lizz Pankova is a junior in the College, an associate editor for the Voice, and lover of all things pickled.

VOICES

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DECEMBER 7, 2018

Three ?

Months ? of Feeling One Step ?

Behind

When I was 18, I started learning French. Three years and many French exams, essays, and presentations later, I packed up my bags to move to Lyon for the semester. I was hoping that, finally, immersion would provide me with the key to the elusive bilingual fluency I had been working so hard to achieve. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that no matter how many hours you spend in a language class, the only way to truly become fluent is to follow the cliché and “make the world your classroom.” When I arrived, I was ready to jump into that classroom and embrace the inevitable fluency I thought was around the corner.

Then, I started talking with people in French.

Three years is a relatively short time to be studying a language, and I quickly realized that I was immersing myself without the vocabulary necessary to fully understand what was going on. I found that the French talk in a blur, turning sentences I could understand on paper into continuous streams of words where only half the letters end up being pronounced. In daily conversation, French speakers employ dozens of slang terms and a unique practice called Verlan, in which they reverse the order of syllables in a word. For example, la femme (woman) becomes la meuf and le métro can be le tromé. Simply understanding what was happening around me was difficult, but that’s a normal problem abroad—the real challenge came when I tried to express myself in response to these eloquent streams.

To that end, I pieced together choppy, simple sentences, pronouncing too many letters and sticking far too close to English phrasing and sentence structure to really be understood. However, there was no other way for me to express myself—all I could do was use my limited vocabulary and poor grammar to explain ideas I understood well in English or talk my way around words that I hadn’t learned yet. (How do you explain what a chorus is without knowing any other words relating to music? “The part of the song that comes

back a lot and you cannot forget” was what I frantically produced.)

I realized that there are a host of people who only know me when I’ve expressed myself in French. Their only conception of me is as a sputtering, confused international—as in nonFrench—kid who doesn’t know words a French person would learn before they lost their first tooth. Of course, I’d love to explain to them, “I’m not unintelligent, I really understand this issue and want to make a well-informed argument about it, I just can’t remember the term for ‘ballot’ right now!” (It’s scrutin for anyone curious.) But that would take so long that I’d forget the terms I could remember by the time I decided to start the discussion. So I just seem constantly confused and am never completely sure that what I’m saying means exactly what I think it does.

In short, it’s exhausting to always feel like you don’t know things now that you knew in your native language. It’s exhausting to know that whomever you’re talking to won’t really know your personality or intentions. I think the only way to ever get people to start truly understanding you is to keep submitting yourself to being misunderstood over and over until you’ve been misunderstood in every possible way and have learned each time how not to do it again.

France is known for its Christmas markets, and when the one in Lyon opened at the end of November, my host family asked me how I celebrated Christmas back in the United States.

Almost immediately, I realized that my three years of language study had never once focused on Christmas, or on holidays in general. Ornaments, stockings, Christmas trees, wrapping paper, and myriad other fundamental aspects of my holidays were impossible for me to explain. I asked my host family to give me a rundown on the general words associated with Christmas in France, but getting more into specifics still presented difficulties. For example, a “manger” became “the place where they put infant Jesus with the animals.” This proved just how much work

? ?

? ?

olivia stevens

I still have to do and how demanding a pursuit of fluency is. I know I’ve already forgotten some of the words I learned in that conversation. I will have to have a similar conversation again, once more stumbling through seemingly basic vocabulary until all the words finally stick and present themselves exactly when I need them (and in the right gender, number, conjugation, or what-have-you).

Speaking in a foreign language is not easy, and I feel for every exchange student at Georgetown who doesn’t have someone to speak with in their own language, and with whom I’ve only been able to speak English. I wish I could speak with you and understand your thoughts in the way you think them because I know the people I’ve met here don’t always understand me.

Learning a new language simply takes time, and I don’t know if one semester is long enough to truly become fluent.

For all students studying abroad and in a foreign language, having experienced what it’s like to always feel one step behind and constantly misunderstood, I hope you find those who can see you as you see yourself.

Gustav Honl-Stuenkel is a junior in the College and former podcast editor for the Voice.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

I first heard the legend of the Georgetown Metro from a sullen medical student on a university transport shuttle. We were caught in traffic on our way to Dupont Station and she blamed the Georgetown neighborhood’s elitism for our peril.

I’ve since heard the same story from fellow Georgetown students, longtime D.C. residents, and cynical Uber drivers.

It goes like this: In the 1960s, as the National Capital Transportation Agency (NCTA) was drawing up plans for a rapid rail system in D.C., Georgetown elites rallied against proposals for a Metro station in the neighborhood. They felt threatened by the prospect of greater access to Georgetown, which would bring unwanted groups to the area—namely poor people and people of color. So the NCTA conceded and did not include a Georgetown Metro station in its plans. Today, the blue and silver lines run straight under the Potomac from Foggy Bottom to Rosslyn, skipping Georgetown entirely.

This is not a complete explanation of why there’s no Metro stop in Georgetown, and in recent years, news outlets from The Washington Post to The Georgetown Metropolitan have rushed to debunk it as an urban legend. It’s a tall tale, they say, engineered by people who want to paint Georgetown as elitist.

That’s false. To call this story a myth is to ignore its crucial truth––grievous issues of racism and classism have always hounded D.C.’s public transport. Yes, the real story is more complicated, as real stories always are. But it’s not just a fabrication.

It’s true that Georgetown’s community never tore down any official proposals for a Metro station, but only because the NCTA never actually suggested a Metro stop in Georgetown. In his book on the D.C. Metro, historian Zachary Schrag attributes this to engineering challenges: Georgetown’s proximity to the Potomac meant that a Metro station would have to be constructed deep in the ground. It was possible, he writes, but obscenely expensive.

He also notes that, at the time, there weren’t many people commuting to Georgetown, which made it a low-priority area for the planners. A station in the neighborhood was never seriously considered.

But Schrag does admit that there was opposition to a Metro stop in Georgetown. It just began before the NCTA released its plans. The Citizens Associations of Georgetown, in fact, published a position paper against the idea in 1962, which much of today’s media coverage has conveniently left out of its narrative.

Was this community resistance the driving force behind the NCTA’s decision to skip out on the stop? Maybe not. But their opposition was undeniably tied to class and race. Many wealthy, white suburban residents across D.C. felt threatened by the Metro system at the time. Schrag quotes Idamae Garrott, a Montgomery County politician in the 1970s who witnessed these views. “A lot of people here are scared to go into the District. Now they think that rapers and muggers will be able

to get on the subway for very little money, rape and mug me, and get on the subway and go back,” she said. This type of rhetoric aimed to restrict transit access for D.C.’s low-income neighborhoods, whose populations were mostly black.

This shameful line of thinking was evident in Georgetown as well. The Washington Post columnist Bob Levey’s 1977 interviews with Georgetown residents showcase a community happy with the absence of a Metro stop. “The Georgetown community leaders who took part in the 1962 decision to bend aside the Metro line that crosses from Rosslyn to Foggy Bottom do not regret their decision,” Levey wrote. They had wanted to “preserve” the neighborhood––by ensuring it was inaccessible.

