As of 4:35 GUSA’s pagan celebration had fallen apart and people were just taking pumpkins. I don’t know if that’s GUSA-sanctioned or the wisdom of crowds, but it doesn’t bode well for tomorrow’s Dowdometer.

If you’ve just come into several of GUSA’s pumpkins, you have some options besides cutting them:

• Drop your pumpkin off a tall building. Obviously, make sure no one’s around, and clean up the mess afterward. But imagine the explosion. For extra Halloween fun, make it the MSB building.
• Scoop out the seeds and cook them. They’re delicious, and you can combine this with dropping them off a building.
• Cover your pumpkin in a white sheet and roll it down a hill. It will look like a small ghost.

Whatever you do, you can sing “I’m a Little Pumpkin” while you do it.

I’m a little pumpkin
Orange and round.
Here is my stem,
There is the ground.
When I get all cut up
Don’t you shout!
Just open me up
And scoop me out!

“Spread to the four winds!”

The GUSA Senate formed the Student Commission for Unity last spring in response to last year’s bias-related incidents and The Hoya’s “Jena 6″ snafu last fall. In April, the SCU conducted a survey on race, discrimination, and segregation at Georgetown which gleaned over 1,500 student responses. While they’re not publishing the numbers just yet, a sneak peak on Tuesday night revealed:

• Only 4% of bias incidents that occur on or near campus get reported to DPS
• Black and Hispanic students often feel uncomfortable here because of their race in face greater numbers that white students
• Catholics and Protestants find religious discrimination to be less of a problem than Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu students
• New students find the bias reporting system far more adequate than veteran Hoyas do
• SFS kids are pretty convinced that self-segregation is a problem (frustrating for their vigorous networking efforts)

For some reason, when they break down their survey based on religion, responses from Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindi students get grouped together. Kesten said it’s because they’re fewer in numbers. Unfortunately, if they respond in radically different ways to specific questions, we may never know.

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The latest morsel of campus-wide email fun comes from GUSA president Pat Dowd and his vice-president James Kelly, both of whom really really want you to get involved in student government.The first part of the email is a heads up about the annual/semesterly/whenever GUSA Senate elections. But bear with it; the second half is the good stuff. Pat and James want you to join GUSA Grassroots, “a new subsidiary of the Executive that reports directly to the President of the Student Body.”

The execs go on to explain that “In the same way that involvement in national politics tends to begin at the grassroots level, GUSA Grassroots is the perfect place for you to begin your own career in campus politics.” It’s admirable that P and J want to get someone other than the usual GUSA types involved, but GG is bizarre for two reasons:

1. How can another committee do anything for GUSA?
2. Since when is grassroots activism initiated by the people in power?

Obviously the second point is rhetorical, because even GUSA execs aren’t exactly “in power”. The email’s after the jump.

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