Last week, the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia dropped all charges against Cooney, who was accused of committing the assault last fall.

“To support the filing of a criminal charge, the standard of proof is probable cause. To obtain a conviction, though, the standard is much higher, that is, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is why with every case we continue to investigate,” Channing Phillips, Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney, wrote in an e-mail.

At 2:30 a.m. on September 9, 2007, an unknown assailant attacked a Georgetown student while shouting anti-gay slurs near the corner of O and 36th Streets, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. The student suffered a broken thumb, bruises and cuts.

The case attracted controversy early on, occurring in the wake of several other anti-gay assaults in the District, and gained national media attention after the victim used Facebook.com to initially identify Cooney, whose father is a former Bush administration official. The victim subsequently identified Cooney a police photo line-up.

“Philip was always completely innocent of the charges against him and the dismissal of the case has vindicated him entirely,” Danny Onorato, Cooney’s lawyer, wrote in an e-mail. Cooney pled “not guilty” at his October arraignment, and Onorato told the Voice last fall his client had passed a lie detector test proving he did not participate in the assault.

Cooney declined a request to comment through his lawyer; the victim did not respond to requests for comment.

While the specifics of the investigation were not released, court documents obtained by the Voice indicate that Cooney’s lawyers intended to challenge the victim’s credibility as a witness.

“[The prosecution] may have some evidence that establishes [Cooney] was probably there and probably did the assault, but they feel that a jury isn’t going to find that it’s beyond a reasonable doubt,” Paul Rothstein, a professor at the Georgetown Law Center, said. “They might keep hoping for some kind of plea bargain that would be reasonable. They may have come to the conclusion that some witnesses may not play very well on the stand.”

Some observers have compared this case to that of several Duke University lacrosse players accused and ultimately cleared of sexual assault charges in 2006. The prosecutor in that case was disbarred.

“The Duke case makes prosecutors and police very wary of going ahead if there’s any doubts, particularly involving college students and more particularly involving well-connected college students who might have the means and wherewithal to fight back,” Rothstein said.

Phillips, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, did note that if new “credible evidence” does come to light, the case could be re-opened.

The post Assault case closed appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

On that day, he told reporters on his airplane (Shepherd One, natch) that he was “deeply ashamed” by the pedophile priests who raped children in this country. He said he hopes to avoid the problem in the future by emphasizing the importance of a strong discernment in potential priests. It was Benedict XVI’s strongest direct statement on the Church’s failure to protect its most vulnerable members.

That is not enough. More often than we realize, Catholics must find wisdom in the words of someone outside the fold—in this case, someone outside everyone’s fold, the grumpy atheist Chris Hitchens, who wondered in a recent Slate column, “Why is the Vatican continuing to shelter Cardinal Bernard Law?”

LYNN KIRSHBAUM

Why indeed? Law, who was head of the Boston Archdiocese during the worst of the scandal, not only knew about many cases of rape and did not report them, but also seems to have worked actively to cover up the activities and protect the priests in question from the rightful consequences of their actions. I write “seems” because the proper legal authorities haven’t had the opportunity to look into Law’s actions. The Cardinal resigned his post in Boston and lit off to the Vatican, beyond the reach of the law of man. I only note that he is not beyond the reach of a higher law.

This is, of course, why I tend to get a little disheartened when bombastic Catholics proclaim that the Church is the infallible source of all truth.

On the second day, the Pope reached the age of 81, and he saw that it was good.

On that day he also met with President Bush and American bishops. While trumpeting his defining message—to battle against the “dicatorship of relativism” and secular challenges—he avoided the few issues that united him with Bush: gays, abortion and stem-cell research; or the many that divide them: the death penalty, the war in Iraq, the problem of poverty, the dignity of workers, or the care of God’s creation. A more active witness by the church would be a stronger message in favor of religion than any complaints about relativism.

But any political ministry from a Church with untended gardens of its own reminds me of someone else who catches flak for his minister, Barack Obama. Any Catholic who thinks that Obama should abandon Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has said many reprehensible things in addition to the many good things he has done in his pastoral career, must take a hard look at their own beliefs. Obama has rejected Wright’s offensive comments and criticized his views. Catholics must do the same to their Church. Both actions follow the same principle: that it is better to be a voice for change than to abandon an important institution altogether.

This is, in fact, why Obama is the best candidate for voters who think religion is important. He takes it seriously, certainly more seriously than John McCain, enough to believe that it is worth taking political damage to maintain his faith conversation. Whether you disagree with his positions on the issues, not one presidential candidate will do, and has done, more to rehabilitate the place of faith in public life. Reading his 2006 Call to Renewal address on the importance of religion in politics, I have come to believe that if Obama is President when the Pope decides to visit the U.S. again, then Pontiff and President will share much more in common than they did yesterday.

