Fresh produce and the lure of healthy living brought students and neighbors alike to the second incarnation Georgetown University Farmer’s Market in Healy Circle yesterday. After its debut in April, the farmer’s market is back to provide students living both on and off campus with an opportunity to take full advantage of the locally-grown foods the Mid-Atlantic region offers.

Melissa Gadsden (NHS ’12) and Bre Donald (NHS ’12), the co-Directors of the farmer’s market, have exciting plans for its future.

“We’re hoping to include outside community groups like the Georgetown Hospital. We hope to possibly get speakers to come in,” Gadsden said on Wednesday.

She then talked about how the growth of their initiative will require a few more dedicated individuals from the student body. “We’re going to split up into three different committees that address different facets of the market… a marketing committee, a vendor outreach committee, and a communicate outreach committee. We’re going to have…a lot of manpower volunteers to help us with the day-of market event.”

Rebecca Yang (SFS ’12) discovered their need for volunteers early on, and found that the farmer’s market caters directly to her interests. “I’m a huge foodie. I’m really into farmer’s markets, eating healthily, recipes, home cooking… and also sustainable agriculture,” Yang said while taking a break from handing out free samples of Belgian waffles.

Elizabeth Buffone (COL ’14), another volunteer, helped serve patrons freshly-baked slices of bread while she explained that her academic interest in social entrepreneurship encouraged her to sign-up at the SAC fair.

After this week, it appears as though the farmer’s market will only get larger as sunnier Wednesdays approach and more vendors are able to arrive on campus. “Unfortunately, today is really rainy and we had four vendors back out because of the thunder,” Donald said.

The vendors that were able to make it came from as far away as Pennsylvania and as close as D.C.  Les Caprices de Joelle, a catering service based in Jessup, Maryland was present, with quiches, puff pastries, turnovers, paella, and Belgian waffles that they have sold at a number of farmer’s markets in the greater Washington area.

For more information about Les Caprices de Joelle, the other vendors at the farmer’s market, or how to get involved, you can visit the Georgetown Farmer’s Market website or email gu.farmersmarket@gmail.com.

Photo by Mimi McCormick (COL ’13).

On Wednesday night, the Lohrfink Auditorium was packed with people who had come to see Karl Rove, the Former Deputy Chief of Staff under the Bush Administration. Rove, who has just published a book called Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, spoke about domestic and foreign policy from the Bush Era through the Obama Administration in a lecture followed by a question and answer session.

Although some had worried there would be disruptions like the protest that broke out at the General David Petraeus event earlier this year, things were calm save for one shout from the audience. The Lecture Fund, which hosted Rove, controlled the questions he was asked, which were collected from their website before the event, and written on index cards from the audience.

Rove began by discussing his predictions for the upcoming election cycle. He viewed the position that the Congressional Democrats were in as similar to the one they were in during the years 1993 and 1994 when Clinton attempted to pass a national healthcare bill. He believed that the public’s expectations had gone unfulfilled, and that those who had elected Barack Obama did not think he was qualified when they voted for him.

He then addressed the recent rise of the Tea Party movement. He described Tea Party members as people who had never paid attention to politics before, and did not know much about it, but really loved the country. He said that one woman who had inspired him told him that she rarely voted, and yet she was a part of the tea party movement because she was angry about what was going on in Washington.

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A new kind of drama class is coming to Georgetown—only this one won’t sell tickets and perform in the Gonda Theater. Father Richard Curry, S.J., a current teacher on a course in theater and Catholic imagination, has plans to create an academy at Georgetown for disabled war veterans from Walter Reed and Bethesda that will use the dramatic monologue as a way for them to cope with their experiences in war.

“Georgetown University is the perfect place. This is a phenomenal service that the University will be able to render to these men and women,” Curry said about the program, where he will help coach veterans on their monologues while assessing their psychological needs that have resulted from serving in the war. The academy will help to transition the veterans from war life to university life, he said. Curry added that he had been inspired to do this through his work with a disabled workshop where he helped veterans from Iraq.

“During that moment of that dialectic this amazing sense of validation comes out,” Curry said. He specifically works with post traumatic stress and post traumatic stress disorder while working with military chaplains to address spiritual needs. Now, he says he is excited to show the undergraduates at Georgetown the potential that theater has to heal wounds. Once in place, Curry’s academy will assist veterans the same age as most undergraduates in the University.

