The old Saxaspeak collapsed shortly after it became a mere repository of Georgetown Google Alerts. Will this Saxaspeak suffer the same fate? Editor-in-Chief Marissa Amendolia and Online Editor Meghan Bartels say no, in a blog post:
Saxaspeak will provide more regular and, occasionally, more casual coverage of the events and trends that affect Georgetown students….it will augment our customary high-quality and in-depth coverage with shorter, more frequent pieces to keep up with the pace of life at Georgetown. The blog is also designed to simplify the search for information by collecting relevant news links in one place.
Bartels told Vox that TheHoya chose the Saxaspeak name because they thought it was suitable, and because of name recognition among older students.
Although Bartels is currently the only blogger on the Hoya’s Saxaspeak staff, she said she expects to create her own blogging staff separate from the paper soon.
Heckler Editor-in-Chief Jack Stuef (COL ‘10) answered questions and tried to explain his point of view on a recent controversial Heckler issue at a forum Tuesday night, while students debated the articles and expressed why they were offended by the satirical articles.
Copies of the Heckler’s article about Hoya staff members holding a Ku Klux Klan-like crossburning were passed out before the forum, and much of the conversation centered on that article.
“The KKK isn’t funny,” Stuef said. “The article is to take the situation to the extreme, to show what is maybe buried in this campus.”
Stuef said that he was sorry for offending anyone, but added that with satire, offending people “comes with the terrain.”
LaMarr Q. Billups, Georgetown’s Assistant Vice President for Business Policy Planning, argued that the Heckler should not have used the picture of a KKK crossburning for the article because its hurtful power.
“This is an image that is deeply rooted in our souls,” Billups said. “In my own lifetime, thousands of people were lynched. Cross were burned in people’s actual yards.”
Tonight, recent issues of the student satire magazine Georgetown Heckler will be the subject of a student forum planned by students who have found some of its content offensive. Jack Stuef (COL ‘10), the Heckler’s editor, told the Voice last night that he planned to attend, too.
“I haven’t really planned this out yet, but obviously I’ll try to explain who we are and where we’re coming from because I think there’s a lot of confusion as to who the Heckler is and what our point is,” he said.
“I stand behind everything I’ve ever printed and everything I’ve ever written at the Heckler and I’ll continue to do that at the meeting. And I’ll try to explain where I’m coming from and hopefully there will be some understanding.”
The forum will take place in White Gravenor 201A at 8:30 p.m.
Chair of the Working Group on Admissions Ryan Wilson, who is the incoming Chair of the Student Commission for Unity, said the latest Heckler warranted discussion because it had gone too far.
“I think the Heckler missed the mark,” Wilson said. “While the paper strives to give insightful and intelligent commentary on different campus articles, the articles they’ve written over the last couple of months haven’t really done that.”
As one its many philanthropy initiatives, the Corp annually doles out Reimagine Georgetown grants to programs that “seek to improve our undergraduate experience at Georgetown in creative ways.” In recent years, grants—which are co-sponsored by GUASFCU and The Hoya—have gone to now-well-known initiatives like Run for Rigby and 25 Days of Service.
According to Chairman of the Reimagine Georgetown Board J. Ryan Zambon (MSB ‘10), the program received more than 20 grant applications this year. Yesterday, the Board announced that it had narrowed the proposals down to four winners:
Georgetown Alternative Music Series: $5,000 will go towards Daniel Alexander’s (MSB ‘11) idea of creating a series of on-campus concerts featuring student and local bands.
D.C. Students Speak: Michael Trummel (COL ‘10) will be getting $3,000 to establish an annual conference between student leaders at all of the major D.C.-area universities to coordinate student response to issues like 61-D citations.
Saxa Service Feast: $2,000 will go to Joel Ziebell (COL ‘10) to host a wing-eating contest for students and faculty. The event will raise money that will be donated to the winning team’s charity of choice.
Diversability: Tiffany Yu (MSB ‘10) is starting a club to promote “disability pride.” The group is in the process of getting SAC approval, and will be receiving $500 to get off the ground.