So it’s deceitful to argue that race and class played no role in the development of D.C. Metro services, particularly in Georgetown. Getting this story right matters. It matters because public transport in the District as a whole remains a battleground for underserved communities who have suffered under the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s recent budget and service cuts.

And it matters because the story isn’t over. The Georgetown neighborhood continues to limit access to transportation, including the public transport our university offers: the Georgetown University Transportation Shuttle (GUTS).

After years of griping from the Georgetown neighborhood, the university rerouted the Dupont GUTS line in 2015, sending it out the Canal Road exit instead of down Reservoir Road. Students and university employees now face significantly longer commutes, just so a few streets can have marginally lower noise levels.

This is the legend of the Georgetown Metro all over again.

Think about it. GUTS––a free shuttle––is an important service for students, staff, and faculty who do not have cars and cannot afford to Uber to campus. The changes made to these routes, then, have disproportionately impacted low-income people.

Thanks to the university’s spinelessness, the whims of the Georgetown neighborhood have once again eclipsed the needs of everyone else.

I’m reminded of this three times a week when I board the Dupont GUTS bus back from my off-campus job (the public bus would be faster, but Georgetown, unlike other D.C. schools, does not subsidize Metrobus access for its students). On my return, the shuttle crawls through slow traffic up the waterfront.

In these moments, it’s easy to curse the Georgetown neighborhood’s elitism and go on with our days. But as students, we are involved in this conversation. It’s our responsibility to challenge Georgetown’s comfort with exclusion. And recognizing Georgetown’s long history of inaccessibility is a good start.

Katya Schwenk is an associate editor for the Voice. She co-authors the column “Branching Out,” which appears on georgetownvoice.com every other Friday.

VOICES

Branching Out: Georgetown’s Campaign Against Public Transport

DECEMBER 7, 2018

JACOB BILICH

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In the fall of 2015, the House majority leader, a conservative pollster, and three Georgetown football players walked into a bar. Disgruntled Rep. Kevin McCarthy and his friend Frank Luntz, the pollster best known for coining the term ‘death tax,’ were accompanying McCarthy’s son, a Georgetown student at the time, to The Tombs on a Tuesday night. By chance, they met Georgetown football players Darius Baxter (COL ’16), Troye Bullock (COL ’16), and Danny Wright (COL ’16) who were there to play trivia.

McCarthy had just given up his bid to be speaker of the House, so he and Luntz were in no mood to talk to the three young men. In time, Luntz warmed up to them. The relationship they formed eventually led the football players to found GOOD Projects and GOOD Partners, a nonprofit and consulting business, respectively, devoted to making a social impact in low-income communities in Washington, D.C. The story of GOOD, which stands for “Giving Out Opportunities Daily,” starts in The Tombs, but Baxter’s, Bullock’s, and Wright’s stories begin much earlier.

Though they did not meet until they arrived at Georgetown, where they became great friends, all three were born in D.C. to low-income families in low-income communities. All three also played football at private high schools.

Baxter’s father was shot and killed when he was 9. He and his family were left homeless and in constant fear of gun violence, and his mother was forced to provide for him and his brother.

All PHOTOs COURTESY OF GOOD Projects

“It was tough coming up, in many different ways,” Baxter said, wearing a polo shirt and his signature tinted glasses. “But at the same time, I was blessed to have a support system around me that always helped me to move forward.”

Wright was also without a father for much of his childhood.

His mother became pregnant with him at 14 and was kicked out of the house, forcing her and Wright’s father to fend for themselves and a child. His father began selling drugs to make ends meet and was incarcerated when Wright was 5 or 6.

“I’m a statistical anomaly, right?” Wright said, smiling. “For someone who’s coming from teenage parents and a low-income community, I was blessed because my mom was really disciplined and made sure that she did everything she needed to do to make sure that I had a good life.”

Bullock, like his two partners, is no stranger to hardship. His mother was bedridden due to sickle-cell disease. Like Wright, his father was incarcerated for selling drugs. “I just kinda grew up in a place where a place like Georgetown wasn’t in anybody’s future,” he said. “Nobody in my family or my neighborhood could see themselves at a place like that. I never met anyone that went to college, but the majority of people I did meet had been to jails.”

Leaning back on the couch in the Georgetown Venture Lab at the White House WeWork, a co-working space for Georgetown alumni from which they operate GOOD, Bullock continued. “Football saved my life because football put me at a private Catholic high school, which then put me at Georgetown,” he

said. “And if I didn’t play football, and I didn’t go to that high school, who knows what would’ve happened to me.”

Bullock played football in Maryland at DeMatha Catholic High School, a sports powerhouse, rather than attend his local public school, which had a 15 percent graduation rate. Baxter and Wright also attended private Catholic schools in the DMV area to play football. Baxter played at Bishop McNamara in Prince George’s County; Wright went to St. John’s College in the District. Being on the D.C. Catholic school football circuit put the three in decidedly better schools than their public options and, ultimately, on the radar of Georgetown football head coach Rob Sgarlata.

Bullock interacts with students. Above: Wright, Baxter, Bullock.

9

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

“[Georgetown Football] made a commitment four years ago to make sure that we did a good job recruiting locally.

There’s great talent here, and there’s kids with great stories,” Sgarlata said. “If you take all three of their cases, they all had great stories. We look for what the motivation behind a student athlete could be. You know, what’s their ‘why’?”

For kids who grew up in Baxter, Bullock, and Wright’s communities, the ultimate goal was to get to college on a full ride.

When they were recruited by Georgetown, the trio thought their private high school experience would have prepared them for the culture shock. But life on the Hilltop exposed them to wealth like they had never seen before and gave the young men a level of freedom they had never experienced. In their first two years, Baxter struggled with depression, while Wright repeatedly found himself in trouble with Sgarlata for partying in the city and breaking curfew, a common infraction for freshmen on the football team.

“We want to have our student athletes come in and really feel safe and trust what we’re doing, have the ability to make as many mistakes here as possible, but within the guidance that we provide,” Sgarlata said. “The bad joke is that the best thing about freshmen is they become sophomores.”

Ultimately, the three grew into themselves at Georgetown.

Bullock found that the culture shock also served as motivation.

“It really gave me a sense that, okay, I can succeed,” he said. “I can be a CEO, I can do that, because before I never was exposed to that, so therefore it was never real for me.” And when they began to use their experiences at Georgetown to their advantage, doors began to open.

“I think it was a defining moment in the end of my sophomore year, beginning of my junior year where it was like, ‘Can the real Danny Wright please stand up and start being what you’re capable of being?’” Wright said. “From there, I started interning a lot more. I interned every single semester when I was at Georgetown, from my sophomore year on, and luckily my overall persona of networking and being enthusiastic and social led us to meeting this guy named Frank Luntz at a bar.”

