GW’s Student Coalition for Palestine on Friday resumed live streamed talks with officials on financial disclosure and divestment from Israel in a meeting marked by a mutual unwillingness to shift position.
Coalition representatives met with two officials from the Office of the Provost to discuss the group’s policy suggestions document, which outlines potential next steps for GW to disclose investments, divest from companies with ties to Israel and increase student involvement in GW’s financial meetings and decision making. When representatives pressed for a status update on GW’s consideration of their financial demands after meeting in May, officials responded by reiterating that GW would not commit to divestment and didn’t provide specifics about disclosure plans.
“Divestment is off the table,” said Deputy Provost for Academic Affairs Teresa Murphy, one of the two officials present at the meeting.
She added that investment decisions don’t get decided quickly and she’s only been involved in discussions about the coalition’s demands “for a few days.” University President Ellen Granberg said at a May meeting with representatives that officials would not commit to divesting from companies selling weapons to Israel or disclose University finances.
GW’s Socialist Action Initiative, a mem-
HATCHET
ber student organization of the coalition, live streamed the meeting, which was the first time University officials have sat down with the coalition since May to discuss students’ demands and the third meeting the coalition has publicized.
“What is really being said here is that divestment for Palestinians in this ongoing genocide is not doable,” a coalition representative said.
Murphy and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs and Special Programs Jeffrey Brand said they will ask officials for more information on the University’s progress toward financial disclosure for the next meeting, which participants scheduled for Sept. 13 from 12 to 2 p.m., but they are not prepared to discuss di-
The University concluded its plan Friday to arm a portion of GW Police Department officers with 9 mm handguns, according to University release Friday. The release states that once all supervisor positions are filled, 22 officers will carry guns and that all GWPD officers are trained in handling firearms and de-escalation. The announcement comes after trustees directed the University in April 2023 to arm about 20 “specially trained” GWPD officers in response to school shootings and heightened national gun violence, a decision met with pushback from students and faculty through letters and campus protests.
The release specifies that there will be 22 armed officers once vacancies are filled, but the department does not currently list any job postings on their website. The 22 officers will make up about a third of the department’s total force, according to the release.
The plan to arm GWPD officers was divided into three phases, to arm the top two officers, to arm five more and finally to arm all supervising officers on the force.
The University solicited feedback from community members on campus safety in May 2023 through the Campus Safety Advisory Committee, the release states. GWPD originally planned to complete the arming in April but postponed the rollout until CSAC was able to hold their first meeting. The University also solicited community feedback through the GWPD website and said in a release that they used community input to revise the original firearm implementation plan but did not state what input was used.
vestment.
“I thought we were just talking about disclosure,” Brand said.
Coalition representatives met in person in May with Granberg, Chief Financial Officer Bruno Fernandes and Dean of Students Colette Coleman. On Friday, Murphy and Brand instead met with the coalition’s negotiations team, with one representative joining via video conference because she is barred from campus. Ilana Feldman, a professor of anthropology who has previously vocalized support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement, also attended the Friday meeting alongside the coalition representatives.
Coalition representatives during the meeting requested that the University disclose any
donations and academic department funding that totals more than $20,000, including money sent to institutes and centers. The representative said the sum of multiple donations from the same source should count toward the total if the sum exceeds $20,000.
The representative asked that officials also disclose all externally funded research and investments that are processed through Strategic Investment Group — which they said handles a “vast majority” of GW’s pooled endowment. The endowment serves as the University’s financial base comprised of investments in stocks, real estate and other assets that officials dole out to fund scholarships, professorships, construction and additional GW projects.
“We want to know where that money is being invested in, but we also want to know where that money is coming from,” the representative said. Murphy said she would relay the coalition’s request to officials, noting that Fernandes and his team are putting together a website on University investments — an apparent reference to a website Granberg announced in May to display publicly available financial documents that she said officials would develop over the summer. In response, Feldman asked whether the website will include information on donations totaling more than $20,000, as the coalition requested.
GW to launch financial documents site in coming weeks
The University expects to unveil a website displaying GW’s publicly available financial documents in a few weeks as students press officials for transparency on its financial assets.
Chief Financial Officer Bruno Fernandes said the website is in progress but declined to provide an anticipated launch date. University President Ellen Granberg said at a May Board of Trustees meeting that the website was planned to launch in the late summer and will mark a step toward providing the community with “greater clarity” on GW’s investments and funding.
She said at the meeting that GW finance officials will be available to answer questions about the website’s contents following its launch.
GW is required to file and publicly disclose their Form 990 annually as a nonprofit organization, where they report the University’s financial details including revenues, expenses, executive compensation and investment income. The form does not disclose investment sources.
The Finance Division also publicizes the University’s audited financial statements, rating agency reviews and bond offerings, but they do not release interim or unaudited financial statements, according to their website.
“Work on the financial website is still in progress, and we expect to launch the site in the next few weeks,” Fernandes said in an email. Fernandes declined to say which University officials have been involved in the website’s development and if officials consulted outside actors while compiling the site. He also declined to say if the site will include any other information besides the University’s publicly available documents.
Pro-Palestinian students pushed Granberg to publicize GW’s investments in October. The Student Coalition for Palestine set up an encampment in University Yard last spring with demands that officials disclose investments and divest from companies supplying arms to Israel.
and “outdated” dining hall.
Officials remodeled The Eatery at Pelham Commons this summer, which students said made the space more uniform with Foggy Bottom dining halls but less welcoming. The summer renovations, which officials announced in April, included a fresh paint job and new flooring, seating options and food stations, which officials placed in a circular formation around the hall’s perimeter. Dining staff said the renovations to Pelham, the dining hall on the Mount Vernon Campus, increased the variety of food options and expanded the space, while students reported more dining stations but a less intimate atmosphere due to the reconfiguration of seating.
Senior Executive Chef Matenziion D’Astrii said officials renovated the space to give Pelham “a fresh new start” by updating the previous “old”
D’Astrii said officials replaced carpeting with tile, removed booths to create an open concept seating layout and added new paint and cabinets with a blue and yellow color scheme.
He said the upgrades to Pelham were intended to match the layouts of the two Foggy Bottom dining halls located in Thurston and Shenkman, which opened in fall 2022 and spring 2023, respectively, following GW’s transition from a Dining Dollars program to a meal swipe program in spring 2023. Officials last renovated the Pelham dining hall in summer 2018 when officials transitioned the space into an allyou-care-to-eat venue.
“Everything downtown in Foggy Bottom was new, of course,” D’Astrii said. “So just bringing everything up with the times and so that everybody didn’t feel left out.”
Officials also plan to open a “Just-Walk-Out Market” that allows students to access food during all hours and days of the week using self-checkout kiosks.
He said officials also added smoothies, ice cream and additional dairy milk alternatives, all of which are available at Shenkman and Thurston dining halls. Pelham now offers hot entrees at Innovation, international foods at Crave Global and pizza at 500 Degrees. The eatery also offers fried foods at Flame, allergen-free dishes at Pure Eats, sandwiches at Wrapped, desserts at Sweet Shoppe and salads at Chopp’d + Wrapp’d. “There’s a whole bunch of different things that are available now, the ice cream, the different kinds of milk, things like that,” D’Astrii said.
University spokesperson Julia Metjian said in April that the renovations aimed to expand food offerings available to students.
“The servery in Pelham will be refreshed to allow for more stations and more options for students to better align with the offerings of Thurston and Shenkman,” Metjian said in an April email.
Students reported in April that limited food options on
the Vern forced them to travel to Foggy Bottom for meals. D.C. Health Department officials in March 2023 reported mice droppings in the dining hall’s dry storage area, opened food products, improper dating and labeling and improper temperatures for cold food. A report from later that month showed dining officials corrected the violations, and a University spokesperson said officials made all “necessary resolutions” after implementing a “corrective action plan.”
“There was a big push by the end of last semester to really fix the Pelham situation,” said sophomore Donald Webster, an international affairs student who lived on the Vern last year. “Because I feel like at fall 2023 food was not very good, but by the end of spring 2024 semester, they had made great strides in fixing the food. And then when I went there last week, it was very good, I would say the food is honestly better than what I’ve had since coming back at Thurston or at Shenkman.”
KAIDEN J. YU | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR The Eatery at Pelham Commons in April before renovations.
SAGE RUSSELL | SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR
A member of the Student Coalition for Palestinew speaks into a megaphone in front of University President Ellen Granberg’s F Street House.
HANNAH MARR NEWS EDITOR
DANIEL HEUER | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR The Eatery at Pelham Commons after renovations in the summer.
NEWS
Staff Council achieves merit pool uptick, visibility in inaugural year
After a nine-year push from staff for a governing body, Staff Council members said they collected census information on the workers they serve and relayed concerns to administrators in the body’s first year. Members of the Staff Council said they spent last year collaborating with administrators to advocate for a more equitable pay structure for all staff, which resulted in a 1 percent increase in the merit pool, and an expanded telework policy. These milestones come after two unsuccessful attempts to form a University-wide staff governing body in 2014 and 2020, which staff said was due to a lack of approval from the administrations of former University presidents Steven Knapp and Thomas LeBlanc.
Staff Council President Bridget Schwartz said former interim University President Mark Wrighton was the first GW president to support staff’s interest in forming a governing body.
She said during the council’s inaugural year, members advocated for staff by launching initiatives like staff spotlights and Community Connections, which highlight the work of different departments. She said the council also released short surveys throughout the year to collect information on staff experiences, which she said helped the council understand employees’ biggest concerns.
“One of the big things we needed to do as a council was to really get to know staff because our role is to advocate on their behalf,” Schwartz said. “We know what our experiences are and what we hear in passing by our colleagues, but what is the staff really facing?”
