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 »