Later this month, the Academics Working Group plans to release its first proposals for how Georgetown can improve diversity in its curriculum. The group, one of three diversity working groups formed by President DeGioia last spring after The Hoya‘s April Fools’ Issues prompted a broad discussion of diversity at Georgetown, is geared toward determining what Georgetown is lacking in its course offerings with regards to diversity. Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs of the group, said its recommendations will probably include recommendations for new course requirements.

The group has been working to examine how Georgetown’s curriculum offerings compare to peer schools’ and form suggestions for how Georgetown can improve their requirements in ethnic studies since the Spring of 2009. Over the summer, they compared the curriculum at Georgetown to that of schools with similar rankings to determine where Georgetown needed to enhance diversity in its course offerings.

The group is co-chaired by Veronica Salles Reese, the Director for the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Professor Eusebio Mujal-Leon of the Government Department and began as small discussion groups among students that were loosely overseen by Provost James O’Donnell. Duyen Bui (SFS ’10), who acts as a facilitator for student discussions and Stephanie Frenel (SFS ’12), who serves as a student representative to the faculty co-chairs, were the two students mainly responsible for gathering student input on how to increase diversity in the curriculum.

The graphs above show the results of their research. Points were allotted to Georgetown and its peer institutions based on their course offerings. The University of Maryland-College Park was one of the institutions with a model curriculum for ethnic studies. They examined their top institutions like Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, finding that each has a much more diverse curriculum than Georgetown. As the graph shows, Georgetown is at the bottom compared to its peers, and is the only school that offers only a minor in African American studies with no general education requirements or majors in any of the three diversity areas.

Bui said that based on these findings, one question became obvious to the whole group: “If we’re one of the top international institutions, why are we so behind?”

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The turnout was terrible, but the content was great.

That was Admissions and Recruitment Working Group Co-Chair Ryan Wilson’s (COL ’12) assessment of today’s open meeting about the recommendations that his working group released last week.

Just ten people attended, most of whom were already involved in the working group’s endeavors, but a few outsiders provided helpful critiques of the working group’s draft of recommendations to the University. (The draft includes suggestions such as adding a diversity-oriented option to the Georgetown application’s essay question and diversifying campus groups like Blue and Gray and GAAP).

Katerina Kulagina (GRD ’09), for example, the Associate Director of Admissions for the MSB’s Executive Degree Programs, asked about diversity of Georgetown’s own undergraduate admissions staff. Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions Jaime Briseno replied that of the 15 or so people working in admissions, he and Assistant Director Kamilah Holder (SFS ’02) were the only two non-white staff members.

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The working group hopes to include diversity discussion in NSO

In a campuswide e-mail yesterday evening, the Office of the Provost announced that the Admissions and Recruitment Working Group has put together a draft proposal for changes to Georgetown’s recruitment process.

The changes, which are meant to encourage a more diverse student body, are not official, and the “plan for implementation” of any changes will not arrive until January 2010, after community comment. However, the e-mail, signed by Provost James O’Donnell and Vice President for Institutional Diversity and Equity Rosemary Kilkenny, did indicate that the suggestions would be “immensely helpful” to the University’s ongoing recruitment of the Class of 2014.

Suggestions for altering the admissions and recruitment process, according to the nineteen-page working group report (PDF) provided by link in the e-mail, include, among other things:

• Prominently advertising the 1,789 new scholarships that Georgetown will be adding to encourage need-blind admissions over the next five years to potential students.
• Looking into strategies that will increase the likelihood that an accepted student from an underrepresented group will attend Georgetown
• Increasing the diversity of Blue and Gray tour guides and their knowledge of diversity issues and clubs on campus.
• Including imagery on Georgetown’s redesigned website that highlights campus diversity.
• Including a required essay prompt that invites students to discuss how their background or life experience would enrich Georgetown on applications.

These proposed changes are aimed at increasing campus diversity and cross-cultural engagement. The report notes that relative to peer universities, Georgetown has a very low attendance yield among its accepted minority applicants.

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This week Vox figured we’d give you some sense of institutional history by presenting a primer of the ten most widely-discussed campus news stories from the past couple years.
10. GUSA election debacles

GUSA Candidates, pre-squabbling

Georgetown’s student government, GUSA, doesn’t have a great record as far as presidential elections are concerned. In 2008, they experimented with instant run-off voting. They failed to conduct the election properly, though, and had to have a re-vote with the top four candidates.

This past year wasn’t much better. GUSA ditched IRV, but the election still devolved into chaos when the Election Commission disqualified two candidates hours before voting started. GUSA largely objected to the Election Commission’s decision, the election was suspended, complaints were filed, Election Commissioners resigned, and the disqualified candidates were ultimately reinstated.

9. Hoya independence and insensitivity

Students hold a sit-in after the Hoya‘s April Fools’ issue

The Hoya, Georgetown’s self-proclaimed “newspaper of record,” has been trying to go independent from the University for a quite a while. Indications were that they were set to go independent this coming year.

They ran into trouble this spring when they published a racially insensitive April Fool’s issue. The issue led to protests from students and promises from the Hoya to reform.

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About 40 students sat-in at The Hoya‘s office late Thursday night

Editor’s note: Okay, so we’ve covered The Hoya an awful lot lately, and you may be getting sick of it. However, we think would’ve been remiss not to cover these events.

Slideshow: Students conduct a sit-in protest in the office of “The Hoya”

Last night, at least 40 students who found themselves deeply offended by The Hoya’s April Fool’s issue staged a sit-in in The Hoya’s Leavey office. Several DPS officers monitored the scene. Hoya staff members did not have official comments about the sit-in, but two senior members of The Hoya said they did not have knowledge of any of their staff calling DPS and said the protest lasted from about 11:20 p.m. to midnight.