But the program still faces the challenge of getting enough funding to get it off the ground. The School of Nursing, the Medical Center, the Neurology Department, and Student Services have all helped to prepare the academy and make sure that Georgetown will be an amenable campus once the veterans arrive. And a year after Curry began to work to set up the program, he remains optimistic.

“One has to lean on the virtue of hope. I believe this is the right thing to do and that I’m getting a lot of hearing on the Hill from some very good people.”

Via The Catholic Spirit

When you see a sophomore girl selling towels in Red Square next month to raise money for a charity, know this: she could have been in movies.

But lifelong surfer Emi Koch (COL ’12) turned down that opportunity years ago to start an international non-profit to support opportunities for impoverished children instead. Now, she’s head of Beyond the Surface, International, a group that raises money to support centers where underprivileged children in Peru, South Africa, and India can learn to surf—a positive activity, Koch said, for children in poor communities where there usually aren’t alternatives.

“In Western society, we’re so used to having a Boy Scout group a Girl Scout group, or a volleyball club,” she said, “but there they don’t really have anything like that, so this gives them more self-empowerment and more self-confidence.”

In Peru, the center Beyond the Surface sponsors works with providing children with an activity after school. The second center is located in South Africa, where Koch said it serves as more of a rehabilitation clinic. Sniffing glue has become a popular drug addiction among the children in the community where the center is located, she said, and the surfing serves as a tool for rehabilitation. The third center, located in India, is dedicated to keeping kids out of violent street gangs. The center tries to get children off the streets by replacing their gang with a home in the life of surfing.

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One of the best things about being on Twitter is being able to follow members of the Georgetown men’s basketball team. Bottom line, they’re entertaining. So from now until the end of the basketball season, we’ll be featuring our favorite tweets from the Hoyas in a special Tweetacular every Friday.

Julian Vaughn thinks it’s time for couples to recognize dating rules for the new decade.

Greg Monroe would like to maintain his individuality among his fellow players.

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Later this month, the Academics Working Group plans to release its first proposals for how Georgetown can improve diversity in its curriculum. The group, one of three diversity working groups formed by President DeGioia last spring after The Hoya‘s April Fools’ Issues prompted a broad discussion of diversity at Georgetown, is geared toward determining what Georgetown is lacking in its course offerings with regards to diversity. Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs of the group, said its recommendations will probably include recommendations for new course requirements.

The group has been working to examine how Georgetown’s curriculum offerings compare to peer schools’ and form suggestions for how Georgetown can improve their requirements in ethnic studies since the Spring of 2009. Over the summer, they compared the curriculum at Georgetown to that of schools with similar rankings to determine where Georgetown needed to enhance diversity in its course offerings.

The group is co-chaired by Veronica Salles Reese, the Director for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Professor Eusebio Mujal-Leon of the Government Department and began as small discussion groups among students that were loosely overseen by Provost James O’Donnell. Duyen Bui (SFS ’10), who acts as a facilitator for student discussions and Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs, were the two students mainly responsible for gathering student input on how to increase diversity in the curriculum.

The graphs above show the results of their research. Points were allotted to Georgetown and its peer institutions based on their course offerings. The University of Maryland-College Park was one of the institutions with a model curriculum for ethnic studies. They examined their top institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, finding that each has a much more diverse curriculum than Georgetown. As the graph shows, Georgetown is at the bottom compared to its peers, and is the only school that offers only a minor in African American studies with no general education requirements or majors in any of the three diversity areas.

Bui said that based on these findings, one question became obvious to the whole group: “If we’re one of the top international institutions, why are we so behind?”

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This week’s male Date Labber listed “sweet’’ and “caring” as the first two things that came to his mind when asked to describe his type. So, we found it appropriate to set him up with a girl who seemed sweet and caring—she’s spent her time teaching in rural and underdeveloped communities around the world, and wants to use her intelligence and interests in international affairs to make a difference.

We thought the fact that she was older and well-traveled would stimulate conversation with a guy who would choose The Amazing Race over any other reality show to be cast on because he thought “it’d be awesome to travel the world and I would totally win.”

