Tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 7 p.m., Georgetown will play host to an independently-organized TedX event. Here is a list of the speakers with brief descriptions on their background. To read more about the event, check out the news article from the Georgetown Voice.

Session 1 – 2:00pm

• Ann Pendleton-Julian is an architect, educator, writer of international standing, and Director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. Her design work negotiates the overlap between architecture, landscape, culture, and technology and is motivated towards internationalism as both a concept and a reality.

• Kendall Ciesemier, a student speaker, will give a talk titled “Finding Power in Powerlessness.”

• Bobby Ghosh is a journalist and  Editor-At-Large for TIME magazine. He was TIME’s Baghdad bureau chief, and one of the longest-serving correspondents in Iraq. His Baghdad journalism has included profiles of suicide bombers and other terrorists, stories about extraordinary Iraqis and also political figures. Will give a talk titled ‘Why the Jihad is Over.’

• Tai Murray is an award winning violinist; she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2004. She was also a BBC New Generation Artist from 2008 through 2010. Will be giving talk titled ‘Music in the Mirror.’

Session 2 – 3:30pm

• Andrew Yang is the Founder and President of Venture for America, a fellowship program that places top college graduates in start-ups for 2 years in low-cost U.S. cities to generate job growth and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, the Student Life Report committee released their finalized 50-something page document about student life. The report primarily focuses on the advisory boards and GPB, but does summarize intellectual life and administrative accountability too. You can find the entire report at the end of this post, but in case you don’t want to read the entire thing, Vox has pulled out the interesting bits for you.

Space

A big ticket issue on campus is centralized space booking: everyone wants to put all space booking under one office. In addition to that SLR2012 recommends that the university renegotiate with Aramark to give better (and cheaper) access to the ballrooms.

On that note, SLR2012 also recommends reducing or eliminating the fees performing arts groups must pay for space.

In many respects, it seems that Georgetown’s issues may be easily solved by simply making [performance] spaces more readily available and less expensive to use. Almost all groups see the requirement to pay for performance space as a hindrance to their ability to regularly perform or attract large audiences. No other surveyed schools required their student groups to pay for use of performance spaces. (p. 40)

For club sports, SLR2012 mainly wants bureaucratic reform so club sports stops getting the short end of the stick in athletic facilities. Specifically, the reports suggests that club sports be allows to use McDonough after the new athletic center is built and that the hospital not expand onto North Kehoe.

Money

The big ticket item in the SLR1999 was the complete dearth of funding for student organizations on campus. Thus was created the student activities fee. Thirteen years, six points of reform, and a couple referenda later, the amount of money for student organizations isn’t as much of a problem as how it is allocated. One suggestion SLR2012 makes is putting the gift account under GUSA control. Currently donors can give money to “student activities” broadly defined, and the money goes to SAC. SLR2012 says the money should be allocated at the budget summit so more groups have access to the funds.

Also, SLR2012 says student groups should be able to audit themselves, but in order to do this, they need online access to their cost centers and timely charges by for space and such by other campus offices.

Finally on money, the SLR2012 suggests a referendum on whether or not students want to create a separate fee for the Spring Concert. It doesn’t actually call for the creation of the fee, but the report does throw the idea out there.

Read the rest of this entry »