I didn’t think much of GUSA President Pat Dowd when he was running. Neither did the Voice editorial board, which endorsed his opponents. With GUSA Summer Fellows coming together so soon and his pretty good response to our latest crimes, though, I’m feeling better about his reign.

Things will change, though, and probably for the worse. It’ll be hard to keep track of whether Pat Dowd’s better or worse than we expected him to be. That’s why we’ve come up with the Dowdometer, a device to measure whether he’s exceeding (admittedly low) expectations. So far, things are rosy. But who knows what next semester will bring?

Along with the numerous Public Safety Alert emails you’ve been receiving lately, you may have noticed a message from GUSA about their “Campus Safety efforts.” If the text of the e-mail seems familiar, that’s because it’s copied-and-pasted from the GUSA Campus Safety Watch Facebook group President Pat Dowd created recently.

Since, as the message declares, “a ‘business as usual’ approach to campus safety is failing to meet the needs of our community,” GUSA is soliciting recommendations and promising to present them to whoever DPS Director Darryl Harrison’s successor is. As of 12:30 a.m., the Facebook group, though boasting 295 members, has only 5 wall posts and 1 discussion post. Dowd told me via email that he has received over 20 student responses in the six hours since the campus-wide e-mail was sent out.

The missive also encourages students to join the Facebook group, saying that “By joining this group, you are sending a clear message to the administration that campus security it [sic] a major concern for you as a Georgetown student.” Does joining a Facebook group really constitute active participation in campus life, though? Surely there are more substantive ways of conveying your concern about safety issues than clicking the “Join this Group” button.

The open meeting VP for Student Affairs Todd Olson and VP for University Safety Rocco DelMonaco held Tuesday evening was pretty sparsely attended, even for study days. There were approximately 50-60 audience members, about half of whom were faculty or staff members. “Where are all these ‘mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore’ students?” someone sitting near me asked.

There’s also an interesting side note for any avid GUSA followers out there: back in the presidential campaign, during the debate hosted by The Hoya, Dowd distinguished himself from the other candidates by arguing that campus safety was not GUSA’s purview – “Safety is not a GUSA issue,” Dowd said in the debate.

After the jump, Dowd explains why he’s mucking around in safety now, the adorable Brian Kesten makes an appearance, and Rocco DelMonaco needs GUSA like jam needs toast.

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The Corp has taken to running the 1st floor of the Leavey Center like its personal fiefdom, with all the restrictions of free speech that entails. Thursday night I noticed several fliers on the bulletin boards near Vital Vittles and the Leavey elevators with this article (link currently down) from the Columbia Spectator about Collegeboxes’ failure to return stored items on time to Columbia students. Later that night, they were gone.

Expecting the hidden hand of the Corp’s Student Storage behind the fliers and Collegeboxes behind the takedown, I emailed Corp CEO Jesse Scharff. His response was surprising: the Corp didn’t put the fliers up, but they took them down because they thought it reflected poorly on them. If someone wants to tell students about Collegeboxes’ seemingly significant problems, the Corp shouldn’t stop them just because it might reflect poorly on them.

After the jump, Scharff’s email and a conspiracy theory I’ve been working on.

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Someone’s in trouble with DPS 

Until the events of this past weekend, LXR had been a relatively quite dorm this year, with few problems larger than the lack of hot water during my morning shower. This week, however, things have changed drastically as DPS officers make the rounds several times a day, banging on doors and handing out safety violation notices.

Residents now face door checks during which officers walk through the halls trying to open each door (similar to what Sunday morning’s intruder did), reprimanding those students who have their doors unlocked. One officer, who knocked, hesitated briefly, and then proceeded to open my unlocked door himself, told us that these demands have come from the “administration”.

I recognize the need for increased dorm security, but I don’t think that it should come at the expense of student privacy and peace of mind. The citation slips which have been left on numerous doors in LXR make me feel uncomfortable in my own home; I used to feel reasonably safe in LXR, but now I just feel constantly annoyed.If the administration wants to increase security in East Campus, I think they should, but they should not try to place the onus entirely on students by implementing these checks.

If I leave my door unlocked and someone steals my computer, that’s my fault, and I accept responsibility for it. But if an outsider manages slip into the building, I should not be held accountable for ineptitude of campus security.

- Lynn Kirshbaum, Photo Editor. Photo by Lynn.

Vox Populi’s kissing-cousins at The Hoya’s blog The Saxa recently made a bold move to divide their blog between regular news (Leavey421, in subtle homage to The Hatchet) and sports news (TheHoyaParanoia). But the Saxa’s editors have something else in store for us: a terrible, terrible pun. From Google Reader, an administrative post reveals as-yet-unmade third section:

Leavey421
- The Newsroom
TheHoyaParanoia
- Sports
Hoya Gonna Vote For?
- Election 2008

It replaces the crime blog, Hilltops and Robbers.

-Will Sommer, Blog Editor

I went down to the basement of Copley at 4:30 last night to get some snacks from the vending machine. For the first time at Georgetown, I feared for my safety as I walked through the halls of my dorm.

Strangely, the numerous burglaries in my dorm earlier in the year didn’t have the same effect. Maybe it was because of the late hour (similar to the times when the recent incidents took place in LXR), or perhaps it was because when I walked into the building a few minutes earlier, the security guard was fast asleep with her head between her arms, and didn’t even bother to look up when I swiped right in front of her.In that moment, I understood how the residents of LXR must feel.