That night, Luntz wasn’t in a good mood: McCarthy had been forced out of the race to be speaker of the House after a gaffe on national television, and they were not at The Tombs looking to celebrate. The young men had no business approaching the high-profile politicians, but Wright persisted. He convinced the majority leader and his friends to play trivia and then take shots with the football players. Wright, Bullock, and Baxter ended up deep in conversation with Luntz, telling him about where they came from.

Luntz, impressed by the three, invited Bullock, Baxter, and Wright, along with another Georgetown student, to meet with legislators on Capitol Hill, where he asked them to pick an issue they would like to speak with members of Congress about.

They chose AmeriCorps, which employs tens of thousands of Americans in community service projects. Luntz partnered with Rep. Joe Kennedy to have the young men lobby representatives on the merits of AmeriCorps.

As they left the Capitol, Luntz challenged the young men.

“There’s something special here. I don’t know how to describe it, I don’t know what will happen,” Luntz said he told them. “Anyone can go to grad school. Anyone can leave and get a job. You guys should stay here in Washington. Go back to the community that everyone is trying to get out of and teach them what you all have learned. Teach them about responsibility and opportunity and give them a path out that you were given.”

Luntz admitted that many of the college students he’s worked with over the years haven’t listened to him. But Bax-

ter, Bullock, and Wright did. They brainstormed on the whiteboard in their house until they came up with the initial idea for GOOD: a youth football camp aimed at stopping gun-violence in the District. They filed for both nonprofit and for-profit companies, and after they graduated in 2016, they went into southeast D.C. with no money and held a summer camp.

There was no way of knowing if their model would work, let alone support the new college graduates. But after watching Entourage and Wolf of Wall Street enough times, they decided they would take a leap of faith.

“We realized, we’ve been poor before,” Baxter said. “All of us to a certain extent have experienced homelessness at a period in our lives. We don’t have any money now, so what do we truly, truly have to lose if we take a shot on ourselves for a few months?”

I never met anyone that went to college, but the majority of people I did meet had been to jails.

The summer before, gun violence had spiked in Anacostia. They assumed that since conditions hadn’t changed in the community in the year since, the gun violence numbers wouldn’t either. Instead of running from a problem they had spent their lives fleeing, the young men set up shop in the heart of Anacostia for five weeks.

They went door to door, telling parents about the football camp they planned to run.

“We were like, ‘okay, why are people shooting each other in the middle of the day?’” Baxter said. “Maybe if we put something in the way where they can just kind of be occupied, and we go with the age range that’s most susceptible to being either the victims or the perpetrators of this, that we’ll be able to cut into gun violence.”

They weren’t sure how many kids would show up at Anacostia High School. But 200 kids came on the first day of the camp. What started as a football camp quickly grew to encompass entrepreneurship, tutoring, other sports, and environmental programs.

They started just $3,000 worth of in-kind donations that summer but immediately noticed an impact. During the time in which they held that first camp, Bullock said that there were no homicides or gun-related crimes in the neighborhood.

Their success led to a contract with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office to pilot a juvenile justice program to rehabilitate youth through mentorship, trips, GED prep, and group therapy sessions. The relationships they have built with the participants have helped get kids off the street, into college, and into secure jobs.

“I watched them get kids to open up who won’t talk to anyone,” Luntz said after observing a group therapy session.

“These are kids who have been incarcerated, kids that have been ignored and rejected and in some cases abused. And they have found a way to talk to them and, more importantly, a way to listen to them.”

The next summer, they hosted a camp in Barry Farm, a neighborhood in Southeast. In 2018, they hosted five camps across southeast D.C. Their model for camps has changed since that first year. Now it targets a younger age

group, pays counselors, and funds a host of programming for campers. As they grew, they were able to point to their success and their stories during their fundraising efforts.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and millions in private donations began to roll in.

When they started their work, members of the community were skeptical that such young Georgetown graduates were going to “save the hood,” Baxter said. They used their youth to create innovative programming and receive help that may not have been so readily available were they older. As their programs have grown, so have their relationships. Now, they said, they’re seen as a fixture of the community.

Along with the trio’s non-profit work at GOOD Projects, through their for-profit side, called GOOD Partners, they have consulted with schools, nonprofits, and government agencies about how to run youth programs and improve the quality of life in a community. Despite a busy schedule, the three make time to come back to Georgetown and serve as mentors for current football players.

“We talk about coming to a special place that produces people that are doing not just the things that _benefit themselves,” he said. “We point to them a lot in recruiting.”

On Dec. 1, Baxter, Bullock, and Wright came back to their old stomping ground as part GOOD Projects’ Brown Bag, a District-wide initiative to feed the homeless. Georgetown students spent hours making sandwiches, writing cards, and dancing to music blaring through the dining hall’s speakers.

Luntz credits the three with saving lives in southeast D.C. “I think GOOD Projects has a greater likelihood of making a meaningful, measurable change in society than any other organization I’ve ever dealt with,” he said.

“And all that we have to hope and pray is that these young men realize it and stay with it, because they are the solution to so

Participants during a GOOD camp. many problems that America faces.”

For Baxter, Bullock, and Wright, their programming work is not yet enough. Over the next few years, they want to work in the Greenleaf apartment complex in southwest D.C. to end generational poverty. They plan to raise money to invest in locally owned businesses, marshall existing resources to help raise families’ incomes, and create individualized plans to lift families out of poverty.

They hope to apply their model to address poverty on a large scale in the District and across the country. But as Baxter, Bullock, and Wright talked about their work, they returned again and again to where they might have been had they not ended up at Georgetown and to the kids whose stories mirror their own.

“They could be us,” Bullock said. “We could’ve been them.

So let’s do something about it.”

10

DECEMBER 7, 2018

Here Comes the Sun?

Local Environmentalists Oppose University Solar Project

Graphics Jake Glass

By Noah Telerski When Benjamin Hance decided he wanted to put solar panels on his home, he faced a dilemma. Living on a wooded lot meant trees cast shadows on his roof, and most solar companies he talked to were hesitant to sign on to the job. But one company—he did not say which—told him they could do it by taking down “just a couple trees” to allow more sunlight to reach his roof.

Hance, a member of the Southern Maryland Sierra Club, did not take their offer but rather had solar panels installed by a different company. “That was a non-starter,” Hance said. “What would be the point if I wanted to lower my carbon impact of taking out two or three large, old trees that have already sequestered carbon and continue to do so?”

Hance and a number of citizens in La Plata, Maryland, are asking the same questions about a proposed solar panel installation that Georgetown is financing: Should natural resources be sacrificed for renewable energy?

Not far from Hance’s house in Charles County are 537 mostly wooded acres, a part of the larger Nanjemoy Forest and a Maryland Audubon Society Important Bird Area because of the variety of bird species found there. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources labeled the land a “Targeted Ecological Area” for its rare species and wildlife habitat, making it one of the most ecologically valuable areas in Maryland.