It will be yet another deep shame if, once again, conservative Catholic bishops urge the American faithful to vote against Obama merely because he is pro-choice. They would be shooting themselves in the foot on a grand scale if they think hurting Obama is the best way to achieve the ends of Catholic social teaching.

Today, the Pope will deliver a mass at Nationals Stadium, and (hopefully) he will see that it is good.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be at the Mass. Benedict XVI is my Pope, and I look forward to celebrating the Eucharist with him. But he should look forward to hearing my concerns and criticisms, and those of many other Catholics here. After all, this is America. We speak our minds.

In the coming days, the Holy Father will set his sights on New York, speaking at the United Nations and meeting more Catholics. Some of his advisors have hinted that he may meet privately with victims of priestly abuse, and that would be good. No doubt he will speak strongly about human rights and justice at the U.N., and that will be good. But it would be best if he heard the concerns of his Church here and around the world—seeking truth in a bewildering timeshy;—and responded with the promise of progress.

The post A Papal visit without pontification appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

I rushed to pick it up—not necessarily because what’s inside would be interesting (much of it was) but because I love newspapers and magazines, especially little, punchy ones, and the ones that populate this campus. Unlike many universities without a real undergraduate journalism program, we have myriad publications on campus.

There’s the Voice, of course, the reliable source for news and center-left opinion, and the Hoya, our stodgy rival, still a must-read, if only to inspire chagrin when they catch a story we didn’t, or to be mocked. Georgetown even has an Independent, whose true purpose I have yet to understand.

But The Fire… satisfies because of the strength of its voice. It’s compelling and proud, and even if its production values are sometimes shoddy, it does its job: the magazine is a window into a culture and community at Georgetown that I don’t always have access to.

Of course, I have friends who are “people of color,” as The Fire… puts it, but the self-segregation that is a reality on campus keeps our discussions of serious issues somewhat limited and certainly safe, despite recent positive efforts on campus to support more community dialogue.

Even when we have those rare uncomfortable conversations about the role of race, about the challenges of being part of a minority community, there can never be enough empathy and solidarity. Each time I read The Fire… and learn about the frustrations and the victories, the nerve centers of agreement and disagreement, among Georgetown’s underserved minorities, I think that if everyone paid more attention to each other’s words, we’d have a tangible campus culture that is bigger than basketball.

The Fire… and its staff weren’t waiting on my praise, of course, but their hard work deserves admiration.

Likewise, The Federalist, Georgetown’s premiere conservative publication, is similarly delightful. I can’t think of an article in their pages I would agree with, but it doesn’t (always) follow in the vein of other campuses’ conservative rags by seeking controversy for the sake of controversy. Interested liberal readers will find arguments and perspectives that often bring a grimace to their faces. To stop reading at the grimace is a sin; the imperative is to remind yourself why you are grimacing, to engage with the article on its merits. Conservatives also need a voice on campus that is more than occasional op-eds in the two main papers.

Of course, in the wider world, magazines are dying. Our news sources are too commercialized for the big pieces that those of us behind these little college magazines wish to grow up and create, and they are becoming more and more polarized. We hope that as many windows will open as doors close, as the Internet and other wonders of the modern age promise. But mass communication—even when “mass” means the nearly 10,000 folks who populate Georgetown—won’t ever cease, and the written word remains the most efficient way to achieve that.

It may not surprise you to learn that polling from the Pew center reports that over half the country thinks that the press is often inaccurate and politically biased. (Only 32 percent think the press is immoral, so they’ve got that going for them.) Nonetheless, the press can still do good; look at the D.C. Council’s recent actions to repeal a law that gave landlords the right to let their buildings fall into disrepair, forcing out their poor tenants so their buildings can be sold to developers. In part, the law was repealed due to the reporting of The Washington Post on the dire results of the statute.

All of Georgetown’s papers put together are far from being the Washington Post. But there are still many stories to be told here on campus, more solidarity to be found, more dissent to be published, more criticism to be leveled. There’s work enough for many little magazines, it seems.

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Fans stood, alone and in pairs, on the red carpet outside the Navy Yard Metro stop, fingers held in the air as signals—two tickets? Three?—even as thousands of other fans, already ticket-holders, flooded Half Street. Beneath red-white-and-blue balloon bunting, they flowed toward the center field gate. An older man, two fingers up, stood next to a young boy clutching a mitt and a bag of peanuts.