Other people did too–I was relatively unsurprised to hear that an RA in the building was carrying a knife. Reports of more assaults in Village A and Henle are somehow no longer shocking. Is this past weekend to be a watershed for crime at Georgetown? Online comments on a recent Hoya article covering the LXR sexual assault suggest many things—mostly ridiculous, like calling for racial profiling, since all of the descriptions seem to be the same, of young dark-skinned males (if only everyone didn’t believe in race).

Beyond the unnecessary racial polarization of the issue, some users have suggested that DPS become a full-fledged police force. This newspaper’s position is well-documented on the issue of arming DPS, but anonymous users are calling for much more than that. They believe that Georgetown’s lack of a proper police force encourages crime, as a bubble where the security officers have no discretion or training to investigate crimes.Therefore, Georgetown will continue to attract crime as a target of opportunity.

Arming DPS further will apparently stop this.The real answer probably lies in more patrols, not more weapons. Rather than commit to upgrading DPS into an actual police department (unthinkable and unnecessary, with MPD just a phone call away), the university might want to begin by rethinking its patrolling policy.

According to another article in today’s Hoya, one security guard covers Village A, Alumni Square, LXR and Walsh. Allison Mead (SFS ‘10), a concerned student quoted for the story, raises an interesting question that is buried at the end of the article: “I have the emergency system. Why didn’t I get a text message to say, ‘Lock your doors; there is an intruder’?”

Perhaps because her door should have already been locked, but that’s beside the point: students should be able to feel safe inside their dorms, to not fear going to sleep in their own beds. Beyond that, there are so many issues here—involving fear, race, campus security (or lack thereof), the abilities, tactics and working conditions of DPS and Securitas (the security company notable for its sleeping guards)—that can’t really be solved with one showy strategy, or even just by urging everyone to lock their doors.

Many of the actions that have already been taken in LXR—replacing the GOcard reader, locking the emergency stairwell doors that permit anyone to bypass the guard desk—should have been done a long time ago. What to do next is the most difficult question; hopefully the debate won’t succumb to fear and choose costly and ineffective options.

-Jeff Reger, Associate Editor

As Doug Feith’s 2-year term at Georgetown expires, several questions remain. Was his ouster organized by liberal faculty members? What does Foreign Service Dean Galluci think of it all? Has anyone at Georgetown ever been so much a war criminal (besides Henry Kissinger, obvs.)?

For a few Georgetown students, however, one question looms above all: how can we use an online petition to save him? Save Professor Feith and the Diversity of Thought worries that Feith is the SFS’s killer app: “We do not want to lose a preeminent foreign policy scholar to another university and jeopardize our status as the nation’s preeminent government and foreign policy institution.”

The petition’s been signed 59 people. But how many who signed are really concerned with diversity of thought and not motivated by other, more sinister agendas? According to the site, notable signatories include

• Henry Kissinger (Hard Knocks 2009)
• Dorit Feith (Michigan ‘07). Daughter?
• Feith Tortures. This signature was deleted, but it speaks to the petition’s persuasiveness if it could even win over that guy.

Can the internet, the medium which heaped so much ridicule on Feith, save his academic career? Probably not!

-Will Sommer, Blog Editor

UPDATED 4/27 BELOW THE FOLD

Some commenters who read this post on the U.S. Attorney’s decision to drop charges against Philip Cooney (MSB ‘10) want more clarification about that decision and the reporting in my recent article on the subject, and I’m happy to oblige (sorry it took so long, but it is, after all, the last week of school). Keep in mind that this analysis is only based on my reporting on the case since last fall and a four month stint working at a legal magazine covering a variety of court cases, so nothing in here is gospel.

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Georgetown Day put up quite a fight: moon bounce, live music, free food, NBA champ Jeff Green, a rock climbing wall, and so on.  In the end, though, Georgetown Nite stole the show with a concentrated soap solution, a giant blow-up rink, a mass of soaking wet drunk people, and a tiny bit of magic. Foam party, indeed.

All hail the die-in. Georgetown finally decided being complicit in Darfur’s genocide wasn’t that great and divested from countries operating in Sudan. Staff writer John Cooke has the details:

Georgetown University, in response to lobbying by STAND, a Georgetown group advocating against the current genocide in Sudan, has decided to divest itself from companies that do business with Sudan.

In a statement, the University stated it completed its divestment in coordination with the Sudan Divestment Taskforce. The group is dedicated to identifying businesses with questionable ties to the Sudanese government, singling out those companies whose revenue goes to the Sudanese government’s arming of militias in the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

In addition to divesting University funds from Sudan, the Administration will also advise its investment fund managers to divest their funds from Sudan, affecting more investments and having a deeper impact.

Reaction from STAND members has been positive.

“Georgetown’s divestment policy reflects a significant step in the divestment movement,” said Hailey Flynn, a STAND member. “It’s a reflection of the depth of which Georgetown values its moral code.”

I was on STAND’s divestment committee freshman year, before the Voice made me interested in more venal things. Good for STAND and the University.

-Story by John Cooke, Staff Writer. Frame story by Will Sommer, Blog Editor.