First off, we’d like to give an official Vox Populi welcome to the Class of 2015, for officially graduating from “pre-frosh” to bona fide freshmen. As you begin your career on the Hilltop, you’re going to notice that, although your fellow classmates may have different interests and hail from different corners of the Garden State, there is one habit that unifies the student body like no other: Complaining about the University. Here, Vox has compiled a rundown of Hoyas’s most common topics of complaint, why they do so, and how to deal with them a little more effectively.

Facilities

• Why we complain: Blame it on Target catalogues that show college dorms with enough room for home theaters and popcorn machines, but most kids go to college under the delusion that their dorms will be big, perfectly furnished, and spotless. So it’s easy to forget before moving in that your room has been lived in by an unfathomable number of people, many with doubtlessly questionable hygiene and destructive living habits, before you. So your blinds might fall off (Editor’s Note: Mine did), your toilet might overflow, your lights will burn out, and you’ll have to wait some undesirably long amount of time before Maintenance comes around to fix them.

• What to do instead: Make sure you report everything, and we do mean everything, in the Room Condition Report you fill out in the beginning of the year—it’ll keep you from being charged for the mess that the inhabitants of yesteryear left in their wake. If you have any problems with your room’s facilities that you really can’t deal with on your own (burnt-out light bulbs, broken drawers, even low water pressure in your shower), put in a work request immediately: Sure, it will still take a couple of days, but the worst thing you can do is wait.

Read the rest of this entry »

Students wondering what a revamped Healy Pub open to under-21s could look like might take a look at what Massachusetts’ College of the Holy Cross has done with theirs.

The Holy Cross Crusader reports that the college’s Student Government Association and administration have worked to open the pub to students over 18 as part of an effort to provide more weekend programming on-campus.

Georgetown introduced comprehensive drinking rules in 1987 to bring University policies in line with DC’s new drinking age laws. As a result, campus administrators forced Healy Pub to institute dry nights for non-drinking freshmen, which helped push the pub towards bankruptcy.

Under the new rules at the Holy Cross pub, students and guests over the age of 18 will now be permitted to enter the pub on weekend nights. Drinking ages will be enforced by issuing wristbands and a stamp to those underage in the pub.

The article states that college officials will evaluate the changes based on their cost effectiveness and how well students’ needs are met.

According to the Worcester Telegram, the changes come in response to rising tensions between students and members of the surrounding community last fall. The college and city ultimately struck an agreement for the college to address “quality of life” issues on campus.

The George Washington University is cracking down on large parties.

After a number Greek-life groups held unregistered parties on campus, the University began to place heavy sanctions on non-compliant organizations.

According to the GW Hatchet, the requirement was spawned by Student Activities Center Director Tim Miller after he drove past a number of very large, very unregistered parties last August.

Although not cited as one of the reasons for the heightened enforcement, the death of sophomore Taylor Hubbard, who fell out of a dormitory window last May, may also factor into the decision. (A medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of Hubbard’s death and is not allowed to release any information regarding his blood alcohol content at the time of the fall.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Georgetown has spoken. (Er … voted.) Closing Georgetown’s once-upon-a-time, on-campus bar, the Pub, was the worst idea the University has had. Ever!

“Revising the alcohol policy” and “selling WGTB’s radio license” finished in second and third place, respectively.

Let’s recap the University’s terrible, awful, despicable decision to close the Pub:

Healy Hall was once the center of student life on campus, with the student-run Pub serving as its drunken core. The Pub was a ‘sticky, smelly, sweaty, time-of-your-life,’ one former manager said. [...]

It won praise year after year as the best college bar in America, but slowly went bankrupt in the late 1980s after a new alcohol policy forced its student managers to host a dry night once a week. Although the Pub was reborn in the newly-completed Leavey Center, Vice President of Student Affairs James A. Donahue closed the bar for good during the 1994-1995 academic year.

R.I.P. Pub. We wish we had the pleasure of knowing you.

For the next couple of weeks, Voice Managing Editor Molly Redden and I will be pitting the University’s most foolish decisions against one another in a feature we’re calling “The Worst Idea Georgetown’s Ever Had.” Today, we discuss two decisions we think radically altered partying at Georgetown, and then let you vote on which you think was worse. We’ll keep the polls open for you votes until next week, when we’ll tackle a new category. Ultimately, you’ll choose the worst move ever made by Georgetown.

The Alcohol Policy

Party registration. Keg bans. Suspensions. For a school that once housed a bar in the basement of Healy Hall, Georgetown has changed an awful lot.

In May 2007, as students buckled down for finals and seniors prepared for graduation, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson announced a revised alcohol policy that applied strict rules to on campus parties. The sneaky move, which caught many students off guard, effectively killed on campus parties thereafter. Although student-based suggestions at the end of the 2008-09 academic year led to minor changes in the policy, make no mistake—Georgetown’s party scene has never been the same.

