The graffiti that appeared on the Village A rooftops last week is gone, and with it, all potential community charges.

Area Coordinator Cory Peterson, who sent an email to rooftop residents last week about the incident, told students on Friday they would not be charged for the graffiti clean-up.

“Thank you to those who emailed and stopped in the office to chat about the graffiti and your knowledge of when it appeared. And thank you to those residents who voluntarily cleaned it up,” he wrote in an email. “As a result of the quick community response, the matter was addressed and no community charges are necessary.”

Oddly enough, Georgetown isn’t the only D.C. school with response-to-vandalism problems.

GW’s Residential Property Management office emailed students in the Ivory Tower dorm last Friday, threatening to levy community charges on all residents for damages to the building. However, the message “was not authorized,” according to a successive email sent Friday night. Now, GW plans to reevaluate its listserv email policies.

Photo: Georgetown Housing

Fire, the specter that has haunted Georgetown’s campus all year, broke out this weekend at the house of George Washington University sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma. In a rare turn of events, however, there actually was a fire this time.

Figures. Of course another D.C. school would try to show us up.

Deputy Fire Chief Timothy Gerhart told GWU’s The Hatchet that the fire started in one room of the house. Papers and books caught fire, but the flame was so small that the overheard sprinklers were not triggered. Firefighters threw the burning materials from the room through a broken window and quickly contained the fire.

As of now it is uncertain what caused the fire, but the remaining occupant of the room, who will stay with friends for the remainder of the year, claimed not to be home at the time it started. (However, some gossips on Twitter were quick to theorize about its cause.)

D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services spokesman Pete Piringer reported that the damage could cost up to a few thousand dollars, an estimate that includes a broken window, water damage, and fire damage. Sounds familiar …

Photo by the GW Hatchet.

A study by the American Association of University Professors found that colleges and universities across the country gave faculty the lowest pay raises in the 50 years since the study began, and Georgetown University is no exception. At Georgetown, full professors’ pay declined by .1 percent, associate professors were given pay raises of .5 percent, and assistant professors’ pay rose by 1.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the rate of inflation at 2.7 percent, and average pay increases at American institutions for a full professor was 1.2 percent. Most other D.C. schools were stingy, but at George Washington University, faculty pay rose by 5.1 percent.

According to the study, Georgetown professors still took home an average salary of $155,500 (and average compensation was $191,700) last year. Associate professors averaged a salary of $100,700, and assistant professors averaged $83,600.

Interestingly, the study provided a gendered breakdown of faculty pay which revealed that in all categories, male faculty out-earned female faculty. Male professors, associate professors, and assistant professors earned average salaries of $157,200, $103,300, and $89,800, respectively, and female professors, associate professors, and assistant professors earned average salaries of $149,800, $96,800, and $76,400, respectively. Percent changes in pay by gender were not available.

Georgetown had originally planned to increase faculty pay to 2.25 percent above the rate of inflation for 2009, a goal which President John DeGioia announced the University had scrapped last January. He announced salary freezes for himself and other senior faculty in the same speech.

Via College, Inc.

Residents of East Georgetown typically don’t partake in Georgetown student-bashing or get involved in the major campaigns against University expansion in any form. They’re just too far away from our noise, trash, and general aura to care.

But they’re not too far away from George Washington students to complain about them. And on Saturday, when a gaggle of GWU students descended upon Rose Park to barbecue, they struck a nerve with an East village resident who sent this message out to the georgetownforum listserv:

“Today, a large group of GW students took over Rose Park with two volleyball nets and a cookout. Apparently they did have a permit, BUT they are completely tearing up the grass and there is a very big crowd there making lots of noise. I am mostly concerned about how torn up the grass will be after turning it into essentially two volleyball fields.

“Rose Park is scraggly enough looking as it is, unfortunately, and I think it was just sodded with new grass last fall. I also do not want to encourage GW students to make Rose Park and this corner of Georgetown an outpost of GW. Who approves these permits, and who can I complain to about the fact that this event was permitted?”

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

And here we were, feeling like the black sheep of the D.C. college family because George Washington’s Ten Year Plan process is going so much more smoothly than our 2010 Campus Plan.

If you thought that last week’s snow storm caused problems with Georgetown’s administration, just wait til you hear what happened with George Washington University.

Since snow was delaying mail, admissions officials opted to send the official acceptance packets for the GWU class of 2014 by e-mail. So, everyone who was accepted to GWU under early action got one—but so did hundreds of applicants who had already been told they’d been rejected.

Senior Vice President for Student and Academic Services Robert Chernak told the GW Hatchet that the mistake was the result of a clerical error made when Admissions decided to e-mail instead of mail the packets.

“Executive Dean of Undergraduate Admissions [Kathy Napper] felt that it would be a good idea to send an e-mail to those people who were accepted, that was the theory, for Early Decision II,” he said. “As those instructions went down the chain of command in the admissions office to the operational level, the individual who sent out the e-mail… touched the wrong button on the list.”

