The Cardinal Newman Society, a conservative Catholic organization that complains about Georgetown University a lot, recently responded to the Georgetown University Student Association’s proposal about the possibility of gender-blind housing.

The GUSA bill calls for a dialogue between members of the University community about the possibility to allow members of opposite sexes to live together.

In a blog post published yesterday, CNS claimed it is Georgetown’s responsibility as a Catholic institution to promote the virtue of chastity on campus.

“Unfortunately, many Catholic universities already have very lax, if not non-existent, male/female [visitation] policies for dorm life,” the group wrote. “Allowing ‘gender-blind’ housing would only serve to institutionalize the hook-up culture which sadly pervades much of Catholic higher education.”

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The 2010-2011 Georgetown University Student Association Senators were sworn in on Sunday, officially beginning the year’s agenda. While the meeting was heavy on ideas and questions from the senators and light on formal votes, the discussions suggest that many of last year’s issues will rear their heads soon.

Chris Pigott (COL’12), last year’s Senate Vice-Speaker, moderated the meeting.

Student Activities Fee and Endowment Reform (SAFE Reform)

In 2001, a system was set up to allocate half of the Student Activities fee to student organizations, club sports, and the media board. The other half went to an endowment, which, according to the plan, would eventually become self-sustaining and eliminate the need to collect a student activities fee from each student on a semester basis.

At the current interest rates, however, GUSA representatives are concerned that students wouldn’t see the effect of the endowment plan until at least 2025. Let’s hope that the Finance and Appropriation Committee looks into the endowment money and creates a plan to speed up the process.

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We’re not finished with college rankings yet? Guh.

Last week, Forbes reported that Georgetown has the second-most expensive dorms in the country. And what do students get for a measly $12,750?

“[A room] in one of four brick high-rises that resemble the aging, cramped spaces parents may remember from their own college days.”

During the 2010-2011 academic year [PDF], residence costs will range from $8,014 to $9,646. (Meal plans will cost $1,226 to $4,468.) The charges mark a 10 percent rise in room and board charges over the past three years.

But look on the bright side—Forbes ranked Georgetown as the 52nd best college in the country! Hurray for subjectivism!

Photo by Flickr user “neubie” used under a Creative Commons license.

Well, it wasn’t the late January or early February date they had hoped for. But the 2010 Campus Plan steering committee has announced the last community meeting it will hold regarding the 2010 Campus Plan before it files the plan with the Old Georgetown Board and D.C. Zoning Commission for approval.

On Monday, April 26, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at Georgetown Visitation, members of the Georgetown administration will present their final draft of the plan with information residents asked for in previous meetings. Those meetings collected community feedback and questions on three specific elements of the plan in November—Transportation, the 1789 Block, and Housing, Enrollment, and Off-Campus Life.

Material on the final draft of the plan will become available here as the meeting date approaches, but so far, the final draft is not available yet. In anticipation of the final draft, let’s recap: what are the major flashpoints for Georgetown neighbors going to be when it does become available, and what did they ask to know about the plan?

• Increased graduate enrollment — Currently, Georgetown is seeking to increase its graduate student enrollment by about 3,200 students, most of whom will be in the School of Continuing Studies. While the University is not going to increase undergraduate enrollment, neighbors are still furious. They want to know how many graduate students they can expect to move into the area.

• New undergraduate housing — Right now, there is no new undergraduate housing proposed in this plan. This is particularly irksome to neighborhood residents who remember that in a May 2009 presentation, the architecture firm working said the University could add 800 beds within Georgetown’s gates. (Although adding that many beds would have required Georgetown to build on nearly every open space left on campus, including the Harbin patio). Expect this to incense neighbors again, unless Georgetown has changed its plans.

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Save these

Whether or not it turns out that Georgetown could have prevented Sunday night’s fire in New South, it’ll probably irk at least a few residents to learn that Georgetown just made U.S. News & World Report’s list of “10 Schools With Pricey Dorms.”

When University officials spoke to neighbors in May and raised the possibility of building a new housing complex on the “1789 Block” (the area between Prospect and N Streets and 36th and 37th Streets), neighbors said they didn’t want to see undergraduates living in that area. So the University decided the new residences would be for grad students and faculty.  When officials at the May meeting said they were hoping to put 200 to 250 beds in the complex, neighbors said that would be too much density.  So the University lowered the projected number of beds to 120.

Even with the concessions, though, neighbors still aren’t enthusiastic about the proposal, which was presented Monday night by University Architect Alan Brangman.  While there were some quibbles about the specifics of the plan, most of the objections stem from one essential conflict: many neighbors don’t believe the land the University owns outside the front gates counts as “on campus;” University officials do.  And so does D.C.: Georgetown University’s legal boundaries, as defined by the the National Capital Planning Commission, include portions of four blocks West of the front gates.