Schwartz said the council passed resolutions to increase benefits for staff, including one passed in February that supported the permanent adoption of the remote and hybrid policy — which allows some staff to work virtually. She said one of the council’s first resolutions was proposed by Staff Experience Committee Chair Nicole Mintz and passed in February to provide work flexibility for staff, cut transportation costs and minimize long commutes.
Schwartz said the council is anticipating officials’ release of a website that will display publicly available financial documents, which University President Ellen Granberg announced plans in May to develop over the summer. She said the council hopes the website will promote more “transparency” with GW leadership after observing an “increased need for communication” between officials and community members during the pro-Palestinian encampment in University Yard last spring.
She said the council cannot predict changes to labor laws, administrative strategic plans or campus tensions, but the council will remain a support system for staff.
“We’ll just stay flexible and amenable to those types of changes and what’s needed from the council. But I think at the core, what the council will always be, is a voice for GW staff and to lift each other up,” Schwartz said.
Council Vice President Kim Fulmer, who will take over as president in January at the end of Schwartz’s 18-month term, said the council has formed a “strong” sense of community because of staff members’ participation in the four standing committees. With 35 representatives housed in divisions like Information Technology and the Division of Student Affairs, the Staff Council operates the four committees: the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, the Service Committee, the Staff Development and Recognition Committee and the Staff Experience Committee.
The Staff Council’s bylaws state the vice president takes the helm of the council as president after serving in the position for one year.
She said the council has allowed the staff to form a “unified voice” when raising issues relevant to them to the administration, including requests for wages that support the rising cost of living in D.C.
As the council enters its second year, Fulmer said she hopes the body will continue to collaborate with the Student Government Association and Alumni Association. She said the effort started when SGA President Ethan Fitzgerald attended a meeting in April to discuss staff’s needs and his mission to increase students’ access to mental health resources on campus.
Mintz, the Staff Experience
Committee chair, said the committee created multiple subcommittees to tackle various topics that concern staff, like compensation, staff resources, career advancement and merit performance. She said the resolution to support wage adjustments for staff was the council’s response to feedback from staff on the Staff Council survey published earlier that month.
The resolution requested all staff receive a one-time salary increase of 5 percent in FY 2025 and then annual wage increases between 3 and 5 percent that are not associated with performance ratings. The resolution was spurred by a discussion on GW’s merit pay compensation model, which annually awards bonuses to staff who go beyond the duties outlined in their job descriptions, Lewis said.
GW pays both salary and hourly wages to staff, depending on the position. The University compensates full-time service and support positions hourly, and positions in the manager stream are compensated on a salary basis.
Mintz said the resolution caused the merit pool, or employees considered to receive the merit increases, to expand by 1 percent this year.
Students to reestablish group to strengthen Bengali campus community
DIANA ANOS STAFF WRITER
ZAINAB RENTIA REPORTER
After a two-year hiatus, students are working to reestablish a cultural organization to create a community for Bengali students on campus.
Leaders of the Bengali Student Association said they plan on collaborating with organizations like the South Asian Society and the Elliott School of International Affairs South Asian Board — a graduate student organization that focuses on South Asian politics — throughout the academic year to increase their visibility within the student body. Junior and BSA CoPresident Ayaan Syed said he and other executive board members wanted to reestablish the organization to create a space for Bengali students to celebrate their culture and talk about the state of the country’s political system after recent natural disasters and mass protests.
“We just felt like there was no space for us,” Syed said. “Obviously, there’s South Asian [Society], but there’s something different when it’s just Bengali people.”
The organization first launched during the fall of 2019 and remained active until the end of the 2021-22 school year, according to their Instagram page.
Syed said the group will have to reapply to be a student organization when applications open in October, which requires a roster of 10 students, attendance at an
information session and a constitution of the organization’s mission before applying. He said after messaging a former member on Instagram, he learned the organization became inactive in 2022 because its membership mostly consisted of seniors that academic year and they were unable to garner enough interest among underclassmen to continue.
He said he wanted to revive the organization since his first year at GW in 2022, but was motivated to do it this year after he “fell in love” with his native country during a trip to Bangladesh this past summer.
Syed said he has not met a large population of Bengali students on campus. But, after restarting the organization’s Instagram page last month, students and organizations like SAS reposted their post in the middle of August, which he said increased the group’s visibility among students and will hopefully attract enough students to join.
He said the group is also planning on hosting a “chai night” for attendees to share Bangladesh’s version of the South Asian tea, which Syed believes is slightly different from India and Pakistan’s, which commonly includes more spices.
“We have our own little spices and flavors to it,” Syed said. “It would be fun to show people our tea and food.”
Syed said the BSA also plans on hosting multiple cultural events for members including “dawats,” an Urdu and Hindi term for feast. He said he hopes the dawats will allow students to immerse themselves in
Staff members previously reported that high-performing staff receive limited rewards through the merit pay system due to a small merit pool, which some experts said was because the system was flawed due to its subjectivity.
“Staff look at that as a morale booster, being recognized for the work that is being done and working toward retention, knowing that employees may go to a different university or the private sector and really wanting to show that the university values staff,” Mintz said.
The survey results in April revealed that the majority of staff want GW to discontinue annual merit increases, or pay raises that reflect employee performance. The survey found most staff would prefer a system in which the University distributes an annual standard cost of living adjustment for all staff members, which in practice is an increase in employee benefits or pay to offset inflation because of the high cost of living in the District.
The April resolution states that more than 60 percent of staff have reported taking on second jobs to “break even” because GW’s wages are too low to keep up with D.C.’s cost of living.
Bengali culture through food, music and games.
Syed said the executive board members have been focusing their efforts on recruiting underclassmen to protect its longevity and garnering support from larger organizations like SAS to promote their group, like advertising on their social media pages and putting up flyers on campus.
Last month, a studentled movement ousted the country’s former prime minister and more than 600 people were killed during the weeks of protests and clashes between law enforcement and students. He said the group will collaborate with the ESIA South Asian Board to host a panel next month on Bangladesh’s politics with panelists Mushfiqul Fazal, a U.S. based Bengali journalist, and Amna Qayyum, a historian of international affairs.
BSA communications chair Mehek Laskur said 21 people attended BSA’s first interest meeting in District House on Sept. 6.
“I never knew we had this many Bengalis overall, because in my high school we had a few Bengalis — not really a community, so I’m glad that we have a community now,” Laskur said.
Laskur said the group plans to grow their executive board so current leaders can divide tasks for officially reestablishing the group and organizing events and collaborations with other student organizations.
Junior Labibah Haque, the BSA co-president, said she wanted to create a space where she could connect with other Bengali people in the D.C. metropolitan area through programming. Haque said she hopes the organization’s revival will increase representation of the Bengali community on campus.
“I feel like Bengali students don’t have as much representation as the Indian Student Association or the Pakistani Student Association,” Haque said. “We’re different, and I feel like we’re just underrepresented, and so we need that.”
Since the Staff Council first convened in August 2023, the body has passed three resolutions, addressing GW’s remote and hybrid work policies for staff, Staff Council bylaws and wage adjustments. Schwartz said more results from the April survey will be published on the Staff Council website before the next Board of Trustees meeting Sept. 27. Mintz said the council advocated for more merit increases to alleviate staff burnout, a result of staffing remaining below pre-pandemic levels. She said because the council’s rate of formally proposing solutions to staff issues outpaces GW’s rate of implementation, the council has felt pressured by time.
Mintz said their annual election will result in a new Staff Council executive team in December. Nominations for executive staff council members and representatives from GW schools and divisions ended Sept. 6. Both part-time and fulltime employees are eligible to join the council.
“We really look out for all staff, shift staff and custodial staff. They’re so behind the scenes and equally as important as senior leadership,” Mintz said.
CRIME LOG
SIMPLE ASSAULT
Amsterdam Hall
8/29/24 – 11 a.m.
Closed Case
A female student reported being pushed by her female roommate during a dispute that took place in their suite.
Referred to Division of Conflict Education and Student Accountability.
LIQUOR LAW VIOLATION
Thurston Hall
9/2/24 – 2:30 a.m.
Closed case
GWPD officers responded to Thurston Hall for a report of an intoxicated female student. EMeRG arrived on scene and conducted a medical evaluation, but the student refused further treatment. Referred to CESA.
VOYEURISM
Thurston Hall Reported 9/2/2024 – Date and Time Unknown
Open case
A female GW student reported finding a hidden camera in a bathroom in Thurston Hall. Case open.
DISORDERLY CONDUCT
University Student Center
9/5/24 – 10:50 a.m.
Closed Case
GWPD officers made contact with a nonaffiliated man at the University Student Center. Officers made contact with and barred him from campus. Closed. No further action.
THEFT II/FROM BUILDING
1957 E Street Reported 9/5/24 – Time Unknown
Open Case
GW staff reported that feminine hygiene products — and the baskets they were stored in — had been taken from multiple bathrooms in the 1957 E Street building. Case open.
—Compiled by Ella Mitchell
SAGE RUSSELL | SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR
From left to right, members Labibah Haque, Mehek Laskur and Ayaan Syed of the Bengali Student Association sit for a portrait.
ARWEN CLEMANS | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Staff Council President Bridget Schwartz speaks during a Board of Trustees meeting in May.
Faculty develop, alter course content to address ongoing war in Gaza
throughout the semester to reflect any developments in the war in Gaza but hopes that the updates will soon pertain to more talks and “peacemaking” and less violence and division.
Faculty that teach classes on the Middle East are adapting their course curriculum to account for ongoing developments in the war in Gaza.
Faculty in the Elliott School of International Affairs and the departments of political science and history in the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences are adding or expanding upon lessons on the war in Gaza in classes on Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Faculty said students have grown more curious about the regional conflict since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and the classroom offers an open space for students to learn about and discuss the topic.