Georgetown has entered into a power purchase agreement with MD Solar 1, a subsidiary of Origis Energy USA, to construct a 32.5 megawatt, 249 acre solar installation on the property.

Xavier Rivera, director of utilities and energy management at Georgetown, wrote in a statement to the Voice that under the provisions of the agreement, Origis will build the facility, and Georgetown will buy power at a guaranteed price for the 20-year term of the agreement.

“The University’s commitment to purchase the power is important to the project’s ability to attain financing, and thus Georgetown plays a catalyzing role in bringing new renewable power to our regional electric grid,” Rivera wrote. “The University will own the ‘renewable energy certificates,’ which certify that the power is from a renewable source, bundled together with the power purchase.”

The installation’s completion, however, will require a large part of the property to be cleared of trees. This has led local con-

servation groups like the Southern Maryland Sierra Club to oppose the project. Members believe that cutting down trees to build solar panels is counterproductive.

Hance said that this is the same problem he faced when getting solar panels for his roof, but on a much larger scale and with the wrong outcome. “If Georgetown wanted to put these solar panels on the roof of a Walmart, or over all of their parking lots on campus, or even old, monoculture farm fields that are essentially spent, something like that is a much lower impact,” Hance said.

“It is the clear-cutting of hundreds of acres that is the problem.”

The installation, announced in September 2017, would provide almost half of the electricity used by the university. Greg Simmons, interim vice president for planning and facilities management, wrote in a statement to the Voice that the university reviewed 60 proposals before settling on Origis “based on overall holistic benefits from the project.” Alongside the project, the Origis Energy Foundation will support scholarships for undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need.

The installation would be a significant step by the university toward meeting its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 2006 levels by 2020. Simmons wrote that the installation would provide enough electricity to power 3,000 single-family homes, far more than would be possible with on-campus installations. “Due to space constraints on our physical campus, even if every inch of the University was covered in solar panels it would provide less than half of the electricity needed to power campus,” Simmons wrote. Along with the announcement of the off-site project, the university said it would also complete a solar project on the roofs of six buildings by the end of the 20172018 academic year. The projects were not completed.

Bonnie Bick, conservation chair of the Southern Maryland Sierra Club, believes the need to destroy forest to make room for solar panels means the installation is not in the right location.

“What we feel is that solar should be located in areas where it will enhance the environment, such as solar canopies, median strip solar, rooftop solar,” Bick said.

A study of the trees on the property conducted by consulting firm ECS Mid-Atlantic for MD Solar found that there are 506.2 acres of forest on the property. Simmons wrote that 288 of these acres will be protected by Maryland conservation laws, protecting

more than half of the trees on the property. “The project will be carefully located on the site such that preserved areas will include most of the largest trees on site, as well as other important ecology such as floodplains, riparian areas and stream buffer zones,” Simmons wrote.

Still, 218 acres of forest will have to be removed to make room for the solar panels. Linda Redding, a local citizen who has been involved in resisting the removal of the forest, called this “greenwashing.” “Green projects do not destroy green resources,” Redding said.

She pointed to the negative effects that removing the trees will have on surrounding forests and streams, as well as the area’s microclimate.

Simmons’ statement included estimates showing that the carbon savings of the solar panels would far outweigh the loss of carbon sequestration from the removed trees. “The project will generate approximately 75,000 megawatt-hours of power each year and is expected to reduce carbon emissions equivalent to 28 million pounds of coal or planting over 600,000 trees—the amount of carbon sequestered by approximately 30,000 acres of forest,” Simmons wrote. These numbers were calculated with the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas calculator tool using the specific factors of Georgetown’s grid.

The study of the parcel conducted by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources estimated that the area sequesters .58 metric tons of carbon per acre per year. The 218 acres that would be cleared could absorb emissions equivalent to those created by burning 507,236 pounds of coal.

The trees are not the citizens’ only concern, though. Bick said that there are two streams which run through the property that could be affected by the clear-cutting. “These streams are Tier II streams,” Bick said, referring to streams classified by the state as exceeding minimum water quality standards. “These are the highest grade we have in Maryland.” Her concerns stem from the possibility for increased runoff and erosion after deforestation, which would not only impact the streams on the property, but the areas downstream as well.

The environmental review of the property prepared by the consulting firm H&B Solutions for MD Solar states that “no impacts to streams or aquifers are anticipated as a result of the project.”

Jason Thomas, director of development for Origis, wrote in a statement to the Voice that the project has been designed with the streams in mind and in accordance with state regulations.

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

11

vs.

solar panels

32.5

forest

218

MW power output

1

acres of forest3

84.5 / 100

75,000

Wildlife Habitat & Biodiversity Potential Index4

MWh power produced annually1

126.4

7,104

metric tons carbon saved annually2

metric tons carbon sequestered annually4

28 million

507,236

pounds coal equivalent carbon sequestered annually2

pounds coal equivalent carbon reduced annually1 1 2

Greg Simmons, interim VP of planning and facilities management EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator; data from Simmons

“These regulations, plus strict permit conditions, require the implementation of engineered solutions to maintain or decrease runoff quantity and also protect the quality of nearby streams,” Thomas wrote. “Examples of these protective measures include large vegetative buffers, stormwater management controls, infiltration basins, the preparation of a stormwater pollution prevention plan and environmental monitoring.”

The loss of the trees, potentially decreased water quality, and reduction in carbon sequestration will cost the people of Charles County. The Department of Natural Resources combined these factors and others to estimate that the property has an average value of $2,440 per acre annually. If 218 acres are removed, for example, Charles County will effectively lose $531,920 a year, forever.

On the other hand, the local economic benefits would include increased tax receipts from the property and, per Simmons, the creation of 200 jobs during the installations construction.

Bick said residents became aware of the project when MD Solar applied for a special exception with the county. In Charles County, regardless of the property’s current zoning, the construction of a large solar installation requires a special exception from the Board of County Commissioners. The exception was granted unanimously.

Redding said this exception was not in line with the county’s comprehensive plan, which lays out how the county will handle land use and development for the next decade. Specifically, Redding said that the exception did not fall under the plan’s goals for natural resource protection to “conserve large tracts of contiguous forestland and forest interior dwelling bird habitat determined to be of significance due to their value for wildlife habitat, water quality and air quality.”

To appeal the Board of Commissioners’ decision, Redding spent $700 of her own money to file a motion for reconsideration but represented herself. “It was me going up against a lawyer, and she just talked circles around me, and the motion was denied,”

3 4

Total parcel minus conservation easement area; data from Simmons Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Redding said. She suggested that if they could find the funds and hire a lawyer, they could try to take the case to circuit court.

The citizens are running out of options. One is to apply pressure on the university either to withdraw from its contract with Origis or reconsider the location of the proposed installation.

“We want them to understand this is the wrong location and that they don’t want to give solar a bad name,” Bick said.

Hance felt the same way and hoped that there is a way for solar projects to become both more common and more sustainable.