But we knew that if these two were going to fall for one another and take whirlwind, romantic trips around the globe together, they would have to have a fun side. Since he said he loves dance parties, and she spends her weekends socializing with the theater community, Vox didn’t think that would be a problem. So, would their attraction travel as far as their overseas ambitions?

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Cherry Tree Massacre

One of the biggest a capella festivals of the year kicks off this weekend—the Cherry Tree Massacre makes its debut in Gaston Hall on Friday. The Georgetown Chimes host a performance that features Georgetown’s various a capella groups as well as acts from other campuses. Now in its 37th year, Cherry Tree Massacre has the Phantoms, Gracenotes, and Saxatones in its lineup along with groups from Fordham University, James Madison University, and Tufts. Tickets for the Friday performance are sold out, but students may still reserve tickets for February 5, 6, 19, or 27 at georgetownchimes.org for $10 each. The show will be held at 7:30 p.m. each night.

From Death Row to Freedom

Shujaa Graham, a wrongly convicted individual who spent five years on death row, will be sharing his perspective on the death penalty on Tuesday, February 2, in a lecture hosted by the Georgetown University Lecture Fund. At 8:00 p.m., “From Death Row to Freedom,” an event co-sponsored by Witness to Innocence and GU Right to Life along with the Lecture Fund will discuss the dilemma behind the wrongful conviction of 139 American citizens who have been on death row. The event will take place from 8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. in White Gravenor 201B.

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The Student Life Working Group, one of the three diversity working groups that President John DeGioia established at an April 2009 town hall, is not quite ready to present all of the proposals it has for encouraging more diversity and tolerance in student life at Georgetown. But Joshua Guzman (SFS ’10), pictured right, who co-chairs the group with Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson, said they have already come up with several things they’d like to include.

“We’re just trying to find a way that we can institutionalize all that work that students put into making Georgetown a safer place and a more diverse environment,” Guzman said. “In my opinion, there’s definitely a culture of apathy on campus and a lot of people just don’t care, but we definitely should start telling people to care about these issues.”

Last semester, the admission and recruitment working group revealed its suggestions for altering admissions so that it encourages a more diverse applicant pool. These included new scholarships aimed at increasing need-blind aid, diversifying tour guides, changing essay prompts, and many other ways Georgetown could increase enrollment by underrepresented minorities.

“Student life made it a priority to get as much input not only from students, but from staff involved. I think people were really engaged and active in these dialogues and conversation, and overall the feeling was very positive about the work that we’re doing.”

The working group is split into two subcommittees: the Institutional Change Subcommittee for long-term goals and the Student Programs/Organizations Subcommittee for short-term goals. Each subcommittee has provided three preliminary recommendations as a framework for what they hope to get accomplished.

The Institutional Change Subcommittee suggests the creation of a Diversity Fellows program. Members of this program would remain fellows throughout each year at Georgetown, and be responsible for proposing new initiatives and programming related to diversity. The program would get these student leaders involved with CMEA, the LGBTQ Resource Center, and the Women’s Center as a way to provide more cohesion among the various groups already working to improve diversity at Georgetown.

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On Sunday evening, representatives from several campus groups met to discuss a proposal for a ‘nonviolence week’ later on in the semester. Hate Free Georgetown, an event being organized by Joshua Goode (COL ’10) and Lauren Cucarola (COL ’10) is an attempt to bring together different social groups and campus activities that would normally be separated in an effort to promote peace in the recently hostile Georgetown community.

At the beginning of the meeting, Goode outlined the need for such a week. He cited the many bias-related incidents Georgetown has seen in the past year or so, including the several bias-related incidents which took place at the beginning of the year, prompting the vigil shown at left.

Goode then described the ideas that had already been discussed as examples for events that might be held during the week. These ideas included a big lawn game day, dorm competitions, a barbeque, and a performance festival featuring as many campus performing arts groups as possible where students express the importance of nonviolence in an artistic way.

“The only way it’s really going to work is if we have this broad coalition,” Goode said, adding that the cultural and sports groups at Georgetown have sometimes been difficult to reach out to.

“The biggest way to stop violence is if you know the people around you,” Goode said. “And that’s only going to happen if we get these groups together. Otherwise we’re going to have pockets of people who aren’t intermingling.”

Photo by Kara Brandeisky