During the first Hoya Roundtable of the new school year, students had the chance to voice their concerns about the facilities at Georgetown. As usual, students were concerned about the most important facility at Georgetown: Leo O’Donovan Dining Hall.

Moderated by Chief Operating Officer Christopher Augostini, the Hoya Roundtable included the new Provost Robert M. Groves, Chief Business Officer for University Services Debbie Morey, Interim Vice President of Facilities Frank Tiscione, Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services Margie Bryant, Marketing Manager Kendra Boyer, and Chief Operations Director of Dining Robert Tobin.

Groves began the Roundtable by introducing himself and reaffirming his dedication to creating a better environment for students. “One of the big things were trying to do is to integrate the financial side of the house with the academic side of the house a little more fully,” Groves said.  “That sort of integration should makes us better.”

Tiscione also announced a plan to develop a new facility to house students on Georgetown. “We hired a consultant to come in to help us with that. The original thing was to build an addition on the Leavey Center,” Tiscione said. “But we wanted to take a holistic approach on that and really take a comprehensive look at some other potential possibilities.”

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On Wednesday evening, President John DeGioia held his biannual conversation with campus media. Over the hour-long discussion, DeGioia discussed a wide variety of subjects, including the capital campaign, the campus plan, campus safety, Georgetown’s major construction projects, diversity initiatives, and the University’s international programs. Next week, the Voice will offer complete analysis of President DeGioia’s press conference.

Before taking questions, the president reflected on the broad themes of his fall semester:

“It was a great fall, I just think we had a terrific fall. For me, it was kind of driven by a couple of big things. We had to launch the public phase of the campaign. That was really quite an extraordinary weekend for us. It was us at our best and I was glad we were able to have such an inclusive experience with so many, including the big tent on the front lawn. Our fundraising success has continued very well, we’re over the halfway mark in the campaign, at the halfway mark. We feel very encouraged by the generosity of our community. We’re just going to keep at it, our highest priority is scholarships, support for financial aid. Given the challenging nature of the economy I don’t think we could have a more important priority- that priority emerged over roughly 8 years of planning going back to 2003, but certainly characterized all of the years of our quiet phase- that was our most dominant priority. We actually went out publicly with that priority in the quiet phase in a series of town halls across the country, where I talked about what we call the 1789 Scholarship Imperative, which is our way of characterizing the financial aid piece.

I think there were other issues that dominated my time- the relationship with the community and our engagement in the city was part of that. This is our cycle, to submit our campus plan and we’ve completed our public hearing on November 17th. And we have our final filing of documents this Friday, and on February 9th we have a read-out from the Board of Zoning where they think they’re going to come down in terms of the conditions for Georgetown, and we’ll expect some time later this spring, maybe mid-April, maybe May, that will be our expectation that we’ll get a written report, and that will give us a sense of the position of the Board of Zoning. But I think as you know, this was a three-year effort, but also really it’s not a episodic experience, it really is a full immersion for ten years with deep engagement with the community and lots of conversation. It just becomes particularly focused in roughly the final two years of that ten-year period where you deeply engage in the formal submission of documents to various city agencies and the like. So we went through that.

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We’ll be live-blogging the second Hoya Roundtable. If you can’t make it to the actual event at 5:30 in Sellinger Lounge, join in by commenting or using the hashtag #hoyaroundtable on twitter.  If you have questions, we’ll try our best to field them to the administrators.

Wednesday, October 12, Georgetown’s Chief Operating Officer, Christopher Augostini held the first “Hoya Roundtable” to ask students how Georgetown could best serve them.

New to the job, Augostini started the meeting by saying, ”The best way for me to orient my self to the issues to the student body was simply to ask you.”

There were only about ten or so student in attendance who were not affiliated with the Roundtables innitiative, and they were vastly outnumbered by administrators and staff who packed the room. Luckily, the Google Moderator questions ensured that the most pressing issues were addressed–well, they were at least mentioned.

Let’s go over the highlights:

Technology services

Kevin Murphy, interim Chief Information Officer, presented on behalf of UIS.

• They have ordered the antennae to give wireless for Copley lawn, and they should arrive in about 45 days. Similar wireless for Healy lawn are due to be installed next spring.
• Faculty and staff and being moved to Google mail, so they will have full access to apps like Google Calendar, Docs, etc.
• They are looking into programs like lecture capture and additional printing locations
• They are planning on changing printing to five cents per page. Murphy admitted that the cost was arbitrary and mainly intended to discourage students from printing “hundreds of thousands” of pages.

Facilities Management

• Work orders: annually, facilities gets 40,000-50,000 work orders, and they received around 2-3,000 work orders per week during the first month of school. They are looking into buying a new computer system to manage the number of orders.
• Facilities also addressed the state of some of the rest rooms on campus. They were in stark disagreement with one student in the audience about the state of women’s restrooms in the ICC.

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