In case you’ve forgotten, the policy limits the size of on campus parties (25 to 35 attendees, with some exceptions for townhouses and Village A rooftop apartments), suspends students if they run afoul three times, and hilariously bans “board games … such as ‘Drinko’, ‘Keel Over’, and ‘Shots and Ladders’.” (No! Not Drinko!)

Read the rest of this entry »

The GUNS girls would not approve…

Editor’s Note: In this week’s cover story, Molly Redden reported on Georgetown’s sordid, besotted past. In her research, she found some interesting insights into Georgetown’s gender relations in the mid-1960s.

This week’s cover story identifies 1966 as the start of two decades of outright debauchery at Georgetown, that being the year that the University first allowed alcohol in boys’ dorms. But not everyone was immediately ready to give in to lady liquor.

On November 3, The Hoya published “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” a recap of a symposium it had held where eight female GU Nursing School students indicated that they were anything but fine with extending the drinking-tolerant policy to girls’ dorms.

Some of the choicest quotes from the article include, “I’d hate to think of every girl sitting around, boozing it up,” and, “If you sit in and get binged every Friday well then you’re not right … in the head.”

“One girl,” the Hoya author wrote, “thought that drunk boys were at least funny, while the same cannot be said for drunk girls.”

Read the rest of this entry »

This week Vox figured we’d give you some sense of institutional history by presenting a primer of the ten most widely-discussed campus news stories from the past couple years.
10. GUSA election debacles

GUSA Candidates, pre-squabbling

Georgetown’s student government, GUSA, doesn’t have a great record as far as presidential elections are concerned. In 2008, they experimented with instant run-off voting. They failed to conduct the election properly, though, and had to have a re-vote with the top four candidates.

This past year wasn’t much better. GUSA ditched IRV, but the election still devolved into chaos when the Election Commission disqualified two candidates hours before voting started. GUSA largely objected to the Election Commission’s decision, the election was suspended, complaints were filed, Election Commissioners resigned, and the disqualified candidates were ultimately reinstated.

9. Hoya independence and insensitivity

Students hold a sit-in after the Hoya‘s April Fools’ issue

The Hoya, Georgetown’s self-proclaimed “newspaper of record,” has been trying to go independent from the University for a quite a while. Indications were that they were set to go independent this coming year.

They ran into trouble this spring when they published a racially insensitive April Fool’s issue. The issue led to protests from students and promises from the Hoya to reform.

Read the rest of this entry »

Avid readers of The Washington Post were regaled Wednesday morning by Hope C. Bogorad’s letter to the editor ridiculing student complaints about Georgetown’s new alcohol policies. Besides being based on multiple logical fallacies–most notably, straw man (claiming that Georgetown students can’t complain about anything else while the country is at war, even though activism on both fronts is not mutually exclusive) and poisoning the well (more on that later), with a nice bit of spotlight (believing all 18-25 year-olds should be drafted because of a few quotes from Georgetown students against an unrelated policy), ad hominem (we must always pass out when we drink) and special pleading (unless, of course, Hope spends all her days solving the dilemmas of Iraq and Afghanistan) thrown in. That’s five fouls in 50 words; it’s the logical equivalent of fouling out five minutes into a game without scoring. And that’s before even touching the obvious grammatical error in her first four words (which should read “if there ever were“).

What’s more, she bemoans the “appalling behavior” of Georgetown students (this is the well being poisoned). Let’s count up every single one of the actions Post article depicts students taking: 1. Not having parties at a “typical party spot.” 2. Feeling blindsided by a rule change that did, in fact, come without discussion. 3. Creating a Facebook group. 4. Bringing home a case of Bud Light and not have many people over to drink it. 5. Offering various docile quotes in opposition to the party. 6. Allegedly holding noisy parties, with no direct quotes about it. Appalling!!!

Most disturbingly, let’s take Hope’s argument out to its logical conclusion: students who are willing to be vocal about infringements on their rights to assemble peaceably and (especially for the many students who are 21) to imbibe alcohol (which actually very rarely involves passing out) should be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they would risk death. Students who want to enjoy weekends the same way college students (before, during and after Hope’s generation) have traditionally done should be forced to risk death.

Rest assured, Hope, that we would never harbor any similar wish for you. We just hope you’ll think responsibly in the future.

-Mike Stewart, Managing Editor

The University enacted a new set of party rules this month that could take the fun out of any campus-dwelling student’s weekend. And what’s more, it seems they timed the release to avoid the predictable student backlash: Making the announcement in the midst of finals, they new students would be too busy to actively oppose it, even as seniors—probably the most knowledgable and invested students at school—are leaving and in time to convince incoming freshmen that this is the way it’s always been. Rest assured that the Voice will be editorializing about and covering this issue heavily next fall; one hopes that prompt action from students and GUSA will result in a more acceptable set of rules, ala this school year’s keg ban debate. While parties may seem silly in light of all the other things students are up to, they’re an important part of the Georgetown experience and one of the few things we actually have some say over. See the letter from Dean of Students Todd Olson and some more commentary after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »