On Sunday evening, the GUSA Senate passed a resolution “to Establish Free Movement across Campus Buildings.” Debate on an amendment to the proposed bill grew heated.

Introduced by Speaker Nate Tisa (SFS ’14) and Sen. Nolan DiConti (COL ’15), the resolution seeks to mitigate restrictions on building entry, which hinder both academic and social life at Georgetown. The bill urges the administration to extend GOCard access from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. campus-wide, to create 24-hr GOCard access for interconnected living halls, namely Southwest Quad, and to request the McDonough School of Business and Regents Hall to create entrance parity for undergraduates.

“Say I’m in Kennedy and I want to go to McCarthy or Reynolds to study. I have to be signed in to do that,” DiConti said. “Moreover, 10 p.m. is not late by college standards and we all know social gatherings of a larger capacity do not typically start before 10. Such little things limit the Hoya experience.”

“This resolution is a part of a larger narrative here at Georgetown, and that is an initiative by the administration to promote social life on campus, which is a dimension of the 2012 Campus Plan Agreement,” Tisa added.

Vice Speaker Zach Singer (SFS ’15), a co-sponsor of the bill, proposed to amend the resolution from 12 a.m. to 2 a.m. for Friday and Saturday night. “This makes sense in terms of socializing. On Saturday nights, I mean on occasional Saturday nights, you might find yourself wanting to visit someone at 1:30 a.m,” he said.

This comment then opened the floor to a period of debate for the potential amendment.

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On Monday night, Yu Jie (余杰), a prominent Chinese dissident living in exile in Fairfax, Virginia, visited Georgetown to address around 70 eager students in McShain Lounge Large. Jie’s main message was to urge students in Western universities to be weary of Chinese Communist Party motivations behind Confucius Institutes in an event sponsored by The Lecture Fund, GUSA, the Asian Studies Department, and the Office of Residence Life.

Hailing from Chengdu in rural and relatively poor western Sichuan province, Yu has spoken out in the past against issues ranging from forced labor camps to persecution of the home church movement. After publishing China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao, in which he thoroughly criticizes the Chinese Premier’s human rights record, and cozying up next to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, Yu was put on house arrest for over a year. To avoid further persecution, Yu emigrated to the U.S. in January 2012.

To a crowd of Chinese and Chinese-American students, Yu discussed (in Chinese with an English translator) how Chinese president Hu Jintao has used state-sponsored Confucian Institutes to teach foreigners Chinese language and culture, all the while inculcating them into trusting the Chinese Communist Party.

Though his presence was generally received positively, many in the crowd pressed Yu with tough questions concerning a range of topics, from Bo Xilai’s recent fall from grace to hopes for democratization at the local level. In particular, many students voiced issue with the fact that Yu overlooked the benefits of the Confucius Institutes with regards to cultural exchange and language instruction. Georgetown itself has a unique institutional relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, though the tricky relationship wasn’t discussed.

According to Yu, the spread of Confucius Institutes is an example of China’s growing desire for soft power alongside a rising military. Citing state-sponsored advertisements by Chinese media outlets in New York, Yu proposed that symbols of pandas, the Great Wall, and martial arts are “replacing the symbols of the Communist Party.” In addition to giving pandas as gifts to Western nations, Yu cautioned that the Institutes were another way of “spreading propaganda overseas.”

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