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The Georgetown University Women’s Rugby Football Club, for instance, has won the the Potomac Rugby Union championship four times since its founding in 2000, and continues to compete in Division II. Club baseball is a perennial playoff contender. The women’s squash team won the most competitive championship available for their division, the Epps Cup, in 2011.

However, the medical attention given to club programs is not held to the same standards as that given to their varsity counterparts. Although it has been a concern of the Advisory Board for Club Sports, these athletes are not given access to a trainer— considered an essential resource at advanced levels of competition. Members of varsity teams have trainers on-site at games and are provided trainers when something goes wrong at practice. Club sports athletes, however, have to make do with less specialized attention.

Alex Skarzynski (SFS ‘15), the current safety representative for the ABCS and the elected chair for next year, has been working on getting funding for an athletic trainer as well as other medical improvements for club sports.

“We are currently in the process of attempting to get an athletic trainer,” Skarzynski said. “It is something a lot of people are talking about on campus. That being said, at a big university like this, before you do anything like this, you have to sort out the logistical issues, you have to understand funding, liability, all those things. So we are taking a lot of time, making sure it’s done right. Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to happen, but we are doing everything we can and we are progressing far along this process of bringing a trainer to Georgetown.”

Currently, the procedure depends on the severity of the injury. Athletes are left to fend for themselves if an injury is deemed minor, or they are sent to the Student Health Center.

In the case of serious injuries, club athletes rely on the emergency room of nearby hospitals and the Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service, for serious injuries. During events away from campus, the ABCS requires that the nearest hospital is notified in case of any injuries. There are sports doctors on staff that are connected to the ABCS and are available, but only by request.

Michael Lindsay-Bayley (MSB ‘14) is a member of both the tennis and soccer club programs. Lindsay- Bayley sustained injuries to his knees during an intramural basketball game after the club seasons for the fall semester had ended. Lindsay- Bayley made an appointment with the Student Health Center and, after two weeks, went to receive medical attention. The doctor that he saw there was unfamiliar with sports injuries and misdiagnosed the problem, but sent him to physiotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital.

“I went [to physiotherapy] and they knew exactly what they were talking about. I didn’t quite know the details of my insurance plan with regards to physiotherapy,” he said.

“I thought I was going to get eight free visits. It turned out that I was only going to get $60 off the total cost of each session. I was getting hour long sessions, which was two sessions at a time. After two sessions, I asked how much it was going to cost, expecting it to be $150, but it turned out to cost … around $560 for my two sessions. That was too much, so I couldn’t carry on with that,” he said. “There are a couple clinics in D.C. where you don’t need to give insurance details, it’s like $150, but even that is too steep for me to do, so I just carried on resting since then. I’m playing sports again, but my knees aren’t great.”

Lindsay-Bayley’s case is not a rare one. Club sports athletes routinely face great risk in practice and competition, in part because of the occupational hazards, and in part because of the inadequate facilities.

Tim Hughes (COL ‘13) is the president of the club baseball team at Georgetown. While Hughes has not been seriously hurt during his time on the team, he has seen his fair share of injuries.

Hughes said, “We’ve had players on the team with separated shoulders, we’ve had two torn ACL’s over the last two years. We had one guy who seriously threw out his elbow playing baseball. So, a couple pretty bad ones.”

Athletes in every level of sport are vulnerable to ACL injuries. ACL tears are one of the most prevalent knee injuries, and rehabilitation alone is not enough for athletes to recover from this injury. Usually, in order to play again, an athlete will require reconstructive knee surgery and ample recovery time, which ranges from multiple months to a year.

The anterior cruciate ligament is one of four major ligaments in the knee, allowing the knee to rotate properly and expanding lateral movement. ACL injuries can result from a variety of causes, including sudden changes in direction, high impact jumps, and sudden deceleration—in other words, very basic components of any sport.

These injuries are usually serious and take multiple months to a year to heal when treated properly. This injury has recently affected many of the largest names in American sports, for instance, after tearing his ACL in December of 2011, it was considered a small miracle that Vikings running back and 2012 NFL MVP Adrian Peterson was able to return for Week 1 of the 2012 season. ACL tears have also been responsible for Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo’s extended absences from the NBA.

Another issue at hand is care for concussions. Women’s rugby routinely suffers 1 or 2 concussions a semester. Head injuries have come into the spotlight in not only professional sports, but also in sports at the college and high school levels. Most prominently, many former National Football League players are suffering from mental illness and are taking action against the league after suffering repeated head trauma and not receiving proper treatment or protection. The procedure for playing after possibly sustaining a concussion has become more strict recently, but concussion testing has still not been completely integrated into club athletics.

“Concussions can be particularly dangerous to an athlete’s future health, so there are specific concussion treatment procedures,” Carter said. “Additionally, they can sometimes be hard to diagnose without proper medical attention, leading to a greater risk of repeated injury. Concussion testing and follow-up is something that we very much hope to combine into the athletic trainer program.”

As of late, the procedure for concussions is to go to the emergency room or to call one of the sports doctors at the Student Health Center to let them know that you have a concussion and need attention. Of course, it is important to have on-site concussion testing in order to prevent an athlete that has sustained a concussion from re-entering the game and possibly injuring him or herself further. Due to the possible cognitive impairment that could result if head injuries are not handled correctly, concussions are at the center of concerns for club athletes.

“I think there is definitely a lot to be worked on. That being said, we are in the process and we are making big strides toward getting increased medical care every year,” Skarzynski said. “Last year it was getting first aid kits, this year it’s hopefully working toward an athletic trainer and a concussion testing program.”

Club athletes at Georgetown have an increased risk of getting hurt compared to regular students. Facilities also play a large role in contributing to the increased danger.

“As opposed to the average student, we’re at a higher risk because we’re playing sports more often. Being at a higher risk, you would need somebody to go to, because injuries are going to happen,” Hughes said.

“The other thing is, we don’t have a lot of practice space available to us and Kehoe field is basically the only place available,” he added. “If you take one look at it, that place is just an injury trap. It’s basically rolled-out carpet on top of a cement floor with some potholes in it. So you’re going to see twisted ankles, you’re going to see torn ACL’s like we have, you’re going to see numerous bruises, things like separated shoulders because you’re falling on solid concrete.”

Hughes is not the only one who has qualms with Kehoe.

Lindsay Fountain (SFS ‘15), who plays for the women’s club rugby team, also sees the limits and dangers of insufficient practice facilities. She said they only practice the contact element of the game when they get the opportunity to practice on the Multi- Sport Field, where varsity football and lacrosse is played.

“Kehoe is really dangerous and limits our chances of succeeding because we can only tackle in 50 percent of our practices and because it results in injuries that keep our players unnecessarily out of practice and sometimes even out of games,” she wrote in an email to the Voice.

“Usually we’re left with the part of the field that receives little to no stadium lighting,” wrote Juliann Jefferson (MSB ‘14), a member of the club softball squad, in an email. “I’d definitely feel a lot safer practicing at a facility with better lighting.”

Contact sports in particular could benefit from having a trainer. Injuries commonly occur not only games, but practices as well, and at present, there is no medical expertise standing by to treat the athletes.

Before an athletic trainer can be brought in for the club programs, the ABCS has to negotiate with the Georgetown University Student Association, who is responsible for approving the funding that goes toward club sports. The ABCS submits a budget to the Georgetown University Students Association, who in turn allocates funding they think is appropriate for the given issues. This past year, the ABCS’s push in the medical area was for first aid kits. This was granted, and now these kits can be checked out by club sports that want to use them.

Though nothing is finalized in terms of getting a trainer for club sports, Skarzynski is optimistic. “We made a request for this athletic trainer funding to GUSA. They denied it as of now because they wanted to put together a plan … I feel very confident that [we could get a trainer] if we get a particular structure in order and we get a program that is sustainable and reasonable … GUSA said that they are committed to helping us get the money we need.” The ABCS submitted a request to the GUSA Finance and Appropriations Committee Board that outlined the funding that would be necessary for a program involving club sports trainers. However, the Board responded by saying that they would like the current funding to be used to get the program up and running. Hopes are that if this is successful, the Board will approve additional funding to allow the program to expand and improve.

Luke Carter (COL ‘14) is a member of GUSA who has been working toward gaining funding for a trainer program and concussion testing. He finds that there also needs to be input on the part of the administration.

“The University could definitely do more in terms of providing medical care for its 1,000 club sport athletes,” Carter said. “Some studies suggest that club sports athletes are even more at risk than varsity athletes for injuries, due to the lack of preseason training camps and the like. That said, if we were able to institute an athletic training program, it would be a massive improvement for club sports medical care.”

It is clear that club athletics could benefit from the presence of a trainer, but this program and improvements in concussion testing are even more important when considering the impacts that substantial injuries that are left untreated could have on the lives of athletes. The wait for funding is leaving this problem untreated and is leaving athletes vulnerable to injuries that could have very serious effects on their long-term wellbeing.

Medical treatment is clearly on the minds of the Administrative Board and GUSA, but the athletes themselves are especially concerned.

Said Hughes, “I say it’s hugely important. Like I said, for most sports injuries, the key is how fast you can get it seen and how fast you can get it treated. Same thing as if you roll an ankle, the faster you can get off it and get ice on it, the faster it can heal. Especially when we have these short seasons, when you suffer an injury, you don’t want to be out for the season. So the faster you get it seen, the faster you can heal, the faster you can get playing again.”

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On Jan. 20, 2010, General David Petraeus began a week-long tour to shore up support for the U.S.’s continuing mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. He started in Atlanta, Ga., where he taped an interview with CNN. His journey continued the next day in Washington, D.C. where he was scheduled to make three media appearances.

His small caravan of black SUVs rolled into Healy Circle early in the afternoon. He and his aides stepped out of the car and made their way into the hall.

The event in Gaston Hall was crowded—and understandably so. The four-star general was the commander of the U.S. Central Command and the highest profile military officer in America. He could have been a leading contender for the Republican nomination for president, if he wanted the job.

Shortly after Petraeus began speaking, a student rose from his seat and began shouting.

“I interrupt this speech in honor of the dead,” he cried, and proceeded to read aloud names of Iraqi civilians who died in the conflict. But, soon after the interruption, the audience’s jeering drowned out the student’s voice. He did not resist the Department of Public Safety officers who escorted him outside.

After Petraeus resumed speaking, another student stood up, and continued where the first protester had left off.

This process continued, student after student, denying Petraeus the opportunity to finish his joke about Syracuse basketball. Director of Student Programs Erika Cohen-Derr warned the protesters they were in violation of Georgetown’s speech and expression policy.

“In accordance with Georgetown University’s speech and expression policy, you have the right to ask questions in the format designated by the event’s sponsor,” she said. “You do not have the right to disrupt the speaker and disrupt the audience members’ participation in the event.”

When the protesters continued, unfazed by the threat of disciplinary action, Cohen-Derr recognized that the protesters knew what they were doing. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you are going to continue to disrupt this event, you will no longer receive a warning. You will be escorted from the event,” Cohen-Derr said, to applause.

Audience members began chanting “USA! USA! USA!” in attempt to drown out the protesters.

Amid the shouting, Petraeus was temporarily denied the privilege of speaking, saying only, “I hope that there is equal attention given to the casualties caused by the Taliban.”

This incident illustrates the conflicts present in the ongoing debate surrounding the speech policy on campus. Georgetown as a private institution is not legally obligated to protect any forms of speech, much less forms of protesting or civil disobedience. In 1989, however, the University implemented the speech and expression policy, which guarantees members of the University community access to public space on campus to meet and discuss issues, as well as demarcates the boundaries of Georgetown’s unrestricted free-speech zone to Red Square.

Though the policy grants the academic community broad speech privileges, immediate decisions regarding how to enforce the policy are left up to the vice president for student affairs. Certain sections of the policy are vague and open to multiple interpretations, which has led to an irregular pattern of enforcement in recent years.

Further, Red Square’s designation as the sole speech zone on campus inhibits the ability to acquire the publicity that is needed to reach the larger student body, whose time and attention is already stiffly contested by a number of student groups.

Georgetown’s policy protects all forms of civil discourse but not every form of nonviolent protest, and, in the school’s history, the disciplinary hammer has fallen rather arbitrarily.

 ***

Georgetown’s present speech policy was established in the aftermath of a heavy-handed response to nonviolent protesters in 1986. In the spring of that year, several student groups had organized demonstrations to protest the University’s investments in companies doing business in Apartheid-era South Africa. As part of a prolonged demonstration on White-Gravenor patio, a group of students took over the entrance to the building and established “Freedom College.”

Once students built shanty accommodations in order to extend the length of their protest, then-Dean for Student Affairs John DeGioia called University Police and, in conjunction with Metropolitan police officers, had the protesters forcibly removed. 35 students total were arrested, though charges were later dropped.

DeGioia’s decision drew sharp criticism from faculty and students, who believed the students’ protest did not interrupt University function or threaten students’ health or safety. But, at the time, DeGioia had free rein to act as he pleased as dean of students, for the University had no speech policy encoded in the student handbook.

Soon after the events on White-Gravenor patio, a committee was formed and charged with forming a speech code which clarified students’ rights regarding civil dialogue, protesting, and demonstrations. Over a period of two-and-a-half years, the committee worked out a policy which ensured the “untrammeled expression of ideas and information” among every member of the academic community.

An early draft of the policy prohibited spontaneous protesting and required that protesters receive administrative approval three to seven days in advance of a demonstration, which students, on the whole, objected to. Then-Managing Editor of The Hoya Chris Donesa (COL ‘89) was quoted in the now-defunct magazine Blue & Gray, saying that the proposal threatened to “make protests, inherently emotional events, a bureaucratic event.”

In January 1989, the new policy took effect after “widespread consultation with faculty, students and administrators.” The preamble of the policy explained the committee’s reasoning for how civil discourse should take place, drawing off of the tradition set by Medieval Catholic universities. “A university is many things, but central to its being is discourse, discussion, debate: the untrammeled expression of ideas and information,” co-author of the policy Fr. James Walsh, S.J., wrote.

Walsh placed civility, learning, and respect in high esteem: “Ideally, discourse is open and candid and also—ideally—is characterized by courtesy, mutual reverence, and even charity.”

The final document was a compromise, of sorts, between students pushing for impromptu demonstration zones and administrators looking to place limits on when and where students could gather.

Every space on campus requires reservation beforehand for public meetings of any kind—except for Red Square, which any student may use during daylight hours “for the purpose of exchanging ideas” without prior arrangement.

The policy does guarantee students the right to meet and discuss any issue whatsoever on campus—so long as they reserve the space, pay associated costs, and abide by noise restraints.

Still, ambiguities remain in the policy, which are up to the dean of student affairs to interpret and enforce. “The Vice President for Student Affairs has the responsibility for administering these guidelines,” the policy reads. “Only in extreme cases of violation of these guidelines can the Vice President prohibit speech and expression before it occurs.”

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In the past 10 years, the speech and expression policy has only been used to limit speech a handful of times, and it’s been used to discipline students even fewer times. The most recent incident when students potentially violated the policy occurred on Oct. 22, 2012, when an unaffiliated group of students protested the foreign policy presidential debate watch party in Lohrfink auditorium.

The group of “concerned students” passed out pamphlets which included descriptions of the “victims of American imperialism,” quotes from Leftist historian Howard Zinn, and military spending statistics. As the debate started, the protesters turned on a slideshow of American military takeovers of democracies across the world.

An unidentified technology staff member tried to grab the projector from one of the students’ hands. They tussled for a few moments until the projector turned off and the technician left, after which the protesters turned the projector back on. A Department of Public Safety officer also took down the GOCard number of the protester who held the projector, but only his number, not any of the others who shielded him.

The student was brought in for a meeting with Judy Johnson, Director of the Office of Student Conduct, but no disciplinary charges were filed.

The incident highlights one of the ambiguities in the policy: What constitutes disruption of an event? The policy doesn’t specify if holding up signs that don’t obstruct other viewers’ line of sight constitutes a violation of the policy. “An individual or group wishing to protest at an event may do so as long as any speaker’s right to free speech and the audience’s right to see and to hear a speaker are not violated,” the policy reads.

Sydney Browning (COL ’15) was one of the students who stood by the projector. In her judgment, simply displaying another viewpoint on a side wall is protected under the policy. “We didn’t cover up the screen, so we didn’t visually impair the debate,” she said. “We didn’t project sound, so we didn’t speak over the debate, so people could still look at the debate, they could still watch it, they could observe.”

Georgetown Occupy members protesting Paul Ryan’s budget plan in Apr. 26, 2012 also didn’t believe that they were in violation of the speech policy when they silently dropped a critical banner from the Gaston Hall balcony during the House Republican’s address. At that incident, security officers initially tried to take the banner from the protesters, but finally allowed them to retain it. Some of their GOCard numbers were also taken down, but no conduct charges were pressed.

Ultimately, Todd Olson, Vice President for Student Affairs, has the final say. According to Olson, the definition of what counts as disruptive depends on the event, which is why the policy allows for some leeway in interpretation.

“At events, there is and needs to be individual discretion based on the nature of the speech or protest.” Olson wrote in an email to the Voice. “We generally do not allow banners inside events, but also work hard not to escalate situations when they occur.”

This openness to interpretation has led some activists to say that the ambiguity in the policy gives the administration a opening to regulate borderline cases of student protest. “The time, manner, and place provisions in the free-speech policy are very flexible,” said Samuel Geaney-Moore (SFS ’12), an activist who was heavily involved in advocacy for social justice during his four years at Georgetown. “It’s not hard for the University to use that policy to come up with a reason why some particular expression of speech is [against the policy].”

There are other institutions that are charged with interpreting the indeterminate phrasing of the policy. In 1989, the University also created a standing committee composed of students, faculty members, and administrators, charged with advising the vice president for student affairs in administering the policy.

Christopher Mulrooney (COL ’14) was one of the student representatives appointed to the Speech and Expression Committee for the term of GUSA President Clara Gustafson (SFS ’13) and Vice President Vail Kohnert-Yount (SFS ’13), which ended March 16.

According to him, committee meetings are characterized by general discussion until consensus is reached. He also says he was struck by how frequently administrators side with students on issues of free expression. “When it comes to issues like free speech … in my experience, the committee, usually, has almost unanimously decided to let … them express themselves on campus,” he said.

According to Mulrooney, the committee meets “whenever there’s an issue that arises,” which is usually once every three months.

The incident in Lohrfink with the projector, however, was not discussed at any Speech and Expression Committee meeting, despite its being the only high-profile case where students potentially violated the policy in the past school year.

“We do not generally discuss each incident at Speech & Expression Committee meetings,” wrote Olson in an email, for his part. “We tend to discuss principles and a few examples that help to clarify the committee’s views.”

Despite there being either disagreement or misunderstanding among students about how to interpret the policy, the committee did not address the issue. At the same time, Mulrooney notes, students did not approach either Olson or the committee to question whether silently dropping a banner would violate the student code of conduct.

The ambiguity of the speech and expression policy is not the only limiting factor. Activists of all stripes at Georgetown worry that the restriction of free and unplanned protesting to Red Square deprives them of an essential tool for them to get their message out—acting in unexpected ways in order to get their message out.

When asked why she and the other protesters at the presidential debate watch party couldn’t protest elsewhere, Browning responded by saying that protesting in other areas would have degraded the impact of their action.

“We thought that if we protested outside of it, it wouldn’t be as effective. Instead of removing our message from the debate, we wanted to integrate into it,” she said. “It was a spectacle, and so we wanted to combine both the spectacle and the information, and we thought that was the best way.”

In reality, however, most students’ daily interaction with activism comes from walking through Red Square, where various student organizations vie for the attention of passers-by.

“It’s really easy to write off everyone in Red Square. As soon as you limit the free-speech zone into that specific place, it’s like ‘Okay, that’s where everyone gathers,’ so it’s really easy to ignore everyone,” Browning said, “As opposed to when we go directly into an auditorium and project something up onto the wall, it’s not so easy to ignore.”

Geaney-Moore points out that the University policy does not accurately reflect the nature of free speech. “Many students get caught up … in the official forms of speech and dialogue and forget that in practice, in daily experience, free speech is a rough-and-tumble situation.”

Newly-elected President of the Georgetown University Student Association Nate Tisa (SFS ’14) echoed Browning’s sentiments. “Red Square is where every group goes to advertise their wares, and when you go through it, you … put your blinders on,” he said.

One of Tisa’s primary policy goals for his term is to enact a speech policy that is less restrictive and opens up more free speech zones on campus, which he says will help student activism flourish.

“GUSA’s never going to be able to do everything … or advocate for things that are more political in nature,” Tisa said. “In order for the student body to be really active and invigorated here, it needs to be individuals students taking up advocacy on their own.”

Tisa also believes that the registration requirements for other venues where students could protest on campus are too limiting for large-scale demonstrations to occur. “For us it’s not so much what you can do as an individual … but group mentality,” he said. “Where would you go to have a large student demonstration? There just isn’t a space for that.”

Tisa, however, doesn’t think the solution is that simple: “The whole system kind of bureaucratizes the passion students feel.”

 ***

The students protesting Petraeus achieved what they had set out to do: In all the post-event coverage, the headlines would no longer read “Petraeus talks military policy in Gaston Hall.” Even though they, as Georgetown students, commanded nothing in terms of money or influence, they drove the discussion following the event. They got their message out.

“The students who spoke up in that event were loud and disruptive, I’m not going to deny that, but they were non-violent,” Geaney-Moore said, “and they were making a political point, and I think it overall improved the discussion at Georgetown.”

Even though the students could have spread their message by traditional means—civil discourse, as Georgetown’s policy defines it, will never completely serve the needs of activists. “By limiting freedom of speech to only discussion and civil discourse, you completely cut out everything else,” Browning said.

“If a student writes an op-ed that goes in the Voice some number of people will read it, but it’s nothing compared to the number of people who will read Thomas Friedman’s column [in the New York Times] … And quiet discussions in classroom settings don’t reach a lot of people, don’t make a lot of noise, don’t really attract attention and make people think,” Geaney-Moore said. “Because of power, some people have amplified voices and some people do not.”

The post The limits on free expression: Red tape and Red Square appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

Glenn is the owner of Rocklands Farm, a 34-acre property in Poolesville dedicated to environmentally-friendly agriculture and livestock. Growing 30 to 40 varieties of vegetables and fruit and raising four different types of livestock, the farm is run by only two full-time staffers: Greg and his wife, Anna. With the start of the gardening season in mid-March, the couple is joined by their friends, Joel and Megan Barr.

Every Saturday, Rocklands Farm opens its doors to families who come to purchase fresh produce, tour the property, and enjoy homemade meals cooked by Glenn himself.

“We wanted to have a market here because we want people to come to the farm to meet us, to see the farm, see where their food came from, and to see the animals and production,” said Glenn.

All animals at Rocklands Farm are pasture-raised. Their produce is non-certified organic, a classification certain producers choose when they believe their produce meets the national organic standards, but has not been verified due to high certification costs.

But, unlike Glenn’s regular consumers—and, until recently, Georgetown students—few households in the U.S. have the privilege of locally-sourced and organic food, much less visit the farm where the food was produced or interact with the farmers themselves. According to the Economic Research Service Report conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, direct-to-consumer sales in the country accounted for only 0.4 percent of total agricultural sales in 2007.

Nevertheless, food consumption patterns in the U.S., especially in higher-income households, have shown a positive shift toward locally-grown and organic food. Dialogue surrounding the ethics of animal treatment and the impact food production has on the environment has increased, while stores such as Whole Foods, which embraces a moderately green identity, are increasingly in vogue. According to a study conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, conventional food distribution uses 4 to 17 times more fuel and emits 5 to 17 more CO2 emissions than the local systems. In addition, according to the New Economics Foundation, a think tank based in London, local purchases “are twice as efficient in terms of keeping the local economy alive.”

Accompanying this trend is the increasing number of farmers’ markets in the country. According to the USDA, the number of farmers’ markets in the U.S. has increased by 448 percent in the last 18 years, from 1,755 in 1994 to 7,864 in 2012. About 30 of these are located in Washington, D.C.

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For years, Georgetown students’ access to locally-grown food was limited to Whole Foods and the Glover Park Farmers’ Market. But with the establishment of the Georgetown Farmers’ Market in the spring of 2011, a variety of vendors from within a 200-mile radius, the conventional definition of “local,” have been attracted to the opportunities selling produce on a university campus provides. Likewise, students have benefited from the presence of sustainable food on campus.

“Farmers’ markets provide an educational experience and a social justice experience in that they show people how important it is to understand where their food comes from and recognize who and what goes into that,” said Alexa Cotcamp (MSB ’15), the Executive Market Director for the Georgetown University Farmers Market.

Breanna Donald (NHS ’12), one of the co-founders of the GUFM, agrees. “One thing that is unique about the farmers’ market is that it’s one of the only places where you can have a conversation with the people who are actually producing your food.”

According to a report carried out by the Harvard School of Public Health in 2007, although the definite nutritional benefits of consuming local still depend on a variety of factors, foods that spend significant time on the road lose more nutrients before reaching the marketplace. Additionally, local producers tend not to harvest with industrial machinery, allowing their produce to retain further nutrients.

“Most of the produce that Leo’s gets … was shipped transnationally … or from Central American countries,” said Donald. “There is a nutritional difference between consuming locally and organically-grown produce versus transnational produce.”

According to Kendra Boyer, the marketing manager for Aramark, the provider of Georgetown’s dining services, initiative has been taken recently to provide students and other community members with sustainable food options.

“We aim to source as much food as we can locally and within the region when available. This varies depending on the quantity of product needed to serve the campus and seasonal availability,” said Boyer.

Indeed, many of the fruits and vegetables offered at Leo’s come from farms that are located within a 250-mile radius of the University. Leo’s purchases over 50 different types of produce from its local produce distributor, the Keany Produce Company. These products range from arugula and basil, to apples and peaches.

However, as soon as certain fruits and vegetables go out of season, produce is shipped from other parts of the country or the world to meet Georgetown’s yearly demand.

“It’s really important to realize … that while you can get strawberries in December and apples in June, neither are going to be locally-sourced due to the season,” said Cotcamp. “It’s important to know that things … are going to taste better if you pick them locally because on a greater scale there’s going to be less energy involved both mechanically and on a human basis.”

Even though Aramark does purchase some of its produce from local growers, it is still behind the curve of the national movement towards more sustainable food purchases by big institutions.

Santa Clara University, a fellow Jesuit school located in the Silicon Valley, offers its students a completely sustainable dining experience. Prioritizing buying food from within a 150-mile radius, Santa Clara offers its students free-range beef, cage-free eggs, hormone-free milk, antibiotic-free chicken, and Fair Trade-certified coffee and tea.

Even though the milk provided at Georgetown’s dining hall is sourced locally, it is still unclear where Aramark purchases its other animal products from.

“We have a lot of buying power as a university, so we have the leverage to say to Aramark that we want them to do this more ethically, or buy from more local farmers or more local produce if they are going to continue serving our university and serving our needs and our mission,” said Victoria Ngare (SFS ’12), Community Outreach Chair of the GU Farmers Market.

While there is a widely held belief that switching to buying organic and locally-grown food will impose higher costs on consumers, this does not always hold true. With the rising price of oil, shipping produce from the West to the East Coast is no longer as cost-efficient as it used to be.

“When you look at buying broccoli local as opposed to buying it from the West coast, for example, the West Coast shippers are pretty much mass-producing, so their cost per case is pretty cheap, but they do have that fuel cost … They are paying around $4,000 for a truck to get from California to Keany,” explained Mary Baran, Customer Relations Manager for Keany Produce Company.

In fact, when The Corp decided last fall to start purchasing its apples from Beechwood Orchards, one of the vendors at the GUFM, one of the main incentives was the cheaper price of buying the local apples against buying them from their previous non-local supplier.

“After talking with the farmer and talking with The Corp, I was able to figure out that we were going to be able to provide apples at a cost substantially lower than the one offered by our provider at the time, which wasn’t locally-sourced at all,” said Cotcamp, who is also the Middle Manager of Digital Media for The Corp.

According to the former produce purchaser for The Corp, Dana Mitchell (MSB ’15), customer reaction to the switch into locally grown apples has been positive so far.

“Our customers have certainly noticed and we have seen greater demand for apples during warmer months when the farmers’ market apples are available,” wrote Mitchell in an email to the Voice. “Usually I purchase anywhere from 400 to 500 apples per week, [but] with farmers’ market apples I buy as many as our shelves can hold (550 to 600) and we sell out.”

Likewise, the success of the GUFM in the Georgetown community has allowed it to expand from its initial six vendors to its current seventeen to eighteen weekly vendors.

“Pricing is a concern, but people do want to consume fresh fruit and vegetables and are willing to pay a … higher price out of the convenience of being able to pick it up at the farmers’ market on campus versus walking all the way to Safeway,” said Donald.

***

The purchasing power of the Georgetown community, however, is far from representative of that of D.C., much less the rest of the country. Of the many farmers’ markets in the city, most are condensed in the Northwest and Southwest areas, where the most affluent neighborhoods are located.

Unlike Georgetown students, not all households are within walking distance of a supermarket. According to a report conducted by the USDA in 2009, 5.4 percent of all households in the U.S. live more than half a mile away from a supermarket and do not have access to a vehicle, in a “food desert” with limited transportation to get out. This accounts for a total of 5.7 million households in the country. In D.C., 18,000 residents live in such areas, which are all located in Wards 5, 7 and 8.

“Food deserts are a very unfortunate situation. There are places that don’t have food; they just have 7-Eleven stores, potato chips, microwave hot dogs, and sugar water. That’s what people are eating,” said Glenn.

The lack of accessibility to grocery stores makes it even harder to argue for the proliferation of more locally-grown products. However, several organizations around the country have been working for the last couple of years to make locally-grown food more accessible to people both financially and geographically.

Arcadia is a D.C. nonprofit organization established in 2010 that aims to create an equitable and sustainable local food system in the city. It runs a mobile market that delivers local, sustainably-produced food across the District, catering to mostly low-income, underserved communities that do not have access to fresh and affordable food otherwise.