“The idea of using your funds to help develop a solar plant and to increase the amount of solar energy is in itself a fantastic idea and something I would encourage for institutions and people at the individual level. I have solar panels on my roof for that very same reason,” Hance said. “But it has to be well-thought-out, and you have to consider where those panels are going and your environmental impact when putting them in.”

Redding thought that this argument could be very effective in persuading the university, or its students, to take action and alter the course of the project. “What would people say if they were going to cut down 240 acres of Rock Creek Park or the beautiful trees on Georgetown’s campus? That wouldn’t be acceptable,” she said.

Samantha Panchèvre (SFS ’19), GUSA’s sustainability chair and a member of GU Fossil Free, believes that sustainability is a worthwhile goal for the university. But she said that this particular project could have been done better if students had been involved in the decision-making process. “I’m really happy that Georgetown is taking concrete steps to meet their renewable energy goals,” Panchèvre said. “But, I wish they had involved more students in the process, and I hope environmental destruction can be mitigated.”

These competing interests are coming to a head as the project approaches its final hurdle. MD Solar must obtain a letter of authorization from the Maryland Department of the Environment

because of the property’s Tier II streams and the potential impact of the construction on the waterways.

The citizens are hoping that they can get a public hearing before the Department of the Environment in one last attempt to block the project. “They haven’t started clear-cutting yet; there are still steps that need to be cleared,” Hance said.

But he also acknowledged that letters of authorization are often granted based upon the decisions of lower appeals boards, meaning the project will likely move forward.

If the project is blocked, locals think there is a chance to save the property for the future. Several people interviewed for this story indicated that there is a conservation group interested in purchasing the property but did not name the group to avoid interfering with any ongoing discussions.

Bick believes that kind of conservation would be the best use for the property. It would protect its natural value and also let it serve a different purpose for institutions like Georgetown as an outdoor classroom. “We’ve always thought of this area below Washington, this Nanjemoy-Mattawoman corridor, as extremely biodiverse,” Bick said. ”It would be much more beneficial for students to come on a tour of the value of this big forest and learn to protect it as opposed to just sitting back and letting it get destroyed out of inattention.”

Redding and the other citizens do not want to discourage Georgetown or any other institution that wants to switch to solar energy, but they believe that there are better ways to do it. “I never thought I’d be fighting a solar project,” she said. “But it was just beyond my imagination that someone would cut down all these trees.”

For Hance, the hour-long drive from the Hilltop to La Plata means the issues with the project can go unnoticed by the Georgetown community. “When it’s out of sight and out of mind here in the boonies, as it were, it can be brushed off a little bit more,” Hance said. “You don’t see the trees coming down, you don’t see the log trucks going in and out.”

LEISURE

12

FINDING HIS VOICE

DECEMBER 7, 2018

Martin Yant Looks Back on Voice Founding, Career of Investigating

As the Voice nears our 50th anniversary in March 2019, we are looking back at our history, alumni, and life after the Voice.

By Peter Guthrie

Yant (right) with Tony Kawas (COL ’71) in the Voice office.

Photo Courtesy of Martin Yant

In the fall of 1967, Georgetown was on the cusp of a seismic social shift. When he arrived on campus, Martin Yant (SFS ’71) found a stodgy, buttoned-up men’s club where a blazer and tie was the de facto student uniform. The College would not admit women for another two years. But a wave of civil unrest soon swept the country as tensions over war and race mounted, changing campus culture forever.

“Georgetown was pretty conservative and insulated, and that changed greatly because of the assassinations in the spring,” Yant said. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 and the ensuing riots, Yant said he remembers “standing up on Loyola Hall, on the roof, watching the city burn.”

Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months later, accelerating the formation of an anti-war, anti-establishment counterculture among Georgetown students. “It was an amazing transformation in a very short period of time,” Yant said.

When he returned to campus in the fall of 1968 for his sophomore year, that stuffy culture from his first year was notably absent. “All of the sudden when people came back in the fall of ’68, everyone was wearing blue jeans, had long hair, and no coats and ties, for the most part,” he said.

Yet campus media did not reflect that change. Yant said The Hoya eschewed coverage of anti-war demonstrations and the shifting culture, holding onto its traditionally socially-conservative foundation of the time. “[The editor] just felt that the purpose of a campus newspaper is to cover the campus, and he had no use for the anti-war movement, which had become a major part of campus activity,” Yant said. “It was everywhere, and he just wanted to ignore it.”

In the spring, several students broke away from The Hoya to form The Georgetown Voice, a magazine in which they aimed to report and reflect on the emergent student counterculture.

Initially, Yant was primarily focused on politics and only casually interested in journalism. He was a self-billed “progressive Republican,” though he said he was quickly alienated from the College Republicans, and the party itself, by a student whom he described as particularly obnoxious, named Paul Manafort (MSB ‘71, LAW ‘74).

Yant was peripherally involved in the Voice at its inception in the spring, focusing instead on his two jobs, but became

more active in the fall. For his first story, he attended a protest against a proposed bridge that would cross the Potomac into Georgetown, potentially destroying several thousand homes. Police eventually told the protestors they were to disperse or be arrested.

“Not too many people dispersed,” Yant said. He was accosted by a police officer. “He grabbed my pen and notepad, threw it down, and said, ‘You’re under arrest.’” Yant and 86 other Georgetown students were arrested that day.

The story turned into a first-person narrative of his experience inside the jail, which won an Edward B. Bunn award, a university award for journalistic excellence. “That really got me interested in journalism,” he said.

The survival of the publication, however, was quickly jeopardized. The director for student activities, Robert Dixon, who personally allocated funds to the Voice, was indicted for embezzling from the student activities fund, casting doubt on the its future funding. Furthermore, some speculated that the Voice was founded largely as an effort to bolster a friend’s campaign for GUSA president, whose success possibly rendered the magazine obsolete to the founders.

Yant spearheaded an effort with several other students to resuscitate the Voice. He took on the role of managing editor and recruited a prominent campus conservative, Rick Newcombe (COL ‘72), who now runs a media syndicate, to write a column in an effort to give the publication a more bipartisan, mature tone.

Still, the Voice maintained its countercultural slant. Yant remembered one illustration on the back cover of an issue in particular: a raised red fist to demonstrate solidarity with the student strikes of 1970 against the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

After graduation, Yant worked as a reporter at the Pittsburgh Press and the Chicago Sun-Times for several years before landing a position as editor in chief of the News Journal in Mansfield, Ohio, at 28. “I considered it a dream come true that turned into a nightmare,” he said.

Mansfield, Yant discovered, was a hotbed of government corruption. “My first day on the job, someone called me and said, ‘Are you going to cover up all the dirt in Mansfield like all the other editors have?’” Yant said.

What began as an investigation into the plight of a truck

driver buried in a blizzard opened the door on a plethora of abuse at the local sheriff’s department. “The torture, beatings, corruption that was going on was just unbelievable,” Yant said. His reporting eventually led to the conviction of the county sheriff and seven deputies on various charges of corruption and assault.

When he discovered that his publisher was entangled in the same corruption he was investigating, Yant set out to create his own daily newspaper. “I had a big following at that point,” he said.