“It’s a misnomer and it’s a deception,” one neighbor said of the University’s practice of defining the campus as including these areas beyond the front gates. “They [the students] are living amongst us!  They’re on the left of us, in the front of us, on the side of us, and they’re in the back of us … They’re not really within your gates, although you’re hiding behind the fact that [the boundaries were] approved.”

Brangman was having none of it, though.

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It’s never too early to invest in your dream house!

If dorm living’s got you down and you’ve heard the horror stories about local landlords, the Washington Times has a new solution for you: go buy a house (or, more precisely, go get your parents to buy one for you).

The Times ran a whole feature story on the new trend of parents buying homes for their college-age kids to live in while they’re at school.  While buying a house seems like a drastic step, the article explains that with the rent and dorm prices rising and the housing market in shambles, buying a house and selling it off or renting it out to other students after graduation often makes financial sense.

While the phenomenon is most widespread in the Midwest where real estate is the cheapest, but it’s also gaining ground here in D.C.  The article features one real estate agent who sells as many as eight houses per year to Georgetown and GW students.  The piece also profiles recent Georgetown Law grad Jim Pyle, whose mother bought him a house on Capitol Hill which they sold for about $200,000 more than they paid.

GU’s Charles DeSantis

On Tuesday night, University officials revealed their tentative plans for the future of enrollment, student housing, and off-campus life at Georgetown to an audience of about forty West Georgetown and Burleith residents. It was the first in a series of community meetings designed to give neighborhood residents an idea of what its Ten Year Plan will look like.

Emphasizing that the plans shown last night were part of the unfinalized “draft plan,” the Georgetown administrators said the University intends to cap its undergraduate enrollment at its current level of just over 6,000 and instead increase enrollment in its graduate programs from 5,512 to about 8,700 in the next ten years.

The presentation of the plan was accompanied by several University pledges to improve the quality of life for neighbors living near campus who often complain about student noise, parties, and trash. Beginning in August of 2010, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson said, the University will place an adult “Community Advisor” in both West Georgetown and Burleith to act as the equivalent of ResLife Hall Directors among upperclassmen living in those areas. Because Georgetown does not own housing in the Burleith neighborhood, Olson said after the meeting that the University will rent a house for the Community Advisor to live in.

While it is unclear whether the creation of the Community Advisor positions came at the request of neighborhood residents, last week, the results of a Voice FOIA request revealed that community leaders have been lobbying the University to place “adult live-in supervision” among students who live outside of Georgetown’s gates.

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While Georgetown is currently tackling the issue of gender neutral bathrooms, Syracuse and Princeton are taking it a step further by beginning to offer gender-neutral housing.

Both universities decided that next fall, they will allow students to room with someone of the opposite sex.  The policies were changed with LGBT students in mind, but will also help other students who want to live with their friends of different genders.

Syracuse will offer seventy-four two-bedroom suites for students that don’t feel comfortable entering the housing lottery with roommates of the same gender. They will also be giving training for potential mixed gender pairings for conflicts that are nonexistent with same gender housing.

Princeton will be allowing Spelman Hall, a residence hall featuring apartment-style suites, to offer gender-neutral housing.

When Georgetown announced plans to establish Magis Row, the block of 16 townhouses designated for living and learning communities that sit on the only strip of University property facing residential homes, the Voice editorial board and many students instantly suspected that Magis Row was appeasement for neighbors frustrated by student trash and noise.

A set of e-mails that the Voice obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Magis Row’s establishment followed months of meetings between University administrators and community leaders in which the leaders tried to effect changes in student housing.  They also show that neighbors hope the University will turn more student housing outside the front gates into LLCs, too.

The FOIA request, which the Voice filed in March, obtained e-mails sent between Citizens’ Association of Georgetown directors and officers and members of Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E. Before submitting the results, the ANC redacted some street names and the names of the CAG members and ANC commissioners who sent and received the e-mails. Ron Lewis, the chair of ANC 2E, wrote in a letter accompanying the FOIA requests that redactions were made according to advice from the D.C. government.

Although it is unclear when the University or neighbors conceived of Magis Row, a September 1 e-mail indicates that neighborhood had long been trying to influence the makeup of student housing outside Georgetown’s gates, and the Georgetown had been attentive to their complaints.

“We have been in monthly meetings to discuss numerous student issues that effect the whole of Georgetown,” the sender wrote. The sender added that with regards to an unspecified block of academic housing which had been designated as normal student housing for that year, “We have solid commitments that that will change in the 2009 academic year.”

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