Like him I was looking for scalpers—a dirty word, suggestive of a rip-off so bad as to leave one seriously bald. Selling or reselling any ticket in a public space, no matter the price, is a crime in the District. If you’re caught, or rather if the police choose to enforce the law, both buyer and seller head for the station, lose the tickets and are assessed a $50 fine. But scalping is a necessary institution when the cheapest hot dog at Nationals Park costs $4.50 and a middling ticket $30. It’s an institution that might let a student see a game in a good seat for twenty bucks.

Moving through the crowds on opening night, I found people who had been waiting for scalped tickets for twenty minutes with no success. Official tickets were sold out, and subway discussion on the way to the game reported that the cheapest tickets on eBay were $100. A man directing traffic in a yellow staff jacket told me he had seen scalpers earlier in the day, but that undercover cops had arrested them. MPD would later report that nine people were arrested for scalping tickets. Scalpers at RFK Stadium and the Verizon Center normally go untouched—would this new stadium be different? The man shook his head, bobbing his short dreadlocks. “It’s opening night—and the president’s here.”

The police seemed to agree. At a roadblock near the stadium, Officer D. Griffiths, a burly man with a thick mustache, was blunter than most about the relationship between police and scalpers.

“[Undercover officers] were here yesterday and today, but the rest of the season—who knows?” he asked, adding that most people who bought scalped tickets ended up “ripped off by some thug.”

That didn’t seem quite right. After spending three games at three different sports observing the scalpers at work, it didn’t make sense that a majority of them would sell bum tickets—that would be bad for business. (Apparently, counterfeit tickets are mainly found at one-time only events like concerts.) I’d even met regular customers who had developed relationships with their scalpers.

But that night, I just wanted to find a scalper at the new stadium. In a line on the other side of the newly-minted building, I ran into a man I had met looking for tickets earlier, a few beers on the other side of sober and clad in Carhartt overalls. He had succeeded in purchasing a scalped ticket, but was cagey about how he got it, saying only that he had been found by a scalper and pulled aside. (Most scalpers and scalpees interviewed for this piece declined to be identified due to their participation in a criminal act.) He was angry that it took him so long to find someone to sell him tickets.

Looking for trouble? Nats fans looking for tickets on opening day.

EMILY VOIGTLANDER

“They are ruining a great American pastime by not selling overpriced tickets to fans who show up a half hour late to a game,” he said. “It’s unpatriotic!”

So, scalpers were at work. Twenty feet down the line, I met three older men who looked accustomed to getting what they want—the kind of men who travel around the country touring baseball stadiums, which is in fact what they were.

Tom, Ed and Gene (from North Carolina, San Francisco and Florida, respectively) had come to see the first official ballgame at the District’s new field. Gene, in particular, was a connoisseur, having visited forty-eight ballparks, including all three that have existed in D.C. As a younger man he had met Ted Williams during the star’s retirement stint as manager of the then-Washington Senators. Apparently, Gene’s introduction to Teddy Ballgame at Griffith Stadium came at the behest of a club attendant named Johnny Orlando.

A sea of red: Thousands of excited Nationals fans crowd into the brand new ballpark for opening day.

EMILY VOIGTLANDER

But it was Tom who surprised me more, with the confession that he bought his ticket from a scalper for $20—apparently maturity does not always convey enough sense to plan ahead on a trip of hundreds of miles. Tom had even been pulled aside after his purchase by an undercover officer who threatened to arrest him, but Tom had simply walked away, viewing the whole thing as a joke—”Wonderful, D.C.! Make a law to stop someone who wants to sell a ticket.”

Tom’s opinion was shared by most of the fans I spoke with at the games, who supported a decidedly laissez-faire ticket economics. But without any scalpers to talk to (or buy from), I was left watching the players’ introduction on the new hi-def jumbotron through the centerfield gate. Jets flew over the stadium, fireworks exploded and a man walked by on stilts.

Earlier in the month, the Verizon Center hosted the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Outside on 7th Street, fans clad in every logo from Duke to Baylor flowed to the stadium. Posted amidst them like rocks in a creek, scalpers plied their trade.

Here is a typical D.C. scalper: Black, male, in his late twenties or early thirties (only a few younger guys were around). He’s often working in a team, ranging in size from three to six guys. The idea, of course, is to buy low and sell high: get fans to part with their tickets on the cheap, and sell them to other fans dear. One guy will concentrate on finding sellers—”got any tickets?”—another will concentrate on low end seats—”I got two! Who needs two?”—and a third, usually better-dressed with a collared shirt or a wireless cell phone earpiece, will coordinate the team and handle the big sells, putting together multi-seat packages or fishing out $120 club seats. One group of three worked their way down from the Metro stop at 7th and H to the entrance of the stadium where they would regroup, swap tickets and money, and then go back to the top of their route. In one hour they made about 15 sales. They repeated this for most of the day.

