Just like last year, Vox has compiled a guide to “news you can use”, or in other words, an excessively comprehensive review of last year’s important news stories. Today, we cover the on-campus issues that made headlines. Check in later this week for the year’s biggest crime stories.

Plan A: Hoyas for Reproductive Justice

In March, the United Feminists and H*yas for Choice created Plan A: Hoyas for Reproductive Justice. The campaign pushed the University to provide contraceptives, sex education, rape kits, the HPV vaccine, and informational resources on reproductive health. Plan A Hoyas also campaigned for less restrictive freedom of speech and expression policies.

After a series of escalating protests failed to get the University’s attention, protesters chained themselves to the John Carroll statue during GAAP weekend. The protesters unchained themselves after campus administrators sent them a letter, but it’s unclear what the letter said. The campaign organizers claimed victories, but not all of them could be substantiated. The campaign sparked debate about University funding and free speech policies, as well as what it means to be a Jesuit school.

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Protest not, lest ye be protested. Tonight, about twenty students gathered in Red Square to condemn the protesters who interrupted General David Petraeus when he spoke in Gaston Hall last Thursday. The students, two of whom held a large American flag for the duration of the counterprotest, read aloud and circulated a letter of apology to Gen. Petraeus and a letter to University President John DeGioia asking him to issue a formal apology to Petraeus for the disruption.

“A great injustice was perpetrated against General David Petraeus, those in attendance of his presentation, and the Georgetown community as a whole on January 21,” junior Will Downes said, reading the letter to DeGioia.

The letter to Petraeus, they said, was drafted in collaboration between several on campus groups, including the the Georgetown Federalist, the International Relations Club, and Georgetown University College Republicans. It asked that and that “university policy be altered so that it does not tolerate the constant and continuous disruption of university sponsored events.”

After the reading the letters out loud, members of the group engaged in some good old-fashioned oratory.

“How is it that a guest at our University could be subject to such disrespect?” Randy Drew (SFS ’10) asked, standing on the planter in the middle of the Square. Drew said the protesters were motivated by “the same spirit which motivates a person in the middle of the night to shout racial epithets, the same spirit which motivates a person to deny a professor the right to teach what he or she believes.”

Members of the crowd hissed softly when Drew mentioned the op-ed that James Reardon-Anderson, a dean in the School of Foreign Service, published in The Hoya comparing the actions of the protesters to Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read more, and the letters to Petraeus and DeGioia, after the jump.

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