“We took a school bus, refurbished it, and set it up so that it can be used to haul vegetables, fruits, meat, and other items, and set up temporary market stops in different low-income neighborhoods in the area,” explained Matt Mulder, Director of Development and Communications for Arcadia.

“We conducted a study after our first year of running the mobile market, and we found out that, contrary to what a lot of other people had said before, there is a demand for locally-grown, sustainably-grown, fresh, nutritious food in these low-income communities, as long as it is available, accessible, and affordable,” said Mulder.

Arcadia accepts federal food assistance vouchers such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as Food Stamps), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, Children, and the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program in order to maintain affordability. Arcadia also offers a “Bonus Bucks” program to double the purchasing power of these benefits. Every dollar spent on Arcadia food has twice the regular market value, and the organization absorbs the costs itself with its grant money.

“[Bonus Bucks] makes it competitive with bigger grocery stores. If somebody comes and buys $20 worth of tomatoes for $10, that ends up being really competitive with what they might spend at a local supermarket,” said Mulder.

Another way D.C. organizations are tackling the problem of food access is through education, an approach that could potentially provide a long-term solution to the flaws in our food production and consumption patterns.

“If you don’t incorporate the education piece into the work we’re doing, we’re at risk of just becoming a fad,” said Karissa McCarthy, D.C. Greens’ Farm to School Program Coordinator. D.C. Greens is another local organization that works to help low-income District residents afford fresh, local produce. “The local food movement efforts across the country are saying that eating local is trendy. It’s important that we have this education piece that cultivates students and citizens who know why it’s important to eat local and support their local food economy, for both their bodily health and for the environment’s health.”

In recent years, the number of school gardens in D.C. has increased to 82, allowing students a hands-on experience in growing their own food. To Glenn, this is an essential step to take if we want to move toward a more sustainable food production system.

“You ask kids where a french fry or a chicken nugget comes from and they answer, ‘McDonalds.’ There’s a huge disconnect. Food no longer comes from an animal or the soil, but from a grocery store,” said Glenn.

Back at the farm, Glenn tosses a muddy tennis ball towards the barn for his excited dog to catch, as he contemplates the future of the food production system.

“It’s hard because our whole food system is set up in a certain way. It’s like we have a city full of buildings and roads; your whole infrastructure is there, so to create a whole different city is hard – you have to dig up all the roads and pull out all the pipes and restructure your city that exists in a certain way,” said Glenn.

However, Glenn believes that shifting the practices of big farms and institutions can potentially start changing the system in which our food is currently being produced.

“To really achieve things, the guys who have a million chickens or ten thousand cows, those are the guys that if you can try to convince to shift their production, I think they can really make a difference,” Glenn said. “If you convince them to shift their practices to be more and more organic, sustainable and humane, you are basically slicing a bigger piece of a pie.”

At a smaller scale, Glenn also believes that the day-to-day choices we make as consumers, such as choosing to shop at a farmers’ market or buying other local food, can help make a difference.

“People ask me almost every day if I really believe what we’re doing makes a difference,” said Cotcamp. “My response is yes. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who will tell you that shopping at an average grocery store offers the same food or experience. Grabbing a few apples at the farmers’ market may seem like a little thing. But all those little things add up to something bigger — maybe today or maybe not, but one day, they do.”

“There’s a lot of attempts for consumers in our country to understand food better, to demand a better food, and be better part of the system. It all starts with the consumer because producers supply what we demand … I think there’s hope.”

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Photos by Maria Miracle (SFS ’14)

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By the end of the semester, Pérez had lost 40 pounds. He was unrecognizable. In an interview with the Voice, Pérez recounted an incident in which he encountered an acquaintance he had not seen since he began restricting his eating. At first she didn’t return his greeting, but once she recognized him, she said, “Oh my God, I didn’t recognize you, you look anorexic.”

“At that point I realized it was a problem because at the moment she said that I felt good about what she had to say,” Perez said. “I felt like that was a positive thing … she had noticed that I lost a lot of weight.”

In the American College Health Association Spring 2012 college survey, only 2 percent of students were diagnosed or treated for anorexia or bulimia nationwide in the past 12 months. According to the survey, at Georgetown, 3.6 percent of the student population has been diagnosed or treated for an eating disorder. While such low numbers may seem inconsequential, in 2006, 58 percent of college females and 33 percent of college males indicated that they were trying to lose weight, and 38 percent of college females and 31 percent of college males reported that they perceived themselves to be overweight.

Only a small proportion of the student population has been diagnosed with an eating disorder, however, Georgetown is far from exempt from the effects of poor body image. Fat-phobia permeates Georgetown’s culture. Fad diets and conscientious exercise routines are the norm. One can barely step on campus without seeing a multitude of confident people with the right clothes and the right body.

“Georgetown attracts, admits, and accepts students who come with really high profiles in terms of accomplishment,” said Carol Day, director of Student Health Education Services. “Sometimes with that sort of level of achievement comes a level of perfectionism, obsessive compulsive tendencies to … apply yourself to achieve, and I think those are characteristics that also seem to be prominent in people with eating disorders.”

***

One. Two. Three. My body tensed and I heaved. Nothing. One. Two. Three. I heaved again, Nothing. I stood over the toilet, staring down a toothbrush clutched in my hand. I couldn’t stop. One, two, three. I drove the toothbrush to the back of my throat, and it hit its mark. I doubled over and gripped the walls of the stall as what was once my dinner burned my insides, making its way up my throat. The burning hurt, but the pain felt like redemption. I heaved once more. I saw blood, and I relaxed. My body shook, but I didn’t care. It was almost as if the worst part of myself had vanished. I was human again. I didn’t want it to end, and before I could stop myself I was doubled over.

Eating disorders are about so much more than food. I would know.

My problem started like most: small. I would skip a meal here and there. But during my sophomore year of high school, my clothes began to get too tight and I began to lose my mind. It didn’t matter that I had grown two inches taller—all that mattered was the flashing number on the scale in my parent’s bathroom. I felt like the ideal of perfectionism was quickly escaping me, and there was nothing I could do about it. My concern turned to panic, and I began to purge.

I purged in the bathrooms in between class periods. I would excuse myself from class to purge. I didn’t want anyone to know. My beauty was supposed to be effortless, my weight was supposed to be natural. When I began losing weight, I felt amazing. My body was frail, but at least it was pretty, or so I thought.

I often heard my parents talk about me in muffled voices. “She’s skin and bone,” my father said. He sounded upset, but I was elated. My effort was paying off. They were always overprotective anyway, I ran up the stairs to the bathroom and locked the door. One. Two. Three.
Peréz also acknowledged the role his perfectionist drive played during his freshman and sophomore years, but the expectations of perfection and insecurities he experienced arose not from explicit pressure from peers, but from his own image of the Georgetown student. “I thought there was external pressure,” he said. “I thought that everybody cared, so that made me think that I should care.”

On the Hilltop, the University strives to play a collaborative role in addressing eating disorders, and developing individualized solutions to assist students in coping with these body image issues. This approach incorporates many branches of student health care, such as Counseling and Psychiatric Services, the Student Health Clinic, and Student Health Education Services. People Day and Staff Clinical Social Worker at CAPS, Mary Quigley, are on the front lines of this approach.

Day has spent her entire career at Georgetown. In addition to being a certified nutritionist, she also has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in nursing. She joined Student Health Education Services when the department was established in 1989. Within the department, Day plays a number of roles, and her background has allowed her to work intensely with students with eating disorders.
Day concentrates on the nutritional aspect of eating disorders, focusing her efforts on instilling life-style changes such as incremental meal plans. Quigley, who specializes in identifying and resolving the emotional causes of eating disorders, works on the other side of the coin, focusing her attention on the underlying psychological causes of the issue.