I chatted with two Xavier fans from Annapolis after watching them buy tickets from that team of scalpers. One, sporting an “X-Men” hat, sat in a wheelchair after a double hip replacement. They said they usually bought their tickets to sporting events second-hand, but they had a hard time finding them before this particular game.

“I had my son, my daughter, my girlfriend and my ex-wife looking on the internet for tickets—these guys get them!” the wheelchair-bound fan said, outraged. “Where do they get them?”

According to the scalpers, some rely on picking up tickets from fans, while others use connections with the teams to get extra passes. At the first-round of the NCAA basketball tournament, the dejected fans of losing teams would be mobbed upon their exit from the stadium by scalpers hunting for cheap second-day tickets. One scalper in a brown leather jacket confessed that it was his first day on the job: he was helping out a friend from Detroit, in town to sell tickets to the NCAA games. The friend had a broker who phoned in ticket orders to be picked up at the will-call and sold in front of the stadium.

How much? Scalpers drive a hard bargain at various D.C. events.

EMILY VOIGTLANDER

But I couldn’t convince any of the scalpers to tell me what I really wanted to know: how they got started scalping, how much money they make (“we’re supplementing our income”), how they got along with each other. For one, they were suspicious, worrying that police attention would follow media attention. But more importantly, they were busy. The tickets in their pockets were only valuable as long as the game hadn’t started (or hadn’t gone on for too long). After a certain point, they aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. But I interrupted them enough to learn a few things.

“There’s a job crisis. It’s better to sell tickets than to sell crack!” said one seller in a New York Yankees cap. True, but how does it work?

“Economics! Economics!”

He wasn’t far off the mark—even economists uninterested in sports take an interest in scalpers, a great market to analyze. The ticket re-sellers find a niche because prices are set artificially low by box offices (doesn’t feel that way, does it?) in order to encourage sell-outs, which improve the venue’s image and maximizes its revenue from parking, vendors and television deals, according to a paper by the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But once those tickets are sold and demand goes up, the only person to turn to is the speculator. That is, the scalper.

Which is why a comparison between a stock exchange trading floor and the corner of 7th and H right before Tuesday’s Capitols game is appropriate, except that stock exchanges are rarely serenaded by a saxophone player jamming with two ersatz drummers pounding plastic buckets. Outside of the Vida gym, it’s a seller’s market early as hockey fans plastered with Caps gear confront twelve scalpers working to earn their pay. It’s finally warm enough, a balmy spring evening, where being outside for hours seems more of a benefit than a disadvantage, and the scalpers go about their work with gusto.

It was a night for savvy fans, too. I met one near the metro stop, looking for a single ticket. A native of Silver Spring, he lives in California now but was back on business. He has been coming to Caps games for 25 years.

“I’ve been here seven minutes. I got one ticket for $20—that’s my safety ticket. Now I’m looking for better seats. I get $75, $95 tickets for $20,” he said.

I saw another man, sporting a red cap pulled low over dark glasses, accompanied by a younger woman, work his way through the crowd, exchanging greetings with the scalpers. D.A. from Alexandria is a regular.

“I always buy them on the street,” he said. “But you have to be careful, [or] they’ll try and get you. But I’m a teacher from Alexandria, they’re straight with me.” As we talked, he pointed out the scalpers he knew. “George is my man, but that motherfuc—mothersticker, he’ll get you.”

While George scolded D.A. for saying his name, the teacher explained that he wanted to exchange two tickets for three. “I try and get tickets for the kids and the families,” he said.

Two police cars are parked across the street, down a ways, and one bike cop stands bored at the corner, watching fans stream by the scalpers. When asked about the discrepancy in enforcement, Assistant Chief Patrick Burke wrote in an e-mail, “As ticket scalping is illegal, we want to send a strong message that it will not be tolerated … We have been very proactive at the Verizon Center as well.” Traci Hughes, the MPD spokesperson, added that “The Department enforces all District laws. Police may use their discretion regarding issuing a ticket, but all law[s] are enforced.”

Then one of the scalpers loudly asked, “What’s this white car? What’s this white car?” Turning, I saw a white sedan, a Crown Victoria with three antennas, idling by the sidewalk. As the scalpers stopped what they were doing to watch the car, the driver sped away. I recalled the mustached cop from the Nationals game, who told me that “The police know [about scalping], and they can do something about it. The Verizon Center knows, and they could do something about it.”

Sheila Francis, the public relations director at the Verizon Center, told me it was up to MPD to enforce the law. Washington Sports and Entertainment, which owns Verizon, “does everything we can to encourage fans to buy tickets through Ticketmaster.” Washington Sports and Entertainment also owns the local Ticketmaster franchise.