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 in a surprise assault that killed around 1,200 people, including kidnappings of more than 250 people. Israel Defense Forces responded to the attacks with airstrikes and artillery in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, at least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military’s ground and air campaign and famine had spread through the region. About 97 Israeli hostages remain in Hamas’s captivity, as of Sept. 1, according to Israeli officials.
Joyce Karam, an adjunct professor in the political science department who teaches the course Arab-Israeli Conflict, said she updated her curriculum after Oct. 7 to include lessons on the increased absence of peacemaking, the element of radicalization in Israeli and Palestinian societies and the “situation” in Gaza and its connection to Hamas’s attack. She said she also plans to discuss the rise of the current far right Israeli government and Hamas’s shift to the right.
Karam said since Oct. 7, she notices “more engagement broadly from the whole class,” compared to previous years when only students who completed course readings participated in discussions. Karam said she will update her curriculum
“Whether it’s about the occupation, whether it’s about terrorism, whether it’s about other elements, we’re always updating it,” Karam said.
There have been numerous protests on campus condemning the war and demonstrations to mourn killings in Israel and Gaza since Oct. 7 and before. In April, pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up encampment in University Yard for 13 days to demand officials disclose all investments and academic partnerships, drop all charges against proPalestinian student organizations and divest from companies supplying arms to Israel. Pro-Palestinian protests have continued this year as demonstrators marched to University President Ellen Granberg’s F Street House on the first day of classes, passing by the barricades installed around U-Yard during the clearing of the encampment.
Ned Lazarus, a teaching associate professor of international affairs, said his class Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding normally focuses on the history of the conflict, but after Oct. 7 he added a permanent part at the beginning of every class session to discuss ongoing developments in the region.
“Every class, we take time at the beginning to talk about what’s happening and certainly the first meetings after the Hamas attacks, we spent a lot of time,” Lazarus said.
“I just kind of had an open forum for people to ask questions and to discuss and explain to the best that I knew what was happening and to hear how people are feeling and responding.”
Lazarus said instead of “antagonistic” and “polarized” discussions, students have engaged in productive and respectful conversations on the topic. He said when students asked him about the “controversial slogans” projected on Gelman Library by Students for Justice in Palestine in October, he let students
share their opinions and then explained his own thoughts on the subject.
Lazarus said he hopes to bring in guest speakers who are Israeli and Palestinian “peacebuilding activists” or hold an event this semester so students can hear from people involved in the conflict.
“The goal of taking these courses is you would be able to understand what’s happening now in a much more detailed way on the basis of what you’ve learned in the course,” Lazarus said. “I guess we’re trying to practice that in each lesson when we talk about what’s happening now and related to the material.”
Scott Weiner, a professorial lecturer in the political science department who teaches Comparative Politics of the Middle East, said students’ genuine curiosity for learning more about the conflict propels respectful discussion in class.
“We talk about how a lot of an-
Community group seeks feedback on Aston resident-neighbor agreement
ELLA
The Community Advisory Team hosted a public meeting Thursday to solicit input from Foggy Bottom community members on a tenant-neighbor agreement for an unhoused shelter slated to open next month, which devolved into local residents posing questions about the incoming tenants.
The meeting, led by cochair Jim Malec and interim co-chair Sakina Thompson, was held at the West End Public Library and invited community members to weigh in on the Good Neighbor Agreement, a document that outlines the shared goals and responsibilities of the people moving into The Aston — a former GW residence hall — and nearby residents. But most community members instead used the time to voice concerns to CAT members about Aston residents using public community spaces, their anticipated cleanliness and security at the shelter.
Susan Haight — the president of the The West End Library Friends, a group that helps people access and learn about the West End Public Library — said she is concerned about Aston residents “overrunning amenities” in the neighborhood, like the public library. She asked whether Aston residents would use the same public spaces as other community members during the day or whether they would have special programming.
“I just want to have this committee know that I don’t want to have one client use a facility at the expense of another,” Haight said.
D.C. Department of Human Services Deputy Administrator Anthony Newman said Friendship Place, the District-based housing provider for people experiencing homelessness that will supervise The Aston, curates a schedule for a “robust” program within the facility throughout the day. He said an advantage of bridge housing — a form of short-term housing meant to help people transition to permanent residences — is residents have the ability to leave the shelter and will be free to visit spaces like the public library, go to grocery
stores and use other public resources.
A member of the public who did not share his name asked where Aston residents would relocate to when Friendship Place staff clean the shelter daily. He said people are “pretty trashy,” and he is concerned about the cleanliness both inside and outside of the building.
Newman said the Good Neighbor Agreement includes commitments to “preserve the aesthetic” of the outside of the building, which tenants are expected to follow.
Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto said she empathizes with neighbors’ concerns about the rise in unhoused people living in Foggy Bottom changing the culture of the neighborhood. She said while she knows neighbors are “alarmed” by the idea of the neighborhood changing, they should recognize the presence of unhoused people choosing to live in Ward 2 as a testament to the community’s resources and safe environment.
“One of the most common things that I hear from people is ‘we feel most comfortable coming to Ward 2 to live outside because we feel safe,’” Pinto said.
Pinto reminded neighbors that officials will staff the Aston with guards both in and outside of the building at all times. She said Friendship Place is also implementing a phased move-in system — beginning with 50 residents during the week of Oct. 1 — to ensure staff can monitor the residents and address any concerns from community members.
Pinto said after 50 resi-
dents have moved into The Aston, officials will evaluate how residents are adjusting to the shelter and potentially raise capacity to about 100.
“We want to make sure everyone living in the facility and around is safe and not leading to other problems,” Pinto said.
Jean-Michel Giraud — the president and chief executive officer of Friendship Place — said Jeremy Jones will serve as The Aston’s director and work closely with residents to ensure they follow the agreement and ensure D.C.’s first bridgehousing shelter is successful.
“The fact that these facilities are service enriched by very qualified, engaging staff makes the whole difference in this system,” Giraud said. “It helps people rebuild in dignity with a lot of confidence in a site that’s actually appropriate.”
Newman said The Aston is still expected to open in October and Friendship Place will move into the building on Sept. 15. He said the timeline will give Friendship Place staff enough time to train staff and check the space before it opens in the coming weeks.
John Stokes, the D.C. Department of General Services’ associate director of external affairs, said Capital Construction completed the plumbing work, replacing sewer drain lines for sinks, dishwashers and bathtubs.
He said officials are searching for a contractor to complete a full roof replacement this winter.
Stokes also said The Aston’s HVAC system — which ANC Chair Trupti Patel raised a concern about at the August CAT meeting — is fully operational.
ger is rooted in fear, and a lot of fear is rooted in pain, and so whether you agree with the politics around someone’s pain, that pain is real, and so it’s something that deserves to be validated,” Weiner said. “So when I mentioned that kind of as a part of my overview to discussing the conflict, students are generally pretty receptive to that.”
Sina Azodi, an adjunct professor at the Elliott School who teaches International Relations of the Middle East, said his course dedicates two class sessions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one class on its history and one on the Oslo Accords. He said since Oct. 7, he and his students have “naturally” spent a lot of time discussing the war in Gaza.
“It’s a very sensitive topic, there are a lot of emotions and feelings involved and everybody can make a very solid arguments of why they’re upset, why they’re angry,” Azodi said. “The first thing that I tell my students is that, ‘You can
express yourself, and it’s your right to express yourself, as long as you’re courteous to the others, and you have to remember that others have the same exact right.’” Ibrahim Al-Assil, an adjunct professor in the political science department, said many students took his Comparative Politics of the Middle East class this semester because of their interest in learning more about the regional conflict. He said the class won’t formally discuss the conflict until the end of September, but the topic has already surfaced in class discussions.
“I see this as a positive sign of student engagement and understanding of these dynamics,” Al-Assil said in an email. “The students are curious, and in an academic setting, curiosity should be nurtured and rewarded by being responsive. I want to keep this class as dynamic as possible to respond to developments in Gaza and in other hot spots in the region.”
SGA assembly to execute mental health initiatives in its second year
MOLLY ST. CLAIR ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
One year after the Student Government Association launched its Mental Health Assembly, leaders are shrinking the body to streamline its approach to raising awareness of mental health resources on campus.
SGA President Ethan Fitzgerald and former Executive Secretary of Health Kaitlyn Burkhardt launched the assembly last year to improve access to mental health resources on campus like the Counseling and Psychological Services. Assembly leaders and former members said they want to revive old programs and launch more tangible initiatives after a year of planning and research.
Markella Lanara, a firstyear graduate student in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling master’s program who intends to join the assembly again this year, said she participated as a member last year as an undergraduate student and hopes to get started on more initiatives that have yet to be fully developed.
“We were mostly talking and deciding what course of action we want to take, but we haven’t really taken that action yet,” Lanara said. “So I think this year, the second year of the assembly, will be more decisive in that sense.”
Lanara said this year she hopes to focus on raising
awareness of mental health resources like CARE referrals because many students don’t have a “deep understanding” of what support is available to them. She said students reported having little to no knowledge of mental health resources in a survey the assembly issued last year about student familiarity with campus resources like CAPS.
The assembly’s new leader, SGA Sen. Jacob Wilner (CCAS-U), said last year’s assembly included about 20 students excluding the SGA co-chairs, but he plans to reduce that number to 10 to 12 this year to ensure every member’s ideas are heard in discussions, an effort he said was difficult last year because of the larger number of students in the assembly. He said this year, he spoke to Fitzgerald about last year’s meetings and expressed concern that too many voices might “overwhelm” the decision process when the body is trying to brainstorm initiatives.
“Sometimes it’s too many cooks in the kitchen,” Wilner said. “Everyone has great ideas, but it’s like, wow, too many ideas, what are we gonna do?”
