On Wednesday afternoon, Georgetown University faculty members and students met at the second town hall about the curriculum and faculty hiring changes recommended by the Academic Working Group last week. While there were only a handful of faculty members who were not associated with the Academic Working Group present at the town hall, students filled the rest of the seats in White Gravenor 208, and some stood at the back and sides of the room.

Chaired by Professors Eusebio Mujal-León of the Government Department and Veronica Salles Reese, the Director of the Spanish and Portuguese, the Academic Working Group is one of three working groups that President John DeGioia established last spring in response to the Student Commission for Unity to increase diversity at Georgetown University. The group is made up of seven students and eleven faculty members.

“We proposed three major avenues,” said Mujal-León, who began the meeting by summarizing the recommendations proposed in the Academic Working Group’s report. “[The first leg] is increasing or extending the hires [of faculty] who are of underrepresented persons in society. The second leg is placing these hires in departments in order to enhance African American studies, Latino Hispanic studies, and Asian American Studies. The third leg is a diversity requirement for students.”

In his introduction, Mujal-León acknowledged that there were still disagreements between students and faculty on some recommendations within the Academic Working Group. He also addressed the proposed diversity requirement for the curriculum, which is contested by many students and faculty members.

The Academic Working Group currently suggests that the core curriculum should be amended to include two courses that have a “diversity stamp.”

Salles Reese explained the requirement, by contrasting it with other required courses at Georgetown, like theology. While “theology is part of a department,” she said, “diversity has different definitions to different groups. A historian may see ‘diversity’ differently than someone who is a sociology professor.”

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Because Sellinger just isn’t quite sufficient…

The Student Space Working Group—an organization founded in the fall of 2008 to address the lack of study space, social areas, offices for student organizations, and a centralized student center—recently got the chance to discuss their objectives with top University administrators at a summit organized by Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson.

SSWG Chair Max Glassie (COL ’10) and Communications Director Fitz Lufkin (COL ’11) both said they thought the administration was responsive at the summit. Plans are still in the talking stage, though, at least until the group finishes the “White Paper”—a student space proposal plan with information from surveys and interviews with students—that they are currently working on.  SSWG hopes to finalize the paper by the end of the semester.

“Space is something that moves very slowly,” Glassie said “A lot of it is talk, and at this point we have to realize that talk is a really good thing and it means a lot of progress.”

Among the long-term proposals is a plan for creating a Student Center with a restaurant or café in the New South basement.

“There’s approximately 30,000 square feet of space under New South, which is largely unused,” Max Glassie, Chair of the SSWG said. “The plans include a conference center—one of the big problems students face now is the lack of adequate space for programming.”

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