“This afternoon, you received an email from me titled ‘Important GW Information.’ Unfortunately, this email was sent to you in error,” the Office of Undergraduate Admissions wrote in apology, “We are truly sorry for this confusion regarding your application to GW.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Georgetown isn’t the alone among area schools concerned about its levels of diversity. Last Friday, University President Steven Knapp announced two efforts to increase the number of non-Caucasian students at George Washington University: a President’s Council on Diversity and Inclusion, and the creation of a senior administrative position to improve minority access to education and diversity among university faculty, the associate provost for diversity and inclusion.

Interestingly, when Knapp made this announcement before the board of trustees, he said that the goal of these new initiatives was to respond to the demographic shift among American students by way of increasing diversity at GWU.

“The way demographics in the United States are developing right now, if you’re not reaching out to all parts of America then you’re really not going to have the kind of students, the kind of experiences and the kind of talents you need to be a successful institution,” the GW Hatchet reported Knapp said.

At Georgetown, meanwhile, diversity initiatives are not just a response to low rates of enrollment by minority students, but to concerns that Georgetown’s demographic breakdown has created an unwelcoming and divided environment at Georgetown.

The ethnic breakdown of Georgetown and GWU are fairly comparable. The most recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics showed that 65 percent of Georgetown students were white, 6 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 7 percent were Black/African-American, and 9 percent were Asian, Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. Five percent did not list an ethnicity and 9 percent were non-residents of the U.S.

At GWU, data showed that 58 percent of its students were white, 7 percent were Hispanic/Latino, 7 percent were Black/African-American, and 10 percent were Asian, Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. Thirteen percent did not list an ethnicity and 6 percent were non-residents of the U.S.

Well, call us Capulet! George Washington University may have earned a resounding victory in yesterday’s snow battle against Georgetown students, but it looks like the real winner of day was … Love.

In his recap of the fight for the Washington City Paper, the Voice‘s Will Sommer shared this missed connection spot from Craigslist:

“Georgetown guy at snowball fight – w4m – 20 (Rose Park)

“I’m a GW student and you are a Georgetown student. In the midst of our epic battle I looked at you and said “you’re too cute to be a George Washington student,” and then I threw a snowball at you. Well, you really are too cute to be a GW guy. I’d love to meet up and debate GW-GU some more.”

We’re particularly flattered that she recognized that Georgetown guys are cuter.

How about it, Georgetown guys? Did one of you fall for the enemy at the Snowdome of Doom?

Editor’s note: Embedded reporter Eric Pilch took the two videos in this post of Wednesday night’s massacre at Rose Park. The first is of GWU’s hordes advancing on the intrepid band of Hoyas, the second is of some of the action on the battlefield. If you got sick watching Cloverfield, you probably shouldn’t watch them.

Wednesday night’s snowball fight between Georgetown and George Washington University may have been a lot of fun, but in terms of winners and losers, Georgetown was clearly the latter.

Starting around 6 p.m., the Georgetown contingent of roughly 50 students began to assemble on the north side of Rose Park at 26th and O Streets, gathering on top of a hill that strategically overlooked the park.  It was difficult to tell how many people from GWU had shown up when they advanced en masse from the other side of the park a few minutes later, but the ratio was at least 4:1 in GW’s favor.

To emphasize their prowess, they even brought a flag. Later reports of the battle also state that their university president, Steven Knapp, was present at the fight and announced that school would be canceled the next day right there at the site of GWU’s victory.

Once GWU began to flood the hill Georgetown students were standing on, the snowball fight digressed rapidly for the Hoyas.

Read more and watch Georgetown get crushed after the jump!

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Because the weather is totally awful out right now, Kyle Boyer, the George Washington University student who’s organized the Georgetown vs. George Washington University snowball fight, has wisely postponed the inter-school snowball fight we’re having today to 6:00 p.m.

The location is the same, Rose Park at 26th and O Streets.

Not sure you want to go? Well, the Washington Post has already told all of D.C. that Georgetown is going to be there. So has NBC Washington, which has termed the event “Snowdome of Doom.” If you don’t go, you’re going to make the Hoyas look bad.

So join the Facebook group and invite all of Georgetown! We can take ‘em. One of their mascots is a hippo.

P.S.: MPD, if you come to our snowball fight, please don’t bring guns.

In other snow news, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack “Of course I shoveled it myself!” Evans is a model citizen when it comes to keeping his sidewalk clear. American University students are lamer than GWU and GU students. The proof is in what they did with their snowdays so far.

Graduates from colleges in the District of Columbia have the highest level of debt in the nation, according to a report released Tuesday by The Project on Student Debt. Students in the District’s class of 2008 averaged $29,793 in debt, placing them ahead of students in Iowa, Connecticut, New York, and New Hampshire, some of the states with the highest levels of debt in the country.

The District was represented in the survey by data collected from three area private institutions: Georgetown University, George Washington University, and American University. At the same time, a (relatively) small proportion of D.C. students—49 percent—reported having debt, making them 40th in the country in this statistic.

Although Georgetown and George Washington appear annually on lists of the most expensive schools in the country, American University students reported having both the region’s highest average debt ($34,213) and the highest proportion of students with debt (56 percent). Debt for Georgetown University and George Washington graduates averaged $23,333 and $30,817 respectively.

Adding to the financial hardship for recent graduates, unemployment among college graduates rose to 10.6 percent in the 3rd quarter of 2008, the highest percentage on record.