Two chairs from the executive and legislative branches, respectively, lead the assembly alongside a group of non-SGA students who apply to be members during the fall semester. Wilner said the assembly
will resume meetings once the executive branch and SGA senate appoint the second co-chair and upon their appointment will release an application for students to join the group. Wilner said the assembly has not yet chosen the second co-chair, but the position will likely go to the executive secretary of health upon their appointment to the executive branch in the coming weeks, replicating the structure of last year’s chairmanship. Fitzgerald said the assembly will hold a mental health resource fair on Sept. 28 to showcase mental health resources on campus.
“The main thing is, ‘Hey, these are the resources that are available, if you want to engage, if you want to ask questions, that space will be there for that.’” Fitzgerald said.
Zaraia Fabunmi, the president of SoulfulBrewings — a student organization for students of color to discuss self care and cultural connections — said she hopes the assembly can communicate with officials in CAPS to become more representative of the diversity of the student body.
“I want to see SGA and the mental health assembly work to truly uplift diverse voices by acting as more of a platform for us to succeed and be bold in our missions and goals for POC voices on campus,” Fabunmi said.
SAGE RUSSELL | SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR
Teaching associate professor Ned Lazarus speaks during the opening of his Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding class.
ELLA MITCHELL | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
The Community Advisory Team met in the West End Library last week.
RNA molecule causes black pigmentation in butterfly wings: study
Researchers discovered a ribonucleic acid molecule that produces black coloring on butterflies’ wings in a study published last month.
GW biology professor Luca Livraghi used the genomeediting technique of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, to show that a RNA molecule called lncRNA generates black coloring on many butterflies’ wings. Livraghi said his study is the first to describe the role of lncRNA molecule in the evolution of butterflies, as researchers had previously thought a protein was responsible.
“There aren’t many examples of this described in the literature yet and even less so of these RNA molecules being implicated in evolution of these species,” Livraghi said.
Livraghi said the CRISPR technology used in the study acts like “molecular scissors” that allow researchers to remove certain RNA sequences from an organism. He said researchers found that when they removed the specific RNA molecule, the black pigmentation did not appear on the butterflies’ wings.
“If you have a gene that you hypothesize, for example, is involved in producing a certain color or a certain pigment on the wings, you can basically go in and use these little molecular scissors to mutate that gene to render it nonfunctional by cutting it with these scissors,” Livraghi said. “Once you do that, you let the organism de -
velop, and you can then look at the resulting effect it will have on the developing wings.” RNA molecules and DNA molecules both contain genetic material, but RNA is made of different sugars than DNA and their main function is to direct the body on what proteins to produce. Livraghi said researchers previously assumed that the RNA molecules’ protein production caused the black pigments to appear on butterfly wings, but his study reveals that the protein generation step is not necessary. “We were really surprised to find that actually you don’t
need that step of the generation of the protein, but that the RNA molecule itself is able to somehow translate its expression into specific pigments in the wings,” Livraghi said.
Researchers used in situ hybridization, a laboratory technique where researchers place tissue on a glass slide and expose it to a dyed DNA sequence, which then binds to the matching sequence in the tissue, exposing the matching molecule to determine the stage the RNA molecule activates the trait.
Livraghi said the process causes genes to “light up” and allows researchers to locate the active
molecule when the black pigment appears.
“If you actually dissect the butterfly wing before its final development, the first few days of metamorphosis, there won’t be any pigment whatsoever in that wing,” Livraghi said. “It’ll look basically blank, but however, genes are being turned on and off in specific sequences and specific places.”
Experts in insect biology and genetics said the methods of the study show how researchers studying organisms can use gene editing technology to identify molecules that spur certain traits in organisms.
Political science professor talks new book on economic theory
An assistant professor of political science discussed his new book on economic theory during a talk at the Elliott School of International Affairs on Tuesday.
Jeffrey Ding, a professor and expert in emerging technologies and international politics, talked about his book, “Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition,” which he released last month to outline his GPT diffusion theory — developed to explain how emerging technologies affect changes in global economic power. After Ding’s presentation, Richard Danzig, a senior fellow in the physics lab at Johns Hopkins University, concluded the event with brief remarks on the book and an analysis of the situations where the theory can be implemented most effectively.
The event was part of the ongoing Elliott School Book Launch Series, which features newly published books authored by GW professors.
Ding said his GPT diffusion theory focuses on how new ideas, specifically artificial intelligence, are most effectively developed when multiple countries collaborate on its creation. He said this approach contrasts with the leading sector theory, which is widely accepted in the economic community and argues that a country gets the most out of technological development when it focuses on its personal innovation and competes with other countries.
During his presentation, Ding summarized the differences between the leading sector theory and the GPT diffusion theory. He said with leading sector theory, countries focus all of their innovation efforts on the information
and technology available in their country and spend a significant amount of money researching new resources. He said the GPT diffusion theory differs by allowing countries to collaborate, share resources and spread innovation across borders.
Ding said his theory operates under a “much longer time frame” compared to the leading sector theory because it takes time for countries to collaborate and share information.
“We shouldn’t see productivity payoffs, significant ones, before 2030,” Ding said, in reference to when society will see his GPT diffusion theory take effect.
He said countries have practiced GPT diffusion in past industrial revolutions, though it has yet been applied to artificial intelligence. Ding said one example of its application can be analyzed by reflecting on World War I, when
the United States took inspiration from chemical engineering that Germany researched and developed.
“German universities dominate chemical research, but they fail to create this unique combination that becomes the chemical engineering discipline,” Ding said.
Ding cited China’s innovation capacity indicator, the rate at which new technology and ideas spread, and the country’s diffusion capacity indicator, its ability to spread and adopt innovations, as measurements that support the efficacy of his theory.
“If you look at the innovation capacity indicators, China ranks at around 13 in the world,” Ding said. “But if you look at diffusion capacity indicators, China drops all the way to around 50.”
Ding said his theory helps explain the rise of AI between the U.S. and China because the two countries
Marc Halfon, a professor of biochemistry at the University at Buffalo, said the technology used in this study is “powerful,” and the results that researchers find about one species can indicate similar genetic processes in other species that result in similar traits.
“The applications are very broad even though you’re looking just at a single species, at a single process here, the information we glean from that could really have a lot of implications for many things that are going on,” Halfon said.
Michael Perry, an assistant professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, said the researchers’ use of in situ hybridization to locate the noncoding RNA molecule — a molecule that does not produce proteins — is helpful because researchers often locate RNA molecules by creating an antibody for the protein it creates, and in situ hybridization allows researchers to see the molecule without the protein.
“Through a combination of slightly more clean genetic experiments, knocking out this sequence specifically and then finding out where this RNA was expressed and showing that it’s expressed in patterns complementary to the wing patterns, it was nice,” Perry said.
Perry said the study was successful due to the use of in situ hybridization. He said researchers often accidentally remove more genes than they mean to through CRISPR, which makes them wrongly attribute the cause of the trait changes.
So when you inject sometimes you do damage just to the whole local region,” Perry said.
contributed their respective strengths to its development. He said China invests more in artificial intelligence research, while the U.S. is able to dedicate more resources to applying AI research to technology, similarly to how the country used Germany’s chemical engineering in World War I.
Ding stated in a Sept. 2023 testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that diffusion capacity indicators are better predictors of a country’s long-term growth in technology development than innovation capacity indicators.
After Ding’s presentation on this theory and book, Danzig gave brief remarks about the book and the author.
Danzig said Ding should also look at how GPT diffusion theory applies in the short-term as opposed to just the long-term, referring to the next decade. Danzig
said China might invade Taiwan by 2027, which is outside of Ding’s long-term timeline.
“Jeff is considerably younger than me and has more assurance he is going to be here in 2030,” Danzig said. He said AI is the “fastest” diffusing invention in the “history of the world.”
But Danzig complimented the toughness of Ding’s research and called his book “exceptional” regarding his theory. He said Ding had the ability to stand back like a “hawk” to look over his entire theory and what research could apply to it.
“To offer a general view that integrates the history of technology, general economic theory, political theory, notions about military, notions of what happened in different industrial revolutions and come up with a set of conclusions, I think that’s pretty terrific,” Danzig said.
Business school, cybersecurity group partner to teach students, African leaders
An organization that connects African leaders to cybersecurity education announced a partnership with the GW School of Business last month, aiming to enhance leaders’ understanding of cybersecurity and cyber diplomacy practices.
Pape Cissé, an adjunct professor of information technology and cofounder of the Center for Cyber Diplomacy and Leadership, said the partnership between the CCDL and GWSB will include conferences and seminars about cybersecurity and policymaking with African leaders and GWSB community members during the academic year. Cissé said as technology rapidly advances, the partnership aims to help African heads of state, ambassadors, ministers and government officials shape policy, prepare and defend against cyberattacks, while also providing GWSB students the opportunity to help solve realworld problems.
Former Ambassador to the U.S. Omar Arouna of Benin and Cissé cofounded the CCDL in November 2023 to ensure African leaders are well-informed and proactive in dealing with cybersecurity challenges to strengthen the security of their nations, according to its vision statement.
“Almost every six months, something new happens, something new is put in place,” Cissé said. “What are those threats? What are the implications? What does it do and why? And then
provide the space for collaboration, discussion and making sure that we have an exchange.”
Discussions about the partnership with GWSB began in spring 2024 during the planning of the GW Future of Finance and Trade in Africa conference and involved Cissé, Arouna, Associate Director of Corporate Relations Kafuti Talahumbu, Vice Provost for Budget and Finance Michael Glatzer and GWSB Assistant Dean of Operations Joseph Miranda, according to a University spokesperson.
Africa has “unique” cybersecurity challenges including lack of security measures, outsourced digital infrastructure and lack of cybersecurity professionals, according to Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLabAfrica initiative.
A University spokesperson said faculty and students in the business school will have the opportunity to work closely with business leaders on technological challenges of “global significance” through research and experiential learning opportunities.