“I try and look at all the other issues underneath that might be connected. Sometimes it feels like an addiction … I always feel like there is some psychological reason,” she said.
Collaboration between departments ensures that students develop a network of support, but also ensures they receive care tailored to their individual disorder. Of the joint effort,“Mostly, the students coming in [at Georgetown] are in need of once-a-week or twice-a-week therapy with nutritional counseling and often we do the team approach,” Quigley said.

Claire McDaniel (COL ‘14), who struggled with anorexia throughout high school, also views the attention paid to appearances at Georgetown as a factor unhealthy eating habits. “It’s something that’s embedded in the culture … and it very well might be unconscious, but it’s still there,” she said. “I won’t lie, I feel like it’s less than my high school, but even watered down, it’s still a very potent force that idealizes being thin.” [Full disclosure: McDaniel is a Voice staffer.]

Georgetown culture exacerbates pre-existing conditions that come from a variety of psychological issues. “I don’t think [Georgetown] promotes eating disorders, but I think it’s a culture of competition and high achievement,” McDaniel said. “A lot of girls say ‘why does everybody look so beautiful and thin?’ … There’s a level of competitiveness, but I think people tend to bring that with them from their pasts.”

Day went on to say that although student life at Georgetown is remarkably competitive, eating disorders are multifaceted and students often allow their need for perfection to drive unhealthy eating and exercise habits without knowledge of proper nutrition. “People struggle at some level that is not officially diagnosable … something under that level of criteria that you have to match to qualify as having an eating disorder,” she said. “I think a lot of people struggle with undereating or the wrong kind of eating, over exercising and being concerned with their body image.”

Pérez echoed Day’s observation, reflecting on his decision to become a vegetarian. “I thought about why I became vegetarian in the first place, and, although I came to other reasons like environmental and ethical reasons, I realized that the main reason was not a very good one to begin with.”

Special diet restrictions are not inherently problematic. Becoming vegetarian or more health-conscious is not a problem in and of itself—but sudden diet changes becomes dangerous when students undertake them without proper knowledge, or in more severe instances, simply to justify under-eating. The danger at Georgetown lies not in explicit pressure to be thin, but in the attitude that extreme dieting is not only acceptable, but preferable to gaining weight. Such an attitude desensitizes people to the physical and emotional trauma that causes and results from eating disorders.

In addition to the other pressures at Georgetown, Pérez’s struggle with his sexuality further complicated his insecurities with his body image. “There’s a very big image of what someone who’s a gay male should look like. I wanted to come out, but I always thought that I needed to look a certain way.”

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, males make up 10 percent of people with anorexia and bulimia.While men remain an oft-forgotten minority when it comes to eating disorders, the underlying psychological pressures are equally strong to those of their female counterparts. Both Day and Quigley emphasized that male eating disorders, although related to female disorders, generally come with a different set of emotional baggage and are even more under-diagnosed than female disorders. Of the 3.6 percent of students who were diagnosed with eating disorders last year, none were male, although individuals such as Pérez confirm that men struggle with the same insecurities as women. “I think a lot of the time that we talk about these issues we talk about women,” said Pérez, “I think that women have an absolutely different experience.

“I would come late at night,” he recounts, “and just hear people trying to throw up. I knew what was going on, but I knew it wasn’t necessarily what was happening to me.”

***

Five minutes became 10, and 10 became 30. I was gasping, I was in agony, I was in ecstasy. I did everything in my power not to cry. The walls were thin and no one could know. I lay on the floor the vent on the ceiling faded in and out of focus. Then a knock pierced the air. Shit, they heard. They know. They’re going to stop me. I stumbled to my knees, still shaking. I pulled my sweatshirt over my head to hide the blood, and unlocked the door. It was my sister. Could she have her towel, the one with Princess Aurora on it? My breathing relaxed. Of course.

Counseling and Psychiatric Services and Student Health Education Services have launched several initiatives to raise awareness on campus about eating disorders. On such initiative is training RAs to identify and help students deal with eating disorders, running publications such as the Stall Street Journal, and engaging in outreach education programs such as the Engelhard Project, which integrates health and wellness education into courses ranging from hard science to philosophy.

Although these initiatives aim to establish the right precedent, people living with eating disorders often do not wish to acknowledge the issue, and, consequently, may not be proactive enough to seek out the resources that Day and her colleagues have to offer.

“So much of what I went through happened because I was in denial that I had a problem,” McDaniel said. “The sooner that they admit it to themselves, the sooner that they acknowledge a problem, then the sooner they can seek out people who can help.”

Quigley, however, insists that outreach education can only go so far. In her view, in order to repair our culture of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders cannot remain on the outskirts of polite conversation. When asked what she would change about Georgetown culture to help students with eating disorders she said, “I think maybe more students talking to other students about their experiences, and I think in general for Georgetown to promote more sort of mindfulness, meditation, holistic kinds of events. Anything that promotes wellbeing.”

McDaniel said, “It’s going to take things like better education on prevalence of eating disorders in college, on helping people who suffer from them. The Women’s Center and Health Education do a tremendous amount of that already, but I think if it had a greater impact on the student body, it would go a long way. I know it would have enormously helped me in high school.

Eating disorders can be life-long ordeals that almost never truly go away, but with effort and support, people can learn to cope and move on. “I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten over these kinds of things,” said Pérez, “I still think about it every day, but I think the process that can help start it really is thinking about the self-harm that I did.”

Pérez never received formal treatment for his condition, but through personal reflection and support from peers in the LGBTQ community, he started on the road to recovery. He has got rid of his scale and his vegetarian diet.

I never received formal treatment for my condition either. Even if they knew, my family never said a word to me about it. Perhaps it wasn’t possible for their straight-A, varsity athlete to be starving her body. My awakening came ironically it came in my school’s cafeteria. It was as normal a day as any other, I was busy chatting with friends when I saw a familiar face across the table. It was an old rival from middle school. I always avoided her, but that day, I couldn’t stop looking at her. One look of her skeletal features and I knew she purged, like me. I was nothing like this girl. I wanted no part of anything she did. I can’t explain why, but that was my moment. I never purged again after that day, but I was lucky. Most people don’t get the luxury of a moment.

The post A weighty issue: Eating disorders at Georgetown appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

However, they were by no means the first women to attend Georgetown. Each of the other graduate and undergraduate programs had been slowly accepting increasing numbers of women for years, and the Nursing School exclusively admitted women at the time. Aside from one admission in 1898, the Medical and Dental school began to officially admit women in 1947. The School of Languages and Linguistics had admitted women since its founding 1949 (it merged with the College in 1994 to become the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics). The School of Foreign Service had reluctantly opened its doors to women in 1943, albeit in a limited capacity. The majority of the 43 women attended language classes, held from 6-8 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays on East Campus—then the center of activity for the SFS.

Among the first women at the SFS were those who had already proven competence and leadership in other fields. For instance, Jessie Pearl Rice was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Women’s Army Corps, and was deputy director of the organization when she enrolled. The administration was adamant that coeducation was an experimental “wartime concession,” according to a 1943 article in The Washington Post. However, as women’s roles in the State Department expanded, so did the class size.

Students expressed skepticism about women’s academic abilities despite their presence in other schools. “Tradition Crumbles: College Adds Girls” read a headline of The Hoya in September 1968, a year before the first class of women was admitted and the Voice was founded. Even a pro-coeducational Hoya editorial published in May 1968 was accompanied by a comic depicting a surprised Jesuit cutting open a cake as a woman jumped out at him from inside. In that same issue, a letter to the Editor decrying coeducation as “Degeneracy!” was printed, complaining, “Is nothing sacred?”