Half an hour after the puck dropped, the thinning crowd outside led to increased competition among the scalpers. While some were working together, others clearly weren’t, surrounding buyers and trying to cut in on business. Sometimes it seemed like this was a negotiating ploy, but other times it seemed more serious. One confrontation sent an angry scalper spinning away, shouting, “You’re the one who’s jumping into shit, motherfucker!”

Eyes wide shut: D.C. Police tend to ignore scalpers at work.

EMILY VOIGTLANDER

The slow business gave me a chance to converse more with the scalpers. They told me they were just small fry. “Write about StubHub! They made $20 million last year!” one scalper, Lou, said. StubHub, essentially a legalized, online scalping service (one which partners with many major sports enterprises, including our own Georgetown Hoyas) does make a lot of money doing on a larger scale what scalpers do on sidewalks. StubHub made nearly $200 million in revenue in 2006, while a scalper who makes a few grand is having a great week.

It fits. The scalpers cater to an industry that makes a lot of money doing on a grand scale what most people grow up doing in yards or on sidewalks: sports. The next time I visit the Nats’ new home, I hope there are scalpers waiting.

The post D.C.’s Ticket Exchange appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

Another university with Jesuit ideals, Boston College, recently saw its Law School decide not to award its Founder’s Medal to Attorney General Michael Mukasey amidst controversy over the decision to host him as a commencement speaker. Students, faculty and alumni reacted negatively because of Mukasey’s refusal to classify waterboarding as torture. Waterboarding—an interrogation technique that involves strapping someone to a board upside down and pouring water over his or her face to simulate drowning—is torture, and anyone who says otherwise is essentially immoral.

Let me now step down from my soapbox and return to Georgetown. While we have yet to announce this year’s honorary degrees, we certainly have made some dubious decisions about those in the past—the crown prince of Spain? Really? More importantly, though, the University has chosen to host a number of former government officials as professors. Among them is Douglas Feith (LAW ’78), who was Undersecretary of Defense for policy from the start of the Bush Administration until August 2005.

DOMINIQUE BARRON

Feith, the man responsible for post-war planning in Iraq, takes hits not only from those against the war but also those who prosecuted it, earning him perhaps the most famous epithet of this century thus far, General Tommy Franks’ “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth.” But it’s time for him to cover his rear, and to that end, he is publishing a memoir of his time in office this April. The Washington Post, which obtained a draft manuscript, reports that “Although [Feith] acknowledges ‘serious errors’ in intelligence, policy and operational plans surrounding the invasion, [he] blames them on others outside the Pentagon.”

This comes of course from the intellectual who argued in the New Yorker that the philosophy of Edmund Burke justified the invasion of Iraq. This is the supervisor whose office issued the report showing connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government, which was later called “inappropriate” by the Pentagon’s Inspector General, rejected by the 9/11 Study Group and now conclusively proven wrong by a Defense Department review of over 600,000 captured Iraq documents. And, returning to the subject of torture, Feith was also among those who, in the 1980s, laid the intellectual underpinnings for rejecting the Geneva Conventions for certain types of detainees and whose office was in charge of Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib, during that scandal. And lest we forget, he failed to create a viable post-war plan for Iraq.

And yet, Douglas Feith is one of our “Distinguished Practitioners in National Security Policy.” Which raises the question: what practices, exactly, distinguished him? During the run-up to his controversial hiring, a majority of SFS faculty opposed bringing him to the school, but SFS Dean Robert Gallucci decided to offer him the job anyway. At the time, Gallucci told me that “[Feith] could defend, as well as explain, those decisions [behind the Iraq War]. Not many faculty on campus would attempt to defend them, myself among them.” And so Feith teaches one class: National Security Policy of the Bush Administration.

No doubt my implication is clear: Feith should not be here. Setting ideology aside, this isn’t an issue of academic freedom. There are any number of conservatives, in the administration and out of it, who could make the case for the Bush foreign policy. There are also many Bush administration officials who actually are distinguished practitioners (Andrew Natsios, for instance). But Feith is not cut out for either position.

It’s too late an hour to see Feith off; we can only hope that the school will not renew his contract. Feith can take his salary, and the further thousands he will no doubt earn from his memoir, and try to and justify his failures somewhere else. But Georgetown is supposed to have a code, one that emphasizes both intellectual and moral rigor, and, in the case of a practitioner, practical success of some kind. We should not reward those who do not meet that standard by associating them with our good reputation. After all, our name is our name.

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Dan Bejar, the chief songwriter and musician of Destroyer, is a weird fella. But he’s smart, and it sells—the raspy David Bowie voice, the deliberately obscure lyrics, the meandering array of yelps and proclamations. And it helps that his band is just getting tighter. Trouble in Dreams generally eschews the hard-charging hooks of his lastshy;shy;—and arguably most accessible—album, Rubies, but it’s still Euro-pop blues for the masses.