He started The Ohio Observer in 1978 to continue probing into the city’s corruption, investigating cases from a crooked coroner to an illicit pornography distribution ring run by singer-comedian Sammy Davis Jr. in Mansfield.

Yant’s investigations at the Observer provoked strong backlash from organized crime rings, at one point turning violent— Yant was forced to shutter the paper after just one year after his circulation office was firebombed. “A lot of our advertisers were getting threats, so just out of fear, nobody would advertise with the paper anymore,” he said.

After the bombing, he moved to Columbus, Ohio, where he worked as a columnist at The Columbus Dispatch and became interested in wrongful convictions. After spats with his editor over criminal justice issues, he became a licensed private investigator, opening his own agency aimed at exonerating wrongly convicted individuals. Since then, Yant has published four books, including two on the corruption he uncovered in Ohio.

He has also helped free 20 wrongly convicted individuals, including two who were sentenced to death. Currently, Yant is working to exonerate four men in Huntington, West Virginia, whom he believes were wrongly convicted more than a decade ago for the murder of a woman. In partnership with several criminal justice groups, Yant believes he has uncovered DNA evidence implicating a man in Ohio for the murder.

Yant credits the Voice as the basis for the path his career is taking even now, years after he graduated from Georgetown. “The Voice was the most valuable part of my fantastic Georgetown experience.

It set me off on a highly fulfilling journey as a journalist, author, and investigator,” he said.

“I couldn’t have asked for more.”

13

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

“Glad It’s Over”: Students Reflect on California Wildfires

By Annemarie Cuccia On Thanksgiving Day, the roads to Gaby Walton’s (COL ’20) home in Malibu, California, were closed. Walton does not normally return home for Thanksgiving due to the distance, however this year, she didn’t have a choice. Her home was safe, but the city around it had burned in the Woolsey wildfire.

Every day of November this year, an active wildfire raged in California. The Camp fire in the north of the state was the most destructive wildfire in California history. Meanwhile, the Woolsey fire ravaged parts of the south of the state in and around Thousand Oaks, California, the site of a recent mass shooting.

Jackie Nowakowski (COL ’20) said that the pain of the fire was sharpest at the community level. Nowakowski has lived in Woodland Hills, the next town over from Thousand Oaks, her whole life. “My first house burned, my best friend’s home burned. I think 80 percent of my high school [district] was evacuated,” she said.

Nowakowski said that the fire has eclipsed the tragedy of the shooting on Nov. 7. The community barely had time to process the deaths of the 12 people killed inside a Thousand Oaks bar before it had to deal with the fires. “There’s been so much happening,” Nowakowski said. “And now they’re talking about mudslides.” The fire left hillsides vulnerable to rainstorms, increasing the risk of further disaster.

Her friends who remained at home expressed feelings of emptiness.

“Everyone feels numb” Walton is also from Southern California, and her father was directly affected by the fires. He stayed at their home in Malibu on the university campus where he teaches. “They were evacuated to the library and basically stayed there for two days,”

Walton said. “I think all of Malibu was under mandatory evacuation except the university said everyone should stay there.”

While city firefighters worked to protect those on the campus, neighborhoods close to the university were wiped out.

Walton spoke to her father frequently during and after the fire. As his classes were cancelled, he found himself at a loss for what to do. “The power wasn’t on for a long time, and he couldn’t leave campus, so he couldn’t go to the store or to do anything, so he was just kind of trapped on the street with the other neighbors, and it was really smoggy, the air was terrible, they were all wearing facemasks,” Walton said. “It’s better now they’ve opened the roads and everything.”

Nowakowski said her friends who remained at home expressed feelings of emptiness. “Everyone feels numb,” she said.

Even after the town was mostly evacuated, people began to return for fear of looting.

Toria Sullivan (NHS ’19) is from Indiana, not California, but the wildfires have affected her family, too. Her aunt and uncle live in Malibu, and her uncle’s house burned down, along with several in her aunt’s neighborhood. While it is not Sullivan’s home, she feels a connection to it, having stayed there one summer in high school. “It’s very wild to think that it could just be a matter of living across the street from someone and one house making it and another house not,” she said. “It was a beautiful, beautiful community.”

While her aunt and cousin evacuated to Los Angeles, her uncle stayed behind with some friends to put out embers in his neighborhood. “It’s not necessarily an endorsed idea, but they did that and were able to apparently save three houses in the neighborhood,” Sullivan said. While her family has not heard from him recently, they know there are people chartering boats from Los Angeles to Malibu beaches to deliver provisions to those who stayed behind.

The experience has reinforced some of Sullivan’s existing interests at Georgetown, such as climate policy. “It motivates me to take climate change more seriously,” she said. She questioned how the government’s response to the California wildfires has differed from its reactions to other natural disasters. “California is burning, but there wasn’t necessarily the emergency response we would see if there was a hurricane,” she said.

Nowakowski felt this disparity was echoed in the attitudes toward the disaster on campus. She said she had not seen any efforts by the university or any clubs to reach out to students that were affected like there has been in response to past natural disasters. “It’s moving on to fires being California’s natural disasters,” she said. Nowakowski said she would appreciate

more support from the university, and she thinks other students would, too.

A spokesperson for the university wrote in an email to the Voice, “Residential Advisors, Residential Ministers, and Student Affairs staff are always ready to connect students with resources on campus. We encourage any students impacted by the wildfires in California to reach out so that the university can provide support.”

With their families so far away, Nowakowski, Walton, and Sullivan all said they had lacked the support that would have made the experience just a little easier to deal with. “I’m the only one from my friend group from California,” Nowakowski said.

It has been hard to explain to people how close the fire was to her home, and how it has affected her. Her friends have often made jokes about “we have snow days, and you have fire days,” she said, because fires are so common. But this was different.

“It’s never been this awful and prolonged,” she said.

Even after Walton knew her father would be okay, she said the weekend during the height of the fire was difficult for her.

“I was stressed, I had to call and be like, ‘If you do have to leave, I’d like you to take some money and some jewelry.’ I had a weekend of doing nothing. I did no homework,” she said. Her friends helped her get through the weekend, and she is glad the worst is over.

For Sullivan, it is not just her family’s possessions that could be lost, but their history as well. “My uncle had a large collection of my great-grandmother’s paintings. She was a folk artist, and so our family lost a big part of our history with that potentially,” she said. “We don’t know how many paintings he had or how many he was able to get out.”

Though families are still dealing with the aftermath of the fire, many people have turned their eyes to the future. Walton is sure California will continue to confront wildfires. “When you’re driving through California, it’s just hills of dead grass, so it’s kindling,” she said.

Still, Walton is taking this time to appreciate her family’s safety. “It was scary and a little stressful. I’m glad it’s over,” she said. “I’m glad I didn’t lose my house.”

When Nowakowski returns home for winter break, she anticipates that her hometown will have changed significantly.