“At the same time, CCDL will have access to GWSB expertise in global business and technology in furthering their mission to bring greater awareness on cybersecurity trends and challenges to African heads of state, ambassadors, ministers, and government officials,” the spokesperson said.
Cissé said the partnership’s events and activities are still in the planning stages, but CCDL and GWSB plan to start hosting events this semester.
Cissé, who currently teaches Information Technology Project Management, said the partnership offers an opportunity for students to build upon theories and concepts they have learned in classes and see how it functions in practice through conferences, webinars and learning opportunities.
“But also how the students could benefit from being exposed to some of these conferences, seminars, and then the leadership in Africa could also
benefit from having a very serious, rigorous academic partner who’s at the forefront of policy writing, or Washington D.C., discussing those very same issues.” Cissé said.
Cissé said the GW research community will benefit African leaders by helping them understand the implications of technological advances through presentations and discussion forums, resulting in a “symbiotic relationship” between the two groups that moves policy for-
ward. He said the partnership intends to expand beyond cybersecurity to address other regional business needs and challenges such as leadership and management.
“Right now, we have a lot of work ahead of us that we are doing, and then we want to get off the blocks really solid and have a couple of events, at least this semester and start planning out what the next year looks like in collaboration,” Cissé said.
DANIEL HALL VIA CREATIVE COMMONS
A butterfly perches on top of a plant.
SARAH GROSS REPORTER
LEXI CRITCHETT | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
The lobby of Duquès Hall on 22nd Street
MAGGIE RHOADS STAFF WRITER
Pelham ‘less welcoming’ after revamp: students
Webster said the food has improved this year due to new options that build on core entrees and salads like the ice cream machine, a full drink selection and a coffee machine. He said the physical upgrades to the space made the dining hall feel less “warm” and more “sterile” compared to the more intimate seating arrangements in the dining hall before the renovations.
“They’ve gone for a very modern look, which is understandable,” Webster said. “They want it to look clean and new. But I do feel like a bit of that home feel that I talked about earlier was kind of lost when they renovated it. Now it feels a lot more just like a cafeteria.”
Webster said he valued the relationships he made with the Pelham workers while living on the Vern last year and that despite the other changes, new Vern residents will be able to make the dining hall feel like home if they continue to connect with the staff.
“That vibe that I had last semester, that I enjoyed at Pelham, is kind of lost, but I do have hope for the fact that the
freshmen living there now can make it their own sort of home and enjoy it,” he said.
Tineisha Murray, a cashier at Pelham, said the renovations created more room for crowds
to move through the space during busy mealtimes.
“As far as the renovation, it’s more welcoming, it seems like it’s more open, and the food has got better,” Murray said. Caro -
line Weaver, a junior majoring in criminal justice and psychology who lived in West Hall on the Vern during her first year, said the renovations make Pelham feel “less welcoming.”
Officials, coalition representatives deadlocked on financial disclosure, divestment demands
“I honestly don’t know,” Murphy said, responding to Feldman.
“It’s one of the things, and we’re going to say this a lot today, and in the future, we’ll take that back.”
A coalition representative reiterated Feldman’s ask for clarification on what points from the policy suggestions document officials will choose to include or omit on their financial disclosure website. The representative asked Murphy and Brand to sift through all of the coalition’s disclosure requests and provide reasoning for why the information will or will not be included on the website.
Brand said he received the policy suggestions document from the coalition at 6 a.m. Friday morning. The coalition did not immediately return a request for a copy of the policy suggestions document.
“If you could communicate to us what the difference is between what’s being included in that project and what is on this list,” a coalition representative said, referring to the coalition’s request for clarity on the contents that officials plan to include in the website.
Coalition representatives also requested student representation on the Board of Trustees’ Committee on Finance and Investments. The committee exercises “oversight and governance” over GW’s endowment, reviews the University’s financial statements and makes recommendations to the Board on “major financial and business matters,” per its website.
Trustees denied the Student Government Association’s request to add student voting mem -
bers to the Board in 2017, claiming its bylaws prohibit students from serving as trustees.
Murphy said she doesn’t expect to get an answer back from officials on the representatives’ request by next week’s meeting.
A coalition representative said the group would like to have the “necessary back-andforth” with officials about their policy proposals before the Board’s first meeting of the year, slated for Sept. 27. In response officials agreed to meet with the group on Sept. 13, though Feldman said she will not be able to attend. Officials said at the end of the meeting they would also look into finding an off-campus location for participants to meet so the student who is currently barred from campus can attend in person.
The coalition announced on Instagram Thursday their plans to meet with officials the next day at 11 a.m., reinforcing their commitment to their demands and refusal to “accept
anything but complete divestment.” The coalition posted a full video of the discussion after the live stream Friday.
More than 100 people viewed Friday’s live stream and left comments in the chat feature. “gwhistory,” an Instagram account for the University’s history department, left several comments during the meeting condemning officials for not responding to the coalition’s divestment demands.
“One day every administrator will pretend that they supported divestment from the beginning,” one gwhistory comment read. “History will absolve this movement and justice will prevail!”
The coalition said in an Instagram post last month that officials agreed to five conditions that the pro-Palestinian group put forward to resume talks on its demands, including that a “trusted” faculty member join the coalition at all meetings. Officials also agreed to hold meetings with coalition repre -
sentatives without a time limit and in “good faith,” exclude Provost Chris Bracey and allow coalition representatives to live stream all meetings, according to the coalition.
The coalition said Bracey “attacked students” at the pro-Palestinian encampment last spring. In a video posted on Instagram April 26, Bracey appeared to grab the phone of a student recording him.
Officials’ first meeting with the group came after the officials invited representatives from student organizations representing Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students to a 45-minute discussion about “broad community concerns” like Islamophobia and free speech — days after local police cleared the encampment and arrested eight GW students.
In the invitation, officials said the University would not consider changing its “endowment investment strategy,” academic partnerships or student conduct processes.
“It made it feel kind of clinical, because it’s a lot of white, and it took out any of the character or uniqueness that Pelham had versus the other dining halls,” Weaver said.
HHS official to lead Milken health law and policy program
RACHEL MOON SENIOR NEWS EDITOR
The Milken Institute School of Public Health named a Department of Health and Human Services adviser and disability rights lawyer as the next Harold and Jane Hirsh Associate Professor of Health Law and Policy in a release last month.
Alison Barkoff, who is currently acting as the Administration for Community Living administrator and assistant secretary for aging, will leave her role at HHS to join Milken in October as both the Harold and Jane Hirsh Associate Professor of Health Law and Policy and as the director of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program. The program offers a joint-degree option in law and public health and takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of health care, policy and law as well as public health with aims to understand how law impacts health care and public health.
“With her decades of leadership in the federal government and nonprofit sector advancing health law and policy, she brings unmatched experience, knowledge and passion to our program and is the perfect person to
continue the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program’s national impact,” Milken Dean Lynn Goldman said in the release. Barkoff held leadership roles at the ACL since the beginning of the Biden Administration in 2021 and worked to ensure the civil rights of people with disabilities and older adults, according to an HHS release. Barkoff has also previously worked as special counsel for Olmstead Enforcement in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and served in advocacy efforts at the Center for Public Representation and the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
“The Milken Institute School of Public Health plays a unique role in serving as a thought leader on the most important health issues today, and I am excited to contribute through research and advocacy to address health disparities, increase access to health care and long-term care and shape courts’ interpretation of health laws,” Barkoff said in the release. “I am thrilled to advance this important work while also serving as a mentor to the passionate students at GW who will become the next generation of health leaders.”
Officials set to unveil financial documents site amid disclosure demands
From Page 1
University investments contribute to the endowment, a financial foundation to fund professorships, scholarships, research and facilities. Representatives from the pro-Palestinian coalition met with Deputy Provost for Academic Affairs Teresa Murphy and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs and Special Programs Jeffrey Brand
on Friday afternoon, where they asked for an update on the status of the website and its contents. Ilana Feldman, a professor of anthropology and international affairs, asked if the website will include information on donations totaling more than $20,000 — one of the coalition’s requests. Murphy said she “honestly didn’t know” but would take the request to administrators. One of coalition representatives present at the meeting
asked Murphy and Brand to look through the coalition’s disclosure requests and provide reasoning for whether each point will be on the website. The coalition’s disclosure demands include that the University make public information on any donations and academic department funding that totals more than $20,000 — including money sent to institutes and centers — and disclose all externally funded research and investments that
are processed through Strategic Investment Group — which a coalition representative said handles a “vast majority” of GW’s pooled endowment. Staff Council President Bridget Schwartz said the body is anticipating the site’s release and hopes it will promote more transparency with GW leadership after observing an “increased need for communication” between officials and community members during the encampment last spring.
A coalition of 14 student organizations and 17 professors representing five of GW’s schools sent a letter in January 2023 calling on officials to disclose “restricted gifts,” onetime donations to GW that fund an initiative that a donor selects and total more than $50,000 from for-profit and nonprofit entities. Organizations including Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine were among the student organizations who signed the letter.
SAGE RUSSELL | SENIOR PHOTO EDITOR The Milken Institute School of Public Health located on New Hampshire Avenue
From Page 1
From Page 1
HATCHET FILE PHOTO
1918 F Street houses the Office of the President, the Provost, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.
DANIEL HEUER | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
The Eatery at Pelham Commons in August after its recent renovations.
OPINIONS
Most college students will cast their ballots in a presidential election for the first time this November. Seemingly now more than ever, politicians are capitalizing on Generation Z trends to market to young voters, from Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign using Charli XCX’s “brat” album cover to former President Donald Trump appearing in podcasts with popular male streamers and figures.