The newest Destroyer disc is the latest iteration of Bejar’s balancing act, attempting to combine the heavy verbiage of his early folk-pop days with a predilection toward the bigger musical punch of the traditional rock combo—I’m obligated to point out here that Bejar is also part of indie-pop supergroup The New Pornographers, and it’s rubbed off on him a little. The album is good for those who relish old-school, City of Daughters-style-Destroyer, but might be a step back for those who loved Rubies.

“Dark Leaves From A Thread” exemplifies the new effort’s style: kicking off with just Bejar and an acoustic guitar, talking to Suzanne about sipping sherry, the song launches into a drum-led jam, overlaid with a lazily grooving electric guitar. It’s a standard trope that pops up throughout the album. “And I couldn’t believe how loud it was!”: the line, from album standout “Plaza Trinidad,” also applies to the drumming in every song, which is either mixed louder or played better than on any previous Destroyer record.

Despite the noise, Bejar also affects ballad in songs like “Shooting Rockets” or “Introducing Angels”—slowing it down, bringing in the piano and playing up his own dubbed-over back-up singing. And always, it’s his weird elocution that dominates: it took me three listens of “Shooting Rockets” to figure out that the chorus was the title, not “Chu-Chu-Ra-Ra.”

Despite that, it’s the lyrics that get me—the weird opening lines, the candy bar references, the narrative, the asides, the relationship advice. Sure, “The leopard of honor speaks to a crowd of the dead/ shouting out for more” sounds weird on the page, but it works in song. As Bejar advises, “Enjoy the wretched writing on the wall.”

Voice’s Choices: “The State,” “Rivers,” “Plaza Trinidad”

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Why leave Georgetown now?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time; an opportunity to spend more time with my family. … I am really kind of ambivalent at this stage in leaving when we’re in the middle of so much, and it’s still exciting.

You have said that improving DPS’ use of technology is one of your main accomplishments.

It’s something that I felt was sorely needed when I first arrived at Georgetown. We didn’t have at that point any cameras [or] closed-circuit TV. It just didn’t exist. We had some pushback initially, as they all do with closed-circuit TV. Right now, you can see the difference. … I just can’t stop additional requests for cameras.

You’ve also emphasized your work improving the quality of DPS’ human resources.

Our big goal is to be able to retain those officers, because that’s always been a problem. The recent negotiations we were able to increase the starting salary. Even with the starting salary, we are behind. We are playing catch-up with our main competitors, and that’s the other universities, to attract and retain exceptional officers. That’s something that the next director has to give attention to. We can bring on board officers, within a year or so they are trained, they have the background. … [and then] MPD and the other larger agencies are very attracted by them. … Our salary rates have to be competitive.

What are the other challenges for a new director?

Naturally, from the standpoint of ensuring that our officers receive training, in addition to the Academy, you never get enough training. … [E]nsuring that the technology continues to be incorporated as the department moves forward. [T]o continue to maintain the excellent relationship that the Department has with other university departments as well as the university leadership. We need someone with law enforcement background at the senior level, as well as, preferably someone with the college experience also.

What advice will you give to your successor?

Our officers are our most important investment. You have to recruit wisely, select just as wisely, and then ensure that your commitment is towards retaining those officers you recruit and select. As far as the relationship that has to be developed with the faculty, staff and senior leadership, more important is the relationship that you got to have with the students.

Will you miss Georgetown?

I’m definitely going to miss it. Hey, I won’t be gone, I still have family in this area, and this has always been home to me. I’m a native Washingtonian, really third-fourth generation. I have a number of good friends and colleagues at Georgetown. I have fully enjoyed my time here, it’s been exciting, it was challenging at times, it was also very rewarding. … I started with the class of 2003. …There were so many events going on. When I submitted my letter, I got to thinking … and I can’t even think about all of them. It’s hard to believe it was nine years, it all went by so quickly. When I look back on it, it just all went by so quickly.

—Interview by Tim Fernholz

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What can we conclude? It’s time to reassert the importance of race-based affirmative action, as a country and, more importantly, here at Georgetown.

I can hear the complaints already: the Supreme Court says it’s not doable, that quotas aren’t allowed. Or maybe you think robust affirmative action is really just reverse racism aimed at non-minorities. But private universities have much greater leeway in pursuing minority students than their public counterparts do, and research says that, despite popular belief, a white applicant is more likely to lose his slot at a university to a legacy student or scholarship athlete than a recipient of affirmative action.