“While the fire was devastating and even though I have seen pictures, it still does not seem entirely real,” she wrote in an email to the Voice. “Going home and seeing the burnt remnants of people’s homes and the actual day-to-day reality of how the community will have to rebuild will put the absolute devastation wreaked by the fire in stark relief.”

LEISURE

14

UPDATEPUBDATE

albums

BEST OF THe voice ’s choices

1

Sweetener

6

Isolation

2

Everything Is LOve

7

Iridescence

3

Invasion of Privacy

8

Kids See ghosts

4

Astroworld

9

7

5

Dirty Computer

10

Ariana Grande has faced unimaginable tragedy and loss in the last two years, and yet, the singer has prevailed as one of the most positive and empowering forces in pop today. While she’s always been known for her distinct soprano and vocal chops, Sweetener marks a turning point for Grande. In it, she drops the bad-girl alter ego of Dangerous Woman for an equally powerful, but more honest and hopeful version of herself. Floating between songs with effortless energy, Grande celebrates love, hope, and healing with tracks that double as dance-club hits and inspiring anthems, leaving listeners without a doubt that God is, in fact, a woman. - Devon O’Dwyer

Ariana Grande

The follow-up to Beyoncé’s masterful Lemonade and Jay-Z’s vulnerable 4:44, Everything Is Love brings closure to the couple’s infidelity drama and features the duo back on top of the world. Acknowledging and accepting the mistakes of the past, Mr. and Mrs. Carter use their music to discuss their reforged love, display their wealth, and highlight racial injustices. This project’s striking visual component, a music video accompanying the track “Apeshit,” juxtaposes their modern wealth and black pride with the colonial opulence of the Louvre, allowing them to shine a spotlight on the historical mistreatment of Africans in western art. Acknowledging this terrible truth and broadcasting their success in spite of it, the Carters point out that love was strong enough to fix their marriage, so perhaps love can become strong enough to fix everything else. - Thomas Scanlon

the carters

“My little 15 minutes lasting long as hell, huh?” Cardi B declares in “I Do,” the final track of her debut album, Invasion of Privacy. She’s right. Invasion of Privacy is boastful and unconventional, but more importantly, it’s Cardi’s definitive response to the skeptics of her success, proving that she is here to stay. With features from the likes of SZA, Chance the Rapper, and Bad Bunny, Invasion emerges as a diverse body of work. Gliding from a traditional New York-style beat on “Bickenhead” to Latin trap on “I Like It” with ease, Cardi exudes a constant air of confidence—and it’s this self-assurance that makes Invasion of Privacy such a successful debut. - Zain Sandhu

Cardi B

Astroworld proves that Travis Scott’s greatest asset is his ear, presenting an experiment in haunting melodies and atmospheric beats—a slow swim through psychedelia and sharp trap.

Scott balances the two styles like a chef balancing sweet and sour, enhancing each with the inclusion of the other. As the title suggests, this album is an amusement park, with a pace ingeniously engineered like that of a rollercoaster. Not only did Scott summon an array of producers to elevate his sound to territories unknown, but he placed the perfect features throughout the album. Appearances from titans like Drake and Frank Ocean, among many others, enhance an already epic collection of bangers and blues, enabling Scott to capture the height of his artistic capabilities. - Eman Rahman

Travis Scott

Dirty Computer is a glimmering, powerful, and paradoxical masterpiece that only Janelle Monáe’s versatile genius could perfect.

Throughout her discography, Monáe has adopted the persona of a cyborg, but her lyrics on this album are deeply human; her sounds are soft and sensual. She is painfully aware that some may view her, a queer black woman, as an outsider, a freak, or a dirty computer, but she responds directly with courage, grace, pride, and an enchantingly rich voice. Monáe’s brilliant, otherworldly concept albums have drawn comparison to Bowie’s space-age pop genius, but she is a cutting-edge innovator of sound, blending classic smoothness with modern funk. Whether through soul, rap, whispers, whimpers, or bold bisexual lighting, Monáe radiates a confident, raw honesty that slashes the standards of establishment power. - Emily Jaster

Janelle Monáe

Colombian-American singer-songwriter Kali Uchis has been honing her unique blend of R&B, funk, reggaetón, and West Coast soul ever since she was a teenager living out of her Subaru Forester. With her much lauded debut studio album, Uchis finds storytelling potential in her own enigmatic self-reflection, daring those listening to define her. A slew of standout guests (Tyler, the Creator and Jorja Smith among them) helps Isolation glide across genres and languages, Uchis switching between Spanish and English just as nimbly. Dreamy and futuristic, vintage and versatile, Isolation solidifies Uchis as one of the year’s most innovative new artists. - Amy Guay

Kali Uchis

It is one thing to make spectacular music in a suburban home with your friends, another to skyrocket to fame by way of that music, and yet another to maintain your original sincerity while producing a new record at Abbey Road. BROCKHAMPTON succeeds on their fourth album in two years, iridescence, because they manage to cultivate the earnest nature of their previous work while maturing both professionally and musically. iridescence creates a winding path for the listener to travel, more sonically complex, emotionally varied, and lyrically engaging than any of BROCKHAMPTON’s previous works, without ever sacrificing a moment of sincerity, honesty, or enthusiasm. The direction of the album, though shifty and occasionally jaunting, is undeniably purposeful and built to reward the listener by showcasing a new dimension of complexity in the boyband. A master class in artistic growth, iridescence earns its slot as one of the best albums of the year. - Timmy Sutton

Brockhampton

It is rare that a 24-minute record has so many diverse themes holding it together. Kids See Ghosts touches on everything from the duo’s mental health struggles to Kanye’s affinity for conservative politics. Beyond the lyrics, the album stands out for its psych-rock production flourishes and fun sample choices. Kids See Ghosts is rare amongst Kanye’s other 2018 projects in that its brevity is one of its major strengths. A disembodied voice at the end of “4th Dimension” sums the record’s ethos up perfectly: “Just do that and then let the music do somethin’, and then do that again ... you only want two and a half minutes if you can get it.” In a year filled with short albums, Kids See Ghosts shines as one of 2018’s best crash courses in quality over quantity. - Parker Houston

Kanye West & Kid Cudi

7, Beach House’s seventh studio album, sees the group in peak form, delivering the dreamy pop they have come to master with fresh energy and crafting a reliable formula for synesthesia. The album plays seamlessly, transitioning from one expansive, psychedelic dreamscape to another with ease. The duo, Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, mesh wonderfully, with Legrand’s mournful voice joining Scally’s anthemic instrumentation to create lush and complex compositions—each song evokes a world of colors, shapes, and textures through the layered, gorgeous sounds the pair create. With 7, Beach House also demonstrate their ability to push the synth pop genre forward, mixing the morbid and the beautiful, the irresistible and the eerie, setting the standard for the genre in 2018. - Gustav Honl-Stuenkel

Beach HOuse

Be the cowboy

This album yee’d, and this album haw’d. Mitski has done it again with her signature sad girl stylings. Be the Cowboy, released in mid-August, is a masterpiece of buildups and breakdowns.

