Georgetown’s alright, but it’s no MIT or Yale—and I don’t really mean academically. You’ll be hard pressed to find Georgetown’s classes on any of the proliferating websites that stream lectures and we’re still paying out the ass for scholarly journals.

Organized by Kevin Donovan (COL `11), a group of Georgetown students is looking to change the University’s current not-so-free culture. They’re the Georgetown chapter of the international organization Students for Free Culture.

The group, which just secured SAC funding last semester, aims to get Georgetown to adopt measures like open access publishing, potentially to reform its patent processes, and to join OpenCourseWare, where Universities can post course materials to the extent that anyone can virtually attend classes. Above, Donovan advocates on behalf of the poor student in Peru and the farmer in Kenya.

When he got to Georgetown, Donovan said was surprised to find it way behind other Universities on projects like these.  “Georgetown, I realized, was not as perfect a campus for free culture as maybe I had hoped.”

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Georgetown student, chances are that at some time you’ve walked by the “265 Kappa Hops” message taped on the sidewalk of the Key Bridge’s D.C. side. Like me, you’d probably never given it much thought.

But, for some reason, when I passed the message on Saturday, an article that ran in the Washington Post a few months ago came to mind. The article, “The Measure of this Man is in the Smoot,” tells the story of some MIT frat brothers who used 5′ 7″ pledge Oliver Smoot as a yardstick to measure Boston’s Harvard Bridge, marking every ten Smoots with a spot of paint. From the Post:

Somewhat miraculously, the markings have been repainted ever since — meaning that while Smoot was pursuing a quiet career in the Washington association bureaucracy, he was also becoming a Boston area landmark and a nerd legend.

“The first time I went to an MIT gathering of undergraduates,” Smoot said in a telephone interview this week, “I introduced myself to this young man, and he said, ‘Oh, I thought you were dead.’ “

Even the government got involved with the Smoots, the Post reports, scoring the bridge’s sidewalk every five feet seven inches when it was renovated a decade and a half ago.

At the time, they [the frat brothers] didn’t understand what they had done. But their Smoots were destined to become part of campus culture, since they contained two key elements of a classic MIT prank: a hint of science and a low level of vandalism.

Jay Keyser, a professor emeritus at MIT and a chronicler of the school’s wacky side, said: “What the Smoot does, it makes fun of measuring. . . . It makes fun of the precision of engineering.”

Could the Kappa Hop be the Smoot of Key Bridge? Hard to say. When I emailed Xavier Aguirre, the co-president of Alpha Kappa Psi, Georgetown’s Business Fraternity, he assured me that AKP had nothing to do with the Kappa Hop. Also, if 265 Kappa Hops does refer to the span of the Key Bridge, each Kappa Hop would be roughly equivalent to 6′ 5″. That seems to me to be quite a distance to hop, especially 265 times. Still, if the Kappa Hop isn’t a unit of measurement, I’m not sure what it would be. Thoughts, anyone?

Photo by Sam Sweeney, Blog Editor