You can check out the full descriptions for the winning programs after the jump!
The Hoya’s Basketball Preview is a nice piece of work–glossy, nice pictures–but, according to an Athletic Department spokesperson, it’s incomplete: it doesn’t mention the women’s basketball team.
Barbara Jonas, an Associate Director of Sports Information in the Athletic Department, complained on the Athletic Department’s Hoya Insider blogthat calling The Hoya’s basketball issue “Basketball Preview” neglects the women’s team:
It’s no secret that the men’s basketball squad is the crowning jewel of our athletic department. No coach or student-athlete would begrudge any publicity, success or accolades that it receives. What is frustrating is that the student press and much of campus continues to ignore that there are two basketball teams on the Hilltop.
Publishing a glossy magazine touted as the Basketball Preview is entirely untrue and a slap in the face to the 15 women that practice just as many hours as the men’s team and who wear the same Blue & Gray.
According to The Sexist, the city’s most progressive sex column can be found in the American University Eagle. Co-written by three anonymous authors, the column has been a bit of a mixed bag, with high highs (tackling anal sex in an enlightened way) and low lows (the inaugural column kicked off with a disturbing date rape scenario). But the Sexist found enough promise in the column-writing threesome to give them a progressive score of seven.
Coming in second was the GW Hatchet’s sex column. The Hatchet switches off between an anonymous male writer and an anonymous female writer, and tends to neglect the LGBTQ perspective, according to the Sexist, earning them a six on the progressive scale.
The Sexist gave Leahey props for using her real name and acknowledged the challenges inherent in writing a column for a relatively conservative paper where “vulgarity” is frowned upon, but took her to task for directing her columns at “desperate” heterosexual females. Ultimately, Leahey and The Hoya walked away with just four progressive points.
In case ourcoverage of the Hoya’s delayed independence (not to mention their news story, editorial and letter from the editor) left you confused about the Media Board’s logic, Vox has some of the memos that show the Media Board’s reasoning behind their sanctions.
First, we have the memo Director of Student Programs Erika Cohen-Derr sent on behalf of the Media Board to the leadership of the Hoya on April 22 announcing their sanctions:
According to emails obtained by the Voice, in mid-April the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action filed a complaint with Media Board, the funding board that oversees student media, over the Hoya’s April Fools Issue. On April 22, Media Board issued sanctions, including a one year delay of the Hoya’s planned independence.
The Hoya appealed Media Board’s ruling, citing their unwillingness to remain tied to the University, but their appeal was denied on June 16, documents show. A three person appeals board composed of Father Christopher Steck, S.J., GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB ‘11), and Faculty Senate President Wayne Davis decided that Media Board had acted within their rights and that the ruling should not be overturned.
The Voice will have more information in our Friday issue.
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.
For the past couple weeks we’ve been wondering what’s going on with the Hoya’s website. TheHoya.com has been displaying a variety of things—a standard issue “down for maintenance” message, ads for a web-hosting service and, briefly, their tech guy Ryan J. Zambon’s personal homepage—but not the actual Hoya website. Their website currently shows an article about the passing of Father King underneath the “down for maintenance” banner.
Doing maintenance during the summer’s no big, but being down for a whole two week stretch makes it seem like you’re doing a little more than standard-issue touch-ups.
According to Hoya Editor in Chief Kevin Barber, the site’s down as they switch servers in preparation for the eventual launch of a new website:
We’re currently in the process of switching our server prior to launching an entirely new web site. (No specific timetable on that.) The regular site should be back up fairly soon; for the time being we’ve restored our main two blogs [The Hoya Paranoia and Outside the Gates], and we also posted a story about Fr. King on our temporary main site because it was important news. Most of our new content during the summer thus far has been on our blogs.
It’s quite irritating, but the summer is obviously the best time to do this sort of work.
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
Stuef speaks at last night’s forum
From the Heckler’s 
WWCD: What Would Carrie Do?
GUSA Candidates, pre-squabbling
Students hold a sit-in after the Hoya’s April Fools’ issue
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