Songs like “Geyser” and “Pink in the Night” start slow, almost painfully so, and build to a mix of screaming vocals and heavy instrumentals. The highlight of the album is “Nobody,” a bouncy song in a mix of pop and indie stylings that ends in a sort of synthetic, broken-record style diminishing silence. With all of the beauty in the sadness of this album, Mitski has proved her artistry to the highest standard. - Claire Goldberg

Mitski

Design: Margaux Fontaine Albums: artwork credit to their Respective Recording Labels Movies: IMDB

15

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

1

Black Panther

6

BlackkkLansMan

more from the cringy French dramas of Catherine Eighth Cribbing Breillat than from the warm-and-fuzzy ’80s coming-of-age staof John Hughes, Eighth Grade is a painfully real attempt at Grade ples comprehending what it means to grow up in a generation over-

7

A Star Is Born

3

Crazy RIch Asians

8

A Quiet Place

4

InCredibles 2

9

Sorry TO Bother You

5

Avengers: Infinity War

10

Black Panther is more than just a movie—it is a cultural phenomenon. The film bolsters an incredibly talented and predominantly black cast that breathes new life into the superhero genre. Its setting in the fictional African nation of Wakanda wondrously blends together Afrofuturism and science fiction in a way that forces viewers to consider what an Africa that was never colonized could have looked like. Director Ryan Coogler masterfully weaves these larger themes of racism and colonization together with action scenes that are a thrill to watch. At a moment in cinema in which superhero films are a dime a dozen, Black Panther manages to surpass the expectations of the genre, making for a film that is exciting, relevant, and unbelievably important. - Dajour Evans

2

whelmed with information. Middle school is invariably an era of confusion and disappointment, and Eighth Grade is here to let us know that that’s perfectly alright. By letting every single emotion feel as achingly important as it does when you’re growing up, director Bo Burnham and star Elsie Fisher capture the tiny milestones of early adolescence with lightning precision to create a strikingly honest snapshot of teenagehood in 2018. - Eman Rahman A movie that was hailed for its casting, diversity, grand aesthetics, and unique rom-com plot, Crazy Rich Asians deserves a high spot on this list. It’s thrilling to see Asian characters portrayed in a three-dimensional way in a box office film. Between the fierce Constance Wu, hilarious Awkwafina, and handsome, loveable Henry Goulding, this movie defies stereotypes in ways that are understated yet speak volumes.

Narrating the story of a Chinese-American economics professor trying to gain acceptance from her boyfriend’s crazy rich family in Singapore, the film revitalizes the rom-com genre, and the lavishness depicted in every scene makes it fun to see how the other half lives. Rife with laughs, drama, heart-melting, and heartbreak, Crazy Rich Asians is a wonderfully tied together, feel-good film. - Inès de Miranda

After a 14-year hiatus, Pixar’s Incredibles 2 brought the beloved Incredibles world back to life on the big screen. For all the hype and anticipation surrounding the movie, Incredibles 2 had an extremely well-curated plot. The development of Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) from stay-at-home mom to an independent working woman embracing her superhero persona was refreshing to see. The wonderfully tiny, yet powerful Edna (Brad Bird) did not disappoint, filling the movie with her curiously sarcastic remarks. While sequels are always a hard sell, Incredibles 2 did not tarnish the great Incredibles namesake. - Anna Pogrebivsky Avengers: Infinity War was epic. Featuring an ensemble of more than 30 superheroes, it pushed the boundaries of classic superhero team-up movies. The film balanced the stories and interactions between long-time favorites such as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) and Captain America (Chris Evans) and newcomers like Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) with relative ease. All of these unique, complicated characters faced off against Thanos (Josh Brolin), a Mad Titan determined to erase half of life in the universe. Brolin delivers arguably the best villain of the Marvel films to date but stands amid an all-around formidable cast. Everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far has led to Infinity War, and the film both meets and plays with fans’ expectations. - Juliana Vaccaro de Souza

LEISURE

OF 2018

movies

BlacKKKlansman features satisfying doses of heart-pounding suspense and blood-boiling outrage.

Spike Lee’s film tells the wild true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), the first African-American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department, as he attempts to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in the early ’70s. Washington brings humor, sarcasm, and intensity to the role, and Adam Driver shines as his accomplice. The film strikes the perfect balance of wit and action, while confronting the question of whether change is best achieved through radical action or working within the system.

Lee perfectly manipulates tension, keeping audiences hooked throughout. The ending packages together intense satisfaction with a chilling montage of modern day racism. - Sienna Brancato

When people talk about A Star is Born, they talk about three things: the song from the trailer, the fact that it’s a remake, and Lady Gaga’s nose. And rightfully so; those are all integral aspects of a movie that greatly deserves its success. It was Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut, and in it he plays a hard-drinking, successful singer who takes Gaga and makes her a celebrity, as well as his romantic partner. The movie is a deep dive into stardom, identity, and love between two people whose power dynamics are constantly shifting. On top of all this, “Shallow,” the aforementioned trailer song, is one of the best pieces of movie music that’s ever been written. It’s truly iconic. - Claire Goldberg Director John Krasinski promised a post-apocalyptic thriller about monsters but delivered a horror about childbearing.

The idea was deceptively simple: carnivorous creatures imprison a family to a soundless existence—even a “shush” invites death. At its core, A Quiet Place explores the nightmares of parenthood, the unpredictability of loss, and the fallacy of love as protection. The chemistry between the protagonists, played by real husband-wife duo Krasinski and Emily Blunt, enlivens the plot’s raw severity. The scariest aspect of this film is neither the silence nor the creatures, but Blunt’s pregnant belly, a foreshadowing of expectant trauma. - Emma Francois

Multihyphenate screenwriter-director Boots Riley’s Sundance hit is colorful communist philosophy that knows how to have fun. Lakeith Stanfield plays our protagonist, Cassius Green, a fellow down on his luck who ascends the corporate ladder at his new telemarketing job by masking his blackness with a “white voice” (dubbed by David Cross). Suddenly, Cash finds himself forced to choose between elites of dubious ethical standing and his revolution-minded excoworkers; both wealth and liberation come with a twisted cost. Featuring Tessa Thompson (full of light) and Armie Hammer (darkly manic) in pitch-perfect supporting roles, Sorry To Bother You is sly, surrealist storytelling. - Amy Guay

Roma

A return to the 1970s Mexico of his youth, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is a semi-autobiographical epic following a middle-class white family and their young indigenous nanny Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) living in the Roma neighborhood of Mexico City. Cuaron imbues the story with both an exquisite sensitivity and the large-scale grandeur traditionally reserved for war movies. Shot in black and white, each image is luminous. There is no overarching storyline, but Roma doesn’t need one. In it, Cuaron captures all the aching loveliness of life—from the bleak to the humorous to the thoroughly quotidian—and through inhabiting the outer edges of his memories, Cuaron has given us the utterly transcendent. - Caitlin Mannering

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