But the recent political campaign strategies that aim to drive younger voter interest in our presidential candidates also seem to take advantage of the growing voting gender gap among young people. Widening the political division between young men and women is a price too high just to win an election, and the threat of a deeper fracture between the voting blocs should awaken first-time voters to refocus their sights on policy and away from campaign strategy.
It’s no surprise that the Harris campaign used the “brat” typography on its X, formerly known as Twitter, account, adopted Beyonce’s “Freedom” as an anthem for her campaign and appeared via Zoom to talk with her old sorority. Yes, Charli XCX and the queen of the Beyhive are adored among many young adults, but the stars tend to target young women. Harris’ campaign embrace of feminine stars and trends ushers young women into politics as the candidate herself only sparsely mentions her own identity as a female presidential candidate compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Trump, on the other hand, recently appeared in a podcast alongside YouTuber Logan Paul and sat down for an interview with conservative streamer Adin Ross — influencers that are known for their hyper-masculine personas. Such appearances are sure to catch the attention of the social media stars’ mostly male audience, like when Trump talks wrestling or whether Paul can go up against Mike Tyson. This “boys being boys” content
FROM GWHATCHET.COM/OPINIONS
“Democrats are now mirroring the ways young people engage with each other online through their more proactive approach to arguing with conservatives.”
— MICHAEL MORINI on 8/29/24
Look beyond divisive political campaigns
STAFF EDITORIAL
— as Paul described in his video when talking about a street fight — is guaranteed to captivate a young male audience. These strategies attempt to make presidential candidates seem more approachable to young vot-
ABBY TURNER | CARTOONIST
ers, which helps in the polls and on Election Day. In 2020, voter turnout spiked among young adult voters, which played a part in the highest turnout for any national election since 1900. Especially after concerns over President Joe Biden’s age
There’s no wrong way to embrace your culture
Growing up Mexican American has meant: being bilingual and spending time in Mexico alongside simultaneous exposure to the U.S. Double the holidays, double the food and double the interests. It felt relatively seamless to jump from one to the other without thinking twice about which holidays or hobbies were considered Mexican or American. But as I’ve grown up, I’ve felt an increasing pressure to only actively embrace my Mexican culture as if I can’t have a foot in both worlds.
Andrea MendozaMelchor Opinions Editor
My routine at home ranged from afternoons after school eating rice and beans with tortillas while watching iCarly to Friday pizza nights binging telenovelas. My pastimes are interchangeable between cultures but also intertwined with both my identities.
Yet people often act surprised that I have interests outside of my culture as if I can only ever be “Andrea, the girl who’s Mexican,” rather than someone who embraces two cultures as one. I remember speaking with one of my classmates about our favorite Mexican
food and I expressed my distaste for cilantro, and I added that while I love spicy food like salsa roja on my tacos or birria, I can’t necessarily handle my spice. But when my classmate said it was “uncharacteristic” for me to dislike cilantro or struggle to handle my spice, I suddenly felt very awkward. Part of me felt like I had somehow failed my Mexican identity.
When I’ve told people that my favorite artists are Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter, they respond in disbelief, saying they didn’t expect someone of a Mexican background to have blonde white girls as their favorite artists, even though I love plenty of Hispanic artists, like Natalia Lafourcade and Elefante.
People have also pointed out that I dress “white.” And it always makes me rethink what I’m wearing. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing floral dresses or frilly tops? Or should I wear a sombrero?
I remember I had a presentation based on a research topic of my choosing. I presented research on the media’s portrayal of “girly” characters as dumb or as the villains in popular movies. At the end of my presentation, when it was time for questions, one of my classmates described it as “white girl discrimination,” implying the topic was solely a “white” problem and criti-
cizing how I decided to focus on an issue that wasn’t serious.
My presentation focused on misogyny in the media, something that affects people of any race or ethnicity, not just white people. Yet, the comment reduced my research to what was seen as a white-focused issue, though what had also inspired me to pursue the research topic were my own personal experiences with misogyny and femininity. It made even my experiences feel white.
I felt that my passion for combating misogyny or my interest in feminism or femininity was the wrong thing to care about. That instead I should be covering something about my Mexican American ethnicity, instead of something so white, as my classmate made it sound.
All of these comments plant a seed of doubt about whether I’m Mexican enough. But the truth is, there are things I like and things I dislike, regardless of my culture. Sure, I dislike cilantro, but I equally hate apple pie. And I may love “Gilmore Girls” but I also love the telenovela “Teresa.” And I love being Mexican, but there’s no right or wrong way to be part of this culture —Andrea MendozaMelchor, a junior majoring in journalism, is the opinions editor.
toppled over his reelection bid, the focus on younger audiences comes as no surprise. And when we see Harris dancing to the tune of Charli XCX or Trump sitting down to talk UFC, it’s easy to get caught up in the relatability of it all.
But these campaigns are leaning into the existing voting gender gap, which has only become more defined and divided in recent years. In a study conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, it polled people between the ages of 18 to 29, where 44 percent of young women identified as a Democrat and 18 percent identified as Republican, compared to 32 percent of men identifying as a Democrat and 29 percent identifying as Republican. And an August study by the New York Times/Siena College reported that among adult voters in some battleground states, the voting gender gap is widening, with up to 55 percent of women leaning or identifying as part of the Democratic party, compared to 38 percent of men.
After social media’s recent infatuation with categorizing gender — take “girl dinner” or “girl math” versus “boy dinner” for example — these campaign strategies aren’t a surprise. But the strategies alienate other voting blocs in the process and prompt politicians and voters to look for more reasons to find divides. Yes, Trump may talk a whole lot about being a man and Harris may lean into the concept of sisterhood, but neither candidate are exclusive to one gender or experience. This is a presidential election, not a TikTok trend. No one is “for the boys” or “for the girls.”
Youth-directed campaigns and strategies, like using social media to reach out to larger groups of people, are needed and welcomed. And it makes sense that voters are likely to connect with politicians that try to relate to them. But social media trends and marketing strategies that focus solely on a candidate’s gender or interests are detrimental distractions. The policies of one of the presidential candidates will become a reality for all citizens after November. As such, we must put politics over personality and hope that the winning candidate will not just represent our own communities but all young Americans.
The East Coast through the eyes of a Coloradan
Have you seen the ladder? Everyone’s trying to climb it — faster than you. It’s made obvious out here: The social hierarchies are well-defined, priorities are decidedly self-serving and power is always chased. Even if these observations have not found their way into your lifestyle, it’s a stark contrast for those of us who came to GW from places further away. In my case, coming from Northern Colorado, I understood a much slower way of life before moving out east.
Noah Edelman Opinions Writer
Promises. That’s what the East Coast is all about to kids from the less relevant areas of this country. Everyone knows someone who left home for the big city. Being that person, is wexhilarating and exhausting. The person I am now could not exist without my choice to leave, but a part of me will always be at home.
I’ve had plenty of time to observe life in most of D.C. Beyond the suffocating humidity, the social environment can prove to be just as taxing. It’s a place where everyone simultaneously thinks they themselves and nobody at all can change the world. People involved in the
government and politics, are both self-righteous and confident in their ability to affect change and resigned to a reality that it’s just “gridlock.”
The East Coast understands power to be the most valuable currency in use. Pressures about where you grew up, what internships you did, who you know in the industry were all new to me.
But I don’t see my interactions with people as transactional. Comparing LinkedIn connections, pictures with important people and places traveled, to impart some worldly mature image on others has never appealed to me and I still haven’t gotten used to it. Simply, the concept of outperforming the next person is not something I believe to be the way of life in the more western areas of this country. I’ve observed a phenomenon where access to certain areas of life is restricted by class, ethnicity, than in other places. There is an equivalent phenomenon in places such as Los Angeles, where the same social hierarchies operate with the end goal of fame in mind.
This is not to say that the West is a dreamland of acceptance and opportunity, but people out there care more about each other than here. Maybe that’s naive, but I know it’s true. It’s
the reputation so widely represented in popular culture. The East Coast hustle.
What makes the West so special in contrast to this is its lower social pressure. The goalposts that define success are simply much more flexible. Financiers, schoolteachers, therapists and cattle ranchers all sit at the same table. We value community.
East Coast life is not bleak, though. There are many lives to be built out here, and the career ceiling is much higher. I’ve found myself lost in government buildings, face-to-face with characters from the news and taking steps in my life that I could not have made back home. It’s a careful balance, poignantly philosophical at times. What would you give to have it all?
I try to not get lost in it, to just have fun and remember I’m allowed to be young and overwhelmed. If I have any advice it’s to remember who you are, whoever that may be.
The culture may make you feel like the golden tickets can only be seen through golden glasses, but trust what you feel, what you come from and where you want to go, and I promise you’ll be just fine.
Noah Edelman, a junior majoring in journalism, is an opinions writer.
CULTURE
The District cut: Inside the lives of GW’s residence hall barbers
This year, two rooms in District House are buzzing from the whirs of electric razors and the snips of scissors.
Floors above hungry students ordering Halal Shack bowls and drinks from Peet’s Coffee, others are receiving cheap, professionalgrade haircuts from two student entrepreneurs who have launched barbershops out of their District House rooms. The student barbers said they have used past experiences working in professional barbershops and offering haircuts to friends and family to their services at GW — trims, lineups and fades, all from the comfort of their District rooms.
Sophomore Sulaiman Bangura, an entrepreneurship and innovation major and a D.C. native, has been working in barber shops since he was 13. He said that summer he was tired of depending on his parents for spending money, so he got a job at a barbershop down the street from his house in Northeast D.C., where he would go “every day” and receive tips for sweeping hair, selling water and brushing people off when they left the chair.
“It was a fun experience,” Bangura said. “I learned a lot from it.”
Bangura said he didn’t enter GW last fall with the intention of offering haircuts out of his room, but by last September, he decided on a whim to invest in new clippers and styling tools to set up shop from his Guthridge Hall room. The venture soon turned into a profitable business as he promoted his shop “Sulaycutz” on social media.