The sit-in followed an “emergency town hall” which over 100 students attended, including GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB `11) and VP Jason Kluger (MSB `11), a few faculty members, and at least one Jesuit. The event was publicized on Facebook under the group name “The Hoya: discrimination is not a laughing matter,” and the group currently has 271 members.

The individual comments from the town hall are confidential, but in general students said they were very offended by articles in The Hoya’s April Fool’s issue that they found racist, discriminatory, sexist, and dismissive of important campus issues. Many students expressed anger that The Hoya targeted individual students and said they felt The Hoya has a history of printing offensive content in its April Fool’s issues. Many also called for its Editor in Chief, Andrew Dwulet, to resign.

The Hoya responds, after the jump.

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…Using the best breakup song ever

Last week, the board of the Student Commission for Unity voted to break away from GUSA. Their decision went into effect Sunday, and Brian Kesten (COL `10) promptly emailed SCUnity’s listserv with SCUnity’s press release, which read in part:

In order to effectively advocate for these recommendations, the Student Commission for Unity will cease to operate under GUSA, effective immediately. This decision was ultimately made to increase the durability … This model will also better serve the advocacy process, as working with various offices on campus will be necessary in order to realize the full potential of all recommendations. The Student Commission for Unity executive board has seen a once productive relationship with the Student Association turn into an inhibiting one.

So what do they mean by “inhibiting relationship”? In the Fall, GUSA and Kesten sparred over SCUnity’s leadership when they became incorporated with GUSA. Recently, GUSA accepted only 6 out of SCUnity’s 8 proposals based on their findings, which irked Kesten.

“GUSA voted down two of our proposals, which were formed by 15 months of research for the exec board, as well as a semester of research done by around 40 students,” he said yesterday. “We intend to fully pursue our recommendations as the result of our extensive research, meaning that we believe all of our recommendations are reasonable.”

SCUnity’s choice is already receiving criticism. Today, The Hoya published an op-ed by GUSA President Pat Dowd, who worried that now that it has lost GUSA’s involvement, SCUnity will not reflect student desires:

“Affirming my worst suspicions, the SCU has decided to cut ties with GUSA in order to unilaterally petition administrators for a number of controversial diversity-related policy changes. This development raises serious concerns about what is being advocated on the behalf of students without their informed consent.

“It is absolutely imperative that students and their elected representatives be given the opportunity to scrutinize, evaluate and ultimately choose to accept or reject the initiatives that Kesten hopes to implement.”

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The most intriguing part of this week’s meeting might have been what went unsaid.  After GUSA approved 6 of SCUnity’s 8 recommendations, Speaker Reggie Greer made a subtle announcement in the evening’s proceedings: ex-Vice Speaker Brian Wood has resigned from both his position in GUSA and his Senate seat.

Greer mentioned something about “there were a few issues with access to benefits and being a full-time student.” We’ll bring you the story when we’ve got it.

GUSA first set aside $900 for some rad RAD suits. According to Tyler Stone (COL `09), money for RAD equipment was not initially allocated to DPS. The discussion was quick and the decision was unanimous—crime prevention is a pretty easy sell.

Then came the heavy lifting. GUSA debated SCUnity proposals one by one for a full two and a half hours straight. Actually, there was one 90-second recess to discuss what to do after the vote count on the first proposal was short two Senators. The solution was to scrap the usual raise-your-hand vote for a role-call vote, which caused a minor, bylaw-obsession-induced panic.

But my personal highlight reel of last night’s meeting would have to include Tyler Stone’s Ode to Diversity but only in Theory, which he published as an op-ed in The Hoya. Didn’t see it? Don’t worry; he read the whole thing out loud at the start of the debate to “focus our minds.”

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It took fifteen months to compile, during which time it suffered royal controversy and headline wordplay, but the tome-of-a SCUnity report is finally here. Flanked by his SCUnity commission and his co-investigator Brian Cook (COL `10), project mastermind Brian Kesten (COL `10) presented the commission’s finding yesterday in Gaston Hall.

A full cover story by our own Kate Mays will appear in the Georgetown Voice tomorrow about SCUnity’s findings about discrimination and segregation at Georgetown, but to hold you over, here are some of the most interesting facts the commission found:

• NHS students (16% aware), MSB students (23%), and freshman (24%) are highly unaware of Georgetown’s bias reporting system

• Almost 80% of student have witnessed student discrimination at Georgetown and almost half have ignored it

• Students’ educational (implied, socioeconomic) backgrounds were not necessarily indicators for experience of prejudice or self segregation. Student experience was more likely to vary based on socioeconomic background, but educational background did not prove an effective lens through which to studying socioeconomic background.*

• Students who identify as LGBTQ are highly likely (82%) to feel self-segregated or the target of discrimination (54%)

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“Spread to the four winds!”

The GUSA Senate formed the Student Commission for Unity last spring in response to last year’s bias-related incidents and The Hoya’s “Jena 6″ snafu last fall. In April, the SCU conducted a survey on race, discrimination, and segregation at Georgetown which gleaned over 1,500 student responses. While they’re not publishing the numbers just yet, a sneak peak on Tuesday night revealed:

• Only 4% of bias incidents that occur on or near campus get reported to DPS
• Black and Hispanic students often feel uncomfortable here because of their race in face greater numbers that white students
• Catholics and Protestants find religious discrimination to be less of a problem than Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu students
• New students find the bias reporting system far more adequate than veteran Hoyas do
• SFS kids are pretty convinced that self-segregation is a problem (frustrating for their vigorous networking efforts)

For some reason, when they break down their survey based on religion, responses from Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindi students get grouped together. Kesten said it’s because they’re fewer in numbers. Unfortunately, if they respond in radically different ways to specific questions, we may never know.

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