Georgetown technically already has an affirmative action program; it’s been endorsed by President Jack DeGioia, who delivered an emphatic speech on the subject during the 2003 Michigan State Supreme Court case. DeGioia said, “I am personally counting on all administrators, faculty, staff and students to provide enlightened leadership and cooperation in support of diversity, equity and affirmative action, so that we can all be enriched by the experience of working and studying in an integrated environment,” according to a document from Georgetown’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action.

DeGioia makes the case that diversity is important to the educational experience, and he’s right. But the larger claim I make, and that the University should make, is that our duty as an institution that professes to care about social welfare is to provide minorities the means for equal opportunity: affirmative action is the only choice for a school that believes in liberal education and social justice. Especially for a Catholic school—Catholics have not had the most sterling record on race issues—that has, in its own way, been a pioneer in supporting black leadership. Data from the Brookings Institution gives us more than enough reason to say that conservatives, like one researcher at the Heritage Foundation, who suggest that poor minorities simply lack “optimism, a propensity to work hard, entrepreneurship and so on,” are wrong.

Looking back at a recent Voice cover story on Georgetown’s diversity [“Pluralism in Action?” Jan 14], it is clear that minority students on campus are aware that they are underrepresented at Georgetown compared to national levels—African-Americans make up about 12 percent nationally, 8 percent at Georgetown; Latinos 15 percent nationally, 8 percent at Georgetown; only Asians are statistically over-represented. Our first goal should be to align the demographics at Georgetown with nationwide population demographics.

Some will note that Georgetown is internationally diverse, and while that is true and a good thing, it does not serve social justice at home. Others will say we must base affirmative action on socio-economic disadvantage, not race. Aside from the fact that these often go hand-in-hand, the data show that problems of economic mobility are not race-blind: they are strongly correlated with race. Still others will argue that we cannot afford to provide the financial aid that would be necessary to allow poor minority students to attend Georgetown. This is, unfortunately, true, and will require us to take a hard look at our priorities and our fundraising.

Georgetown is trying to develop a $500 million financial aid endowment, and has founded a program for alumni scholarship funding. But what if alumni donors, beginning with this year’s senior class, made their gifts contingent on their use for minority scholarships? Our relatively small donation this year will go, in part, to student scholarships, and no doubt won’t be wasted. But it will be even stronger if we use it to send a message about Georgetown’s priorities.

And what if Georgetown considered adopting a version of the Texas Ten Percent plan, which aimed to achieve diversity by promising the top ten percent of students at under-performing high schools admission to the state University system. What if Georgetown guaranteed admission to the top 50 D.C. public school students? What if the University was proactive in putting our slogans and our ideals to work?

As a country, we are failing in our promise to provide equal opportunities for economic mobility, and it is clear that our institutions of higher education bear much of the burden for correcting this problem. Georgetown, a school of men and women in service to others, should be a leader in fixing this problem.

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DelMonaco has just finished his first term here at Georgetown, and I hoped to hear what he had learned from a semester of overseeing public safety on campus. His comment that “more education” was the key to preventing muggings came under criticism from this paper back in September. Indeed, this fall’s sensational early evening robbery at gunpoint just outside the Walsh building suggested that more focus on DPS training and patrols may be the answer to our security problems.

But DelMonaco, a compact, nattily dressed man whose second floor Gervase office sports a full humidor and a commemorative “ROCCO” license plate from Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural, seems unflappable. It was a tough fall for the new VP; in addition to the usual series of burglaries, muggings and fights, a bias-related assault shocked the campus early in the year. Despite a “really good job” by the University of preparing him for the “ebb and flow” of Georgetown’s security situation—particularly the spike of illegal activity around school breaks—DelMonaco shook his head ruefully. “Now that I’ve lived it, it gives me a better idea of how to redeploy … our personnel, to use other tactics and techniques,” he said.

His biggest surprise? Students’ tendency to leave their doors unlocked and to tamper with outside security doors. Indeed, despite maintenance failures, particularly in Henle Village, many burglaries on campus are connected to students who left their doors unlocked, and no one can deny that circumventing Georgetown’s security systems is a Saturday night tradition. All of which leads DelMonaco to plead, “If it is a security device, keep it whole.”

Maybe DelMonaco is just getting his sea legs, so to speak, here at Georgetown. (He’s certainly got the Catholic part down; he made it to 8 a.m. Mass on Ash Wednesday). But what about the issue of the day—the 38,000 missing Social Security numbers belonging to students who attended Georgetown as far back as 1998, including some 7,700 current students? While information security doesn’t necessarily fall under DelMonaco’s umbrella—that’s the problem of David Lambert, the University’s Chief Information Officer, whose policy of encrypting personal data was not followed—this was an out-and-out theft.

While details about the investigation are still sketchy, what we do know is this: sometime over winter break, someone got to the fifth floor of Leavey—which requires a key outside normal business hours—and entered a locked office, taking only the hard drive that contained the missing information. There were no signs of forced entry, according to the Metropolitan Police Department’s report. The only item reported as stolen was the hard drive. This leads to some interesting questions; the first being, could the crime have been committed by someone at the University?

“[The investigators] have no assumptions at all,” DelMonaco said. “When you assume, you block out other possibilities.”

But it appears that the University, and DelMonaco, still haven’t learned the lesson of this fall’s hate crime, which wasn’t publicly announced until weeks after it occurred: no matter how embarrassing public knowledge of an incident might be, transparency must be the first step. Though DelMonaco told me that he has already personally installed the transparency recommendations made by a University working group formed in the wake of this fall’s public relations debacle, the University chose to sit on news of the robbery for three weeks, despite announcing it privately to the Alumni Board of Governors.

Those three weeks could have been critical, according to Linda Poley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, who said that wide publicity is key to preventing identity theft. If thieves know their potential victims are aware of the danger they are in, they may wait to use the information, giving breach victims time to initiate fraud alerts and other protective steps. Poley recommended that those whose information was compromised keep fraud alerts active for at least a year.

“You can never assume that you’re safe,” Poley said. “These thieves may warehouse the information—if they got hold of the information. They may not know they have the information. This has been a very well-publicized breach. These thieves are not stupid, if they do intend to use it, they are going to sit on it.”

The University got lucky this time; thus far, no one who lost data has reported an incidence of identity theft. And in past incidences of data exposure at universities, relatively few identity crimes have come to light. But how many times will Georgetown get away with a lack of transparency surrounding an illegal act? DelMonaco has made community policing a key rhetorical theme of his still-short tenure; in the future he should make it a point to inform the community of what is happening on campus.

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Schall, who is by reputation an excellent professor and a representative of that classic Jesuit strain that we denizens of modern Georgetown have cause to miss, normally eschews temporal matters (Typical column title: “Rediscovering the Role of Thought in Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics,” Typical first line: “Should the vast size of the universe concern us?”). But his latest dispatch begs for rebuttal. Though Schall is coy about what his point is—much more so than the article’s headline—it seems he and Plato agree that the “desire to have the perfect city is the cause of all political evils that do happen in this world.” It may be worth mentioning that Schall is a bit conservative.

Now it’s possible be that the headline writer missed the point of the column, and slotted in idealism when perhaps utopianism would have been a better fit. But it seems throughout that Schall is advocating a withdrawal from worldly affairs. What a sad message to send to college students. Why would he choose this moment, when the world has such an urgent need for the work of young people? Luckily it is possible to find an answer: At eighty, Schall has written more books and articles than most anyone, and a column written earlier this month and published online at Ignation Insight bemoans Georgetown’s “about twenty outside lectures a day from national and international figures. With the upcoming election, it will be a madhouse. May I say it? These are distractions, for the most part. Students are not here this time of their lives to find out about current events. And if that is what they do while in the university, that is all they will know. They will have missed the important things while pursuing the ephemeral ones.”

I wouldn’t dispute with Schall about the necessity of reading Plato and Aristotle. Students ought to share their time between academic contemplation and current events. But I would suggest he rethink his definition of ephemerality. Presumably the current election, where thus far the youth vote has played an important role in determining who our next president will be, is not important to Schall. But as every day people live and die based on decisions that a president makes, I’ll throw my weight on the side of its importance. Schall and other professors seem to think that students ignore their work at the expense of these outside activities, but I believe in our ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.

In a pleasing coincidence, I had just seen Schall’s Plato quote referenced in a year-old episode of The Wire, another paean to the difficulties of rightly managing a city. But the heroes of that television series are those that strive onward against these difficulties, not those that walk away.

No doubt this column reads like the folly of youth—oh, they do not understand the time they have! But Schall’s column reads like the condescension of age, filtered through Plato—how so many young men come to Washington with the hope of making things better, and how wiser minds have watched them fail and become thus embittered. But Schall and I might find some common ground yet. I sympathize with his mission of injecting a little morality and truth into each generation of Hoyas since 1978, leaving each one with some kind of moral structure at hand. Would that he would urge current students to go out and put this to good work. I’m not brash enough to quote scripture to a Jesuit, but I might get away with a recent papal encyclical, Benedict XVI’s Spe Salvi: “[E]very generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline for the proper use of human freedom.”

No doubt to manage a city, or a country for that matter, is difficult to do rightly. But it is incumbent on us to try. Forward, then, the dangerous enthusiasm of young men.

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