He said he was barbering about 10 clients per week at the business’s peak last year. Bangura said the demand pushed him to change the way he set up appointments, shifting scheduling from text to the digital scheduling platform Calendly. Bangura currently offers haircuts on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons, according to his Calendly page.
In his second year at GW, his shop is based out of his new room in District House and covered with the tools of his trade — clippers, brushes, razors and a red, white and blue-striped spinning barber’s pole. He keeps the room pristine, with not a lock of hair on the ground, but the environment in his shop is far from sterile as he jokes with clients about classes and the surprising difficulty of being a math major.
Bangura said he charges $20 per haircut, a $5 increase from last year, and $10 for line-ups — a cut that defines the hairline.
Bangura said he has garnered about eight regular clients since starting up his in-dorm shop last fall. To attract more clients, he said his regulars often refer him to their friends, and he markets his services by posting photos and videos of his clients’ haircuts on Instagram and Snapchat accounts for his business.
Just one floor below Bangura’s business, in a different room inside District House, Nicholas Matias has also transformed his dwelling into an at-home barber shop. Matias, a junior majoring in communication and business, said he has been an at-home barber since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when he was living at home
in Chicago. Matias said as his hobby grew through high school, with his friends flocking to his house for haircuts. The more hair he cut, the more skilled he became, and he eventually began to offer his services at a local barber shop. He said the experience taught him how to respond to people’s hair requests and keep up with the common banter between barber and their clients.
Matias started offering inhouse haircuts his first year at GW in Thurston Hall. He said referrals from his 10 regular clients helped his business take off, and he advertises his cuts on his Instagram “nicknextup.”
Matias’s shop is an instantly cheery environment, as the student barber bops to hip-hop and clicking scissors. A D.C. flag hangs above his workspace as he focuses while using an electric razor inches above his client’s spotty blue smock.
He said his clientele is all men, but he’s confident he could cut “any texture” of hair, long or short. His current rate is $25 per haircut and $30 with a beard trim — lower prices than his now-competitor the Foggy Bottom Barber Shop, located near the Watergate complex.
Matias said word spread of his mastery of the fade, a tapered style with short sides and a fuller top, which caused his business to grow.
“One person gets a haircut and their friend’s like, ‘Oh, who cut your hair?’ and he’s like, ‘Nick!’ and then he gives them my number,” he said. “I’ll have random people texting me, ‘Yo, I heard you give good haircuts, can you get me this week?’”
Student art exhibition ‘KNEES’ intersects athletics with health
KIANNA
GRAY REPORTER
For the next few weeks starting Wednesday, an exhibit in the Flagg Building will cover its walls with photos of an unusual muse: knees.
The semester just started, and GW students have already completed a rite of passage for living in the District: surviving the August humidity.
But temperatures are staying high and are forecasted to stay that way through October. To take advantage of the sundrenched start to the autumn season, take to D.C.’s streets and trails for these outdoor refuges.
Break open the books under the sun
The dreariness of Gelman Library’s gloomy fluorescent lighting might drive you to grind through your work so you can flee. But consider wandering outside the library and into the less foreboding sunlight to do your class readings while soaking up the remaining summer sun.
A 20-minute walk from campus, Rock Creek Park includes nearly 2,000 acres of chestnut oaks and is home to white-tailed deer and red foxes. Lounge up against a tree while reading Karl Marx’s “Capital” — after all, reading Marx in nature is a bit less ironic than studying him in a giant concrete building.
If you prefer your great outdoors a little more manmade, pay a visit to the roof
of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Embrace D.C.’s spirit at neighborhood festivals
The brutalist architecture of the State Department in Foggy Bottom and limited campus green spaces won’t suffice as your only outdoor exposure this fall. Leave the neighborhood to gallivant around one of the District’s monthly neighborhood festivals to witness the city’s true range of food and arts culture.
The H Street Festival, which will take over its namesake neighborhood in Northeast D.C. on Sept. 21, is a 12-block amalgamation of anything that can fall under the umbrella of the arts. The festival, which will take place just east of Union Station, features vendors selling local vintage tchotchkes and dance performances to warm up from the first chills of autumn air. Visitors should expect to fill their stomachs with desserts or full meals — the celebration has in the past featured food vendors like strawberry popsicles and Caribbean jerk chicken. If you’d prefer a festival closer to campus, the District will showcase a nighttime art exhibition in all eight wards across D.C. this month. Between Sept. 27 and 28, Art All Night will do just what its name suggests: decorate
D.C. with art, all night long, from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.
The free festival will have outdoor pop-ups on everything from new literature to indie art films in each ward, with more specific locations to be revealed later in the month.
An accompanying festival called Dine All Night will run concurrently with the art component, ensuring festival visitors can enjoy the art with an ice cream cone in hand.
See green become yellow, red and orange
Extended summer warmth in D.C. isn’t just impacting the pastimes of college students when the sun sets — the stress the heat causes trees may cause fall foliage to burst into golden hues earlier, if for a shorter time. The District is expected to see trees start to change colors in early October, before peaking later that month.
D.C. might not have the same famed arrays of color-changing leaves as New England, but the District still holds areas to see the shades of autumn emerge in full force. While the Tidal Basin is more famous for the pinks that platoon its cherry blossom trees in the spring, the mass of foliage that surrounds the Jefferson Memorial can still draw a crowd as leaves change color in autumn.
The photographs of the bruised legs of GW athletes make up the exhibit “KNEES” by senior MC Daubendiek, a fine arts and art history double major, as part of the Luther Rice Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which provides research funding for Columbian College of Arts & Sciences students. Daubendiek said the exhibit, open on afternoons from Wednesday to Saturday until Oct. 1, examines examples of bodily wear and tear caused by athletics, a topic that resonated with her as a volleyball player at GW.
“In my art practice, I think a lot about the body, my body, other people’s bodies,” she said. “As an athlete, that’s especially true.”
Daubendiek said the knee photos are meant to turn the body parts into “formal objects” that reveal the damage that athletes’ bodies face. She said the exhibit seeks to harness art as a medium to help people understand college sports.
Upon entering the exhibit, visitors are greeted on their left by a large, hot pink wall punctured by scrappy holes. A video of Daubendiek playing adjacent to the wall shows the artist punch-
ing holes in the wall with a dumbbell. Eleven neutraltoned square fabric prints of bruised knees line the perimeter of the room.
Daubendiek said she decided to center her exhibit around the athlete’s body because she has received many injuries and other “sports-related chronic issues” from playing volleyball, sparking an interest in how recovery from an injury impacts a person’s identity. She said she settled on knees as the focus of her exhibit because scars and scabs on the joints can resemble a history of people’s injuries.
“My sport is my job, and that job comes with certain levels of risk, ranging from a scraped elbow to broken bones,” Daubendiek said in a text. “Through examining my own body, and then expanding that to looking at the athletes around me, I noticed that knees are a locus for visible injury and healed scars and present a sort of object history. They act like a fingerprint or a portrait.”
Daubendiek said she pursued the exhibit via the Luther Rice Fellowship because putting together art projects like “KNEES” can be expensive. She said she received $5,000 through the fellowship, which she used to buy cameras and support herself over the summer.
Applying for the fellowship carried a bit of Daubendiek’s eventual exhibit theme: injuries. She said she got hit in the head during a volleyball game
and wrote her funding proposal “incredibly concussed.”
Daubendiek said her research process included thematic work to flesh out the concept of the piece and material work to bring her ideas to life. She said part of the process included interviewing GW student-athletes about what they would say if they had “a soapbox” to discuss collegiate athletics. These interviews didn’t initially give her the results she hoped for because she didn’t find a common experience between the athletes’ stories, she said. She said she also experimented with different tools to integrate sports into the creation of the art — though maybe not the materials one expects to find in an art studio, as she worked with athletic equipment like dumbbells to create the video aspect of the exhibit.
“I was casting dumbbells, I was making wrappings with athletic tape of different parts of my body, I was cutting up gear and embroidering shoes,” she said. She said all her time playing volleyball at GW has been filmed, but taking videos of herself hammering for the exhibit allowed her to review her performance in an artistic setting, like how she reviews tapes of volleyball practice.
“Volleyball, there’s kind of nothing you can do by yourself,” she said. “And so I think this performance element is almost the antithesis of all of that.”
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JORDAN TOVIN
A student reads a book in Rock Creek Park.
RAPHAEL KELLNER
exhibit featured in the halls of the Flagg Building
JORDAN TOVIN | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
Sulaiman Bangura prepares to cut Lucas Rigsby’s hair in his District House room.
JORDAN TOVIN | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Nicholas Matias cuts the hair of his client Nico Hernandez in his room.
SPORTS
Tennis to open season with team dominated by underclassmen
MCGUINNESS STAFF WRITER
Tennis will start the 2024-25 season this Friday at the Bedford Cup with a young roster and a focus on building confidence ahead of the spring season.
The season’s seven-person roster consists of three returning sophomores, three freshmen and one returning senior after four athletes on last year’s 10-person team graduated in the spring. Head Coach George Rodriguez, who led the team to finish with a record of 6-15 and a 4-6 Atlantic 10 record last season, said the young squad has a strong desire to show off their skillset and improve.
Rodriguez joined the Revs in 2022 after coaching Division II Fresno Pacific for two seasons. His team achieved the highest cumulative GPA, 3.88, among all GW athletic teams last spring.
“What I like about having a young team is that they’re open to buying into the process,” Rodriguez said, “That was a challenge as I came in with a team that has been with a different coach.”
He said he wants to focus on players’ confidence this season, particularly since underclassmen make up the majority of the roster.
“Confidence is a big issue for us and me this year, the focus is just keeping everything simple, really focusing on the quality of what we’re doing, not the quantity of it, but just focusing on the confidence of each player,” Rodriguez said.
The Revs made the A-10 tournament last season with a 16-5 record but fell to Richmond in the first round. The team also beat A-10 rival George Mason in a late March meetup in Fairfax, Virginia, followed up with a win against Davidson on March 29. The Revs went on to vanquish crosstown rival Georgetown 4-3 on April 5.
Alum Stella Wiesemann will also join Rodriguez as an assistant coach this season. She attained a 13-5 singles record in the 2022-23 season and achieved A-10 All-Conference First Teams in each of her four seasons.
Rodriguez said Wiesemann’s expertise and bond she built with her team when she was an athlete allows her to further connect with team members, while also understanding their competition. As a captain last season, Wiesemann was the sole player to participate in the singles main draw in the ITA Atlantic Regional Championships, where she
defeated then-No. 6 seed Melodie Collard, prior to falling to Virginia Tech in the next round.
“She played for us the last couple years,” Rodriguez said. “She’s played every top player in our conference, so she understands that aspect of competition at that high level. She could help the team out overall, from our one player all the way down to our sixth player.”
Freshmen Vaida Matuseviciute, Karen Verduzco and Patricia Ungure-Rogozoveca are all joining the team as international students, hailing from Sweden, Mexico and Latvia, respectively. Verduzco had previously represented her home country at World Cup qualifiers in Montreal while Matuseviciute brings numerous under-18 and ITF championships during her time with the youth Swedish national team.
“The team has been great,” Matuseviciute said. “They’ve been very welcoming, and everyone has taken the time to really get to know us and spend time with us. I think they’re great girls.”
Senior Alejandra Ramirez said she serves as a captain and a mentor through her position as the only senior on the team. She said athletes trained over the summer to build up a “match rhythm” and also competed outside of the Revolutionaries team to build confidence and prepare to kick off their fall matches.
“It was really exciting having to take the role as the leader and captain and using everything that I’ve learned from my freshman year,” Ramirez said. “I’ve had different coaching experiences and just adapting and showing the girls what to do, what not to do, how to hang in there, academically and socially, and how to balance everything.”
Ramirez said their upcoming competition, the Bedford Cup, is her favorite, as she looks to set a strong precedent for the season, although she is still excited to compete against multiple rival schools like Georgetown and Davidson. With seven athletes competing in last year’s Bedford Cup, two placed first in their draws while then-senior Gabriela Giraldo earned second in the top singles Tiafoe draw, the tournament’s highest.
“You play from players from everywhere, Maryland, Howard, everyone comes,” Ramirez said. “It’s pretty fun.”
After competing at the Bedford Cup, the team will travel to Annapolis, Maryland, where they will play in the Navy-hosted Blue and Gold Invite.
Women’s soccer
Women’s soccer (2-3-2) collected their second win of the season Sunday afternoon with a narrow 2-1 victory against Drexel (1-3-1), more than a week before their first conference game. After a tied, defensive-driven first half, the Revolutionaries took down the Dragons with a winning goal with less than 15 minutes left in the game. The consecutive wins pave the way for the team’s third game of the season against North Carolina State University next week and their first game in the Atlantic 10 Conference against St. Bonaventure later this month.
Drexel gained the lead early in the first half with a goal in the 10th minute by sophomore forward Liv Brocious, but GW quickly responded in the 19th minute with a goal of their own from junior forward Isabel Kelly on an assist from senior midfielder Abby Mansoor.
The Revs worked to activate their defense throughout
GAMES OF THE WEEK
Men’s and women’s basketball to face District rivals, new opponents
Men’s and women’s basketball will kick off their nonconference season in a doubleheader on Nov. 4, according to releases last week.
The 2024-25 nonconference season will feature tournaments for both teams, with the men’s program participating in the Paradise Jam tournament in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the women’s team playing in the MTI Christmas Classic from Miami. The men’s and women’s teams will also take on District rival American on the road. Men’s basketball went 11-3 in nonconference games last season but had a 4-14 conference play record that included a 12-game losing streak to finish the season 15-17. The women’s team concluded their nonconference play with a 7-6 record and finished 13-18 after a 6-12 record in conference play.
Atlantic 10 play is set to begin on New Year’s Eve, and a schedule will be released later this month, per the release.
Here’s a breakdown of the nonconference season:
Men’s basketball
The season begins Nov. 4 at the Smith Center, where the Revs play Mercyhurst University, a newly classified Division I program that finished 15-16 in its final season of Division II play. The Revs host Hampton University on Nov. 8, the lone program they have competed against in their first four games — most recently, a matchup in 2020 that resulted in a Revs loss.
The following week, GW hosts North Carolina A&T State University on Nov. 12 and New Jersey Institute of Technology on Nov. 18
the game, by emphasizing awareness and toughness on the field, a top priority of new Head Coach Jeremy Williams who joined the team in late April.
“We’ve been really trying to strengthen our defensive identity,” senior defender Maggie Mockenhaupt said. “We stay really compact and together as a unit, and then we’ve been working on a lot about stepping and covering whoever steps.”
The Revs maintained their back line in the first half, keeping two of the Dragons’ attempted shots on goal out of the net. Senior goalkeeper Ainsley Lumpe has collected five saves and let in three goals so far this season, after recording a save percentage of 0.659 and letting in 14 goals last season.
The game fell into a standstill for most of the second half, with both teams employing a tight defense, stifling any offensive momentum and limiting possessions for GW’s attack. The Revs managed four shot attempts, while the Dragons had
five, with both teams remaining scoreless till 75 minutes into the second half.
GW’s efforts to break the tie continued to come up short, with freshman midfielder Selah Koleth sending her attempt high, despite skillfully navigating through defenders.
The winning goal came from senior defender Alicia Window after a short pass from sophomore forward Kate McGrath. Window knocked the ball from center field into the back of the net with 14:48 left in the game, giving the Revs the 2-1 lead.
Looking to capitalize on this win, the Revs prepare for their first A-10 game of the season on Sep. 19 against St. Bonaventure.
“We’ve been gaining momentum going into the season, which is exactly where we want to be. So we’re just going to keep maintaining that and hopefully keep doing well,” freshman defender Julia Bilal said. Bilal is one of 12 additions to the team this season, along with 11 freshmen and one sophomore
before they depart for the U.S. Virgin Islands for the Paradise Jam tournament. The Aggies concluded their season with a 7-25 record and the Highlanders finished 7-21.
The Revs open play in the Virgin Islands on Nov. 22 against Kansas State University of the Big 12 Conference. The Wildcats made it to the Elite Eight of the 2023 NCAA Tournament but lost to Florida Atlantic 79-76. The Revs’ second confirmed tournament matchup will be against either Liberty University or University of Louisiana on Nov. 23. Depending on the outcome of the first two games, the Revs will play a third game against an opponent.
When the team returns home from the Virgin Islands, the Revs will host a former conference opponent, Virginia Military Institute, on Nov. 29. The Keydets and the Revs competed in Southern Conference play until 1970, when GW left for the A-10. VMI went 4-28 last season.
The Revs hit the road the following week for two away games against District rival American on Dec. 4. The last time men’s basketball and the Eagles squared off was in 2022, when American defeated GW 69-64. American concluded a 16-16 campaign with a fourth-place finish in the Patriot League last season. On Dec. 7, the team will travel to Norfolk, Virginia, to take on Old Dominion University, who finished 7-25 last season.
After their two road games, the Revs will finish off nonconference play with three home games: Army West Point on Dec. 13, Lafayette College on Dec. 18 and Division II Virginia-Wise on Dec. 22.
Women’s basketball
Women’s basketball announced 11 nonconference opponents, including a trip to Miami, for the MTI Christmas Classic hosted by Florida International.
The 2024-25 season tips off with a face-off against University of Delaware on Nov. 4. The Revs and Blue Hens last faced off in 2020, when GW defeated Delaware 61-56. Delaware finished 11-20 last season.
On Nov. 8, the Revs will visit Howard University, who capped off last season at 1516 and Division III Virginia University of Lynchburg, who finished 15-12 last season, on Nov. 11. The team will then travel to Athens, Ohio, for its second matchup with Ohio University in the last three seasons. The Revs defeated Ohio 74-57 in 2022 at the Smith Center, while the Bobcats finished the 2023-24 campaign 11-19.
After the trip to Ohio, GW returns home for four straight home games, starting with Towson University on Nov. 20 and three days later hosting Georgia Southern University, who concluded last season with a 20-11 record and a 1518 record, respectively.
GW takes on Morgan State University, who went 8-22 last season, the day before Thanksgiving. Their final home game of the nonconference season is on Dec. 10 against Coppin State University. Women’s basketball has never lost a game against the Coppin State Bald Eagles.
The Revs play another crosstown rival when they visit American on Dec. 16. Last season, GW defeated the Eagles 69-59 on Nov. 15. In the MTI Classic, the Revs’ first game is against Miami University on Dec. 20. They take on Hampton University the next day, which concludes the team’s nonconference play.
transfer student. Mockenhaupt said the newcomers have spent the preseason adapting to the team culture and goals by consistently training with upperclassmen. “Culture is something that’s really important to us,” Mockenhaupt said. “So as important it is for them to
adapt to our expectations, it’s important for us to show them how the team operates and what we want from them. And I think the freshmen have been doing a really good
job.” GW will travel to Raleigh, North Carolina for their last nonconference game against NC State on Sep. 15 at noon.
RAPHAEL KELLNER | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Senior defender Maggie Mockenhaupt defends the ball from a Drexel player.
RYAN JAINCHILL BASKETBALL EDITOR
KAIDEN J. YU | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
The GW women’s basketball team stand behind the bench before the tipoff of a February game.
CARRIE
KARSYN MEYERSON | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Head Coach George Rodriguez huddles with players during a Thursday practice.