The general attitude toward women on Georgetown’s campus was narrow-minded. When the first female switchboard operators were employed in June 1938, a faculty member reportedly thought he had the wrong number upon hearing the woman’s voice on the phone. In April 1964, when it was rumoured that a female student was aiding in research in the Astronomy Department, The Hoya excitedly published a short article referring to her as “femme” and a “wench.”

Another challenge women faced as their numbers grew on campus, even before the College opened to women, was the issue of housing. Georgetown was struggling even then to meet housing needs for all students, and it was the women who were pushed off-campus first in order to make room. Female student enrollment was rapidly rising, and mixed dormitories were not yet an option until Copley Hall’s third floor housed women in 1969. In all of 1957, there had been 373 total female students—in four short years, the number increased to 484. In the 1960-61 academic year, women were sent to the Meridian Hill Hotel in Northwest D.C. in order to accommodate student needs. The now-defunct SFS publication The Courier reported as early as February 1959 that “Female Housing is Subject of Student Council Discussion,” although, ironically, the one female member of the Student Council was not present at the meeting. When Darnall Hall was built in 1965, it was a step forward—although it was outfitted with a larger parlor area in which to receive dates, as well as special hair-washing equipment.

In the December 1965 edition of The Courier, a male student using the name King Sparrow wrote a piece in which he asked Georgetown women to question whether a college education was truly beneficial. “Women who do continue in the traditionally masculine pursuits of…professional life,” he wrote, “often surrender a good part of their female essence… are you as females learning the potency of your distinctly womanly characteristics?”

In the rebuttal in the same issue of The Courier entitled “B.S. or MRS?” by Louise Lague, Father Joseph Sebes, then Active Dean of the School of Business Administration, embodied the attitude of the times. While conceding that female students, “being women…naturally want to find the right man,” he agreed with the author that women at Georgetown value their education for education’s sake, choosing to study independently of whether going to college presented an opportunity to find a husband and get married.

***

The circumstances surrounding the decision to make the College coeducational were unusual. The expansion was largely prompted by the demand to meet rising costs, wrote Susan Poulson (GRAD ‘90) in Going Coed: Women’s Experiences in Formerly Men’s Colleges and Universities, 1950-2000. Lauinger Library was to cost $6 million to build, the number of academic programs was growing, and women offered a new financial base for the University’s expanded ambitions. There were very few internal disputes, although there was surprise on the part of the University and the public.

“GU Offers Languages to Girls” trumpeted The Washington Post in 1943, when SFS began to admit women. “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” blared a Hoya headline in 1966. Until the late 1980s, women at Georgetown were consistently referred to as “girls,” as opposed to the “men” in both off- and on-campus publications, infantilizing the female students and only reinforcing the notion that women’s education was to be viewed as a frivolous exercise.

Contrary to this view, women actually had to work harder to get to the Hilltop than their male counterparts. According to the Georgetown University Office of Admissions Annual Report in July 1969, the first fifty women admitted to Georgetown averaged in the 92nd high school percentile. The men in the same admissions pool averaged in the 78th percentile.

In the early years of coeducation, female students were constantly monitored: The 1967 edition of the administration-written guidebook Miss ‘G’ Goes to Georgetown stated, “Your bed must be made and your room in order by 11 A.M.…room checks will be made twice weekly and demerits assigned for disorderly rooms by a member of the Residence Staff.” Women were also expected to dress modestly, with the 1966 Miss ‘G’ prohibiting women from wearing pants and shorts outside the dormitories, except on Saturdays. Needless to say, the standards for male students was much lower: The ‘G’ Book for men only required that “Georgetown gentlemen are expected to keep their rooms neat and orderly.”

The integration itself was largely uneventful. Although The Hoya mockingly entreated female students to remove “frilly things” from their windows in the event of an alumni visit, there were no highly publicized bias-related incidents on campus.

As told to Poulson, the first female graduate of the College, Maria Angermeier (COL ‘72), reported being treated with some “subtle hostility” by students and professors. But, she added that “there was nothing directed toward me in particular…I really can’t make any generalizations about the experience.” Students happily adapted to the coeducational life. Patricia Reuckel, the former Dean of Women, said in 1975, “There is no longer a mystique about male and female qualities because students like to know one another as persons, friends, classmates, not as future mates and sex objects.”

Sexual relations between students were strictly monitored. There were curfews for both men and women, but women were expected to be home half an hour before men. Although other schools loosened their intervisitation policies, in part due to the sexual revolution and in part due to student pressure, “at Georgetown, men were not permitted above the first floor of the women’s dorm, and women were not allowed in the men’s dorms ‘unless accompanied by a Jesuit,’” wrote Poulson.

In the 1966 Hoya article “The GUNS Girl—Balancing Binge and Brain to Combat Conformity,” the main topic of debate was whether allowing liquor in female dormitories would lead to an increase in sexual activity. The article reinforced stereotypes about heterosexual relationships, quoting students who said, “A boy’ll go out and have his fun and everything, but when it comes time to getting married, he wants his wife to be a virgin,” and citing the existence of “a list of girl’s [sic] names stating whether they’re easy or not, and their qualities and such.”

This attitude is not surprising considering the on-campus culture previous to the integration of women. The Hoya published a series of articles on the local girls’ schools, their cultures, their curricula, and, most importantly, whether the girls were open to dating male Georgetown students. The caption under a photo of girls at Immaculata Preparatory School, a Catholic school that shuttered its doors in 1968, read, “The Immaculata girl dates even American U. boys,” showing that some prejudices never die.

***

A long history surrounds the admission of women to Georgetown’s undergraduate and graduate programs, and the narrative is not yet over. Although in recent years Georgetown has rocked the boat with social justice initiatives such as the LGBTQ Resource Center, its traditional Catholic identity has hampered certain women’s rights initiatives. Both students and faculty faced challenges as they attempted to break the stained-glass ceiling.

The Georgetown University Women’s Center was established by students in the 1989-90 academic year. Specifically, the students founded the center because they saw “students facing difficulties…women’s health, violence, or eating disorders…and they wanted there to be a place on campus where women could go to deal with those particular problems, and would collect resources to help them deal with those problems,” said Nancy Cantalupo, the Director of the GUWC from 1995-2003.

The first GUWC office was in a small converted closet in New South, with a part-time coordinator position added in 1995. Over the next two years, Cantalupo worked with students to accomplish a number of goals. In addition to working toward establishing events such as Take Back the Night on campus, the Center lobbied hard for better office space as well as to add a full-time director to the program. The GUWC moved to the Leavey Center in 1997. Support for the Center “ebbed and flowed” depending on leadership, with budgets and salaries contingent on the religious views of the Dean of Students. “There were certainly [women] who found the campus to be unfriendly at the time,” Cantalupo said.

“Over the time that I was Women’s Center Director,” she added, “I definitely…felt like women’s issues were more prominent on-campus, and some programs like Take Back the Night developed that were really widely attended by students and were major, central events on campus, and I think that raises the visibility of women’s issues on campus.”

Speaking about Georgetown’s Catholic affiliation, Cantalupo emphasized the importance of serving all women on campus. “The idea was to provide services and promote a safe space for all women on campus…we basically tried to stay away from hot-button issues because we did see ourselves as having a mission to serve all women…To the extent that we could, we focused on issues that were less divisive.”

Another important aspect of generating conversation about women’s issues on-campus was the development of what would become the Women and Gender Studies program. Professor Pamela Fox came to Georgetown as an English professor in Feminist Literary Theory in 1990. As she wrote in an email to the Voice, “The program’s founding was absolutely essential to creating a climate that made feminist inquiry even possible at Georgetown… I was…not in on the ground floor of that initial Women’s Studies program founded in the 1980s but I benefitted from, witnessed, as well as contributed to its impressive, dogged development through the ‘90s, which accomplished some major milestones that made its institutionalization possible. It was exhilarating to be a part of that work.”

Fox expanded on the issues pertaining specifically to the Women and Gender Studies program: “Although it’s now thriving, I would love to see the University commit more resources to all of its interdisciplinary programs, allowing them to become full-fledged Departments with the capacity to hire their own, stable tenure-line faculty.”

The struggles of Mary Anne Summerfield, who was rejected from a position teaching physics at Georgetown in June 1954 because only men were employed as faculty, seem distant in the 21st century. But, just over a decade ago, in April 1992, only six women were elected to the Georgetown University Student Association, the highest number elected up until that point.

Miss ‘G’ still has a long road to walk to achieve absolute parity, but in the 42 years that Georgetown has been completely open to women, everyone can agree strides have been made in the right direction.  As Poulson put it, “The presence of women adds weight to the influence of feminism on and off campus. The presence of women in the student body gives rise to the need for more women faculty…Women and feminism have changed Georgetown…not only as places but also as processes, for education is ultimately a process of personal and social change.”

The post The vagina dialogue: Women’s integration at Georgetown appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

My after-school shopping retreats went from the thrift store Housing Works on East 23rd St. to chain stores like H&M and Zara. Not surprisingly, I didn’t want to look like everyone else. The megalithic fashion factories could not quench my sartorial thirst. With only the vintage boutique Annie Cream Cheese within proximity, I anxiously awaited the occasional weekend trip home to New York City where I would reserve at least an entire day to get thrifty. But being persistent as I am, I did frequent the District’s then-meager vintage shop circuit, and established a superficial relationship with a saleswoman who called me whenever something “good” came in.

Even so, it was nothing like New York, a candyland for any fashionista. I couldn’t walk down the street and find an oversized sherpa vest from the 1970s or casually come across a Mulberry Alexa designer bag for less than a fraction of the original price. I couldn’t pour my heart out to store owners about that one satchel that I had been yearning for, and have them empathize with me. But as a consummate “thrifter”—a patron of specialty discount thrift stores and vintage boutiques—and college student, I became too broke to indulge in frequent weekend trips to Manhattan, and I decided to give this city another chance. After all, D.C. had eventually become home. This past weekend, I took a special trip for this feature, back up to New York, and around the Washington D.C. thrifting scene I had reluctantly become acquainted with.

It had been a while since I made one of my usual downtown thrifting rounds, so I decided to revisit some old haunts. New York City boasts an unparalleled diversity when it comes to secondhand trade. It is home to a large number of thrift stores right in the heart of Manhattan, in addition to a network of vintage and consignment boutiques. And although the industry has been around much longer than it has in D.C., success remains unwavering. Even on a blustery day in February, with temperatures below freezing, every thrift and vintage shop on East 23rd St was bursting at the seams. Customers even had to be thrown out by management (including your intrepid writer who was caught indulging in some heavily discounted Helmut Lang) after closing time had passed.

Customers in the Big Apple are cutthroat. “We have not had one window for the past month that has not sold out. Individual objects go on sale every other week, and since the anticipation builds up, 10 a.m. on the day that it goes on sale, it sells out,” said Tatiana Smith, an employee at City Opera Thrift Shop on 23rd St. The same goes for Housing Works, another thrift store with outlets all over Manhattan. The items in the windows are only available for auction, and almost always sell out. There is such a quick turnover that you can stop by a few times in a week and you will see completely new sets of items.

A few purchases later I was back in the D.C. area, and decided to trek off the beaten path to discover what I had been missing. A friend who was similarly dissatisfied with the secondhand fare in the District told me to venture out, so I did.

On Monday morning, I walked into a vast warehouse: a bustling, noisy space with 30-foot high ceilings and a seemingly infinite number of overflowing aisles. Everything from second-hand underwear to floppy disk holders and rare vinyls took up temporary residence here, like a humane society for knick-knacks. As I waded through the musty sea of sweaters and old soccer cleats, I almost crashed into young shirtless boy tearing through the store. His mother soon caught up and handed him a pile of worn, oversized t-shirts to try on. I had arrived at a traditional thrifting epicenter.

Located in a strip mall about 14 miles outside of D.C., Unique Thrift runs solely on donated items. “If we have donations, then only our business will go up,” said Kamala, who declined to give a last name, a store manager at Unique Thrift. In exchange for donations, customers are awarded points that can go toward their future purchases. This system, along with a tax write-off, and the knowledge that profits are going toward charitable causes, serve as incentives for customers to donate their belongings. All of Unique Thrift’s profits go to the Lupus Foundation of America, American Veterans, and the National Children’s Center.

However, traditional charity thrift stores, as I came to discover, are rare in the District. “Because the rent is so high here you can’t be a charitable organization and have a superstore-sized Goodwill in the District and be able to pay for it … Around here you pay between I’d say $85 and $115 per square foot for retail rent, so you just can’t afford to be a charitable organization and be inside the city,” said Megan Gay, Manager of Junction Vintage & Resale Boutique on U St.

This is quite the opposite in Manhattan, where there is a plethora of thrift shops in all five boroughs. Just on the single 23rd St block between 2nd and 3rd Ave., there are five thrift stores, each one donating their profits to a unique cause.

In the District proper, however, there are only two thrift stores; Martha’s Table on 14th and V St., which benefits Food for Friends, and a Salvation Army way up above Howard University, almost at the D.C.-Maryland border.

Gay spelled out the distinction between thrift, vintage, and consignment. “Thrift [stores] accept donations and usually it benefits a specific charity in some … form, so either all of your profits or a portion of your profits have to go to charity. Whereas some place that’s like us that’s a vintage store, we go out and we do all of our own buying. We own all of the inventor … we clean it, we repair it, we bring it in.

“If some place is a consignment store, that means that individual clients bring their clothes in, and the brick-and-mortar consignment store resells it for them. The inventory actually belongs to the clients and the store sells it for them and then they split the profits,” said Gay. She explained that vintage stores each tend to have a focus, whereas consignment stores are essentially a physically present form of Ebay.

Thankfully, within the District, a more urban phenomenon is on the rise, one that is beginning to resemble the thrifting scene at home. Small, independent vintage and consignment boutiques have begun to crowd neighborhoods including the U St. Corridor, Adams Morgan, and Dupont Circle, forming a new camaraderie in the city’s growing neighborhoods.

“Up until three years ago it was us, Meeps, Annie Cream Cheese, and Remix [that] were the only four vintage stores in the District. Now, in this neighborhood there’s about 15,” said Gay.

Today, the District has become so saturated with vintage shops that Gay and her colleagues have stopped buying locally. “There’s such a glut of shops that are doing vintage, that we actually go far field … we go all the way up to New England, all the way down to Florida. We don’t shop in town anymore,” she said.

Gay attributes the surge of vintage in the District to a host of factors. The resilience of the economy in D.C. gives owners opportunities to open new shops. In addition to financial stability, “vintage and resale, and especially consignment, have become more popular because people realize that they have money in their closets.”

She also noted that “there was a definite difference when [Barack] Obama came into office. Style in D.C. just completely changed and people were willing to mix vintage into their wardrobes and do stuff with it.” Upon the President’s first inauguration, more and more people settled in the District. According to Gay, “It was who was working for him. It was younger. It’s not just Republican versus Democrat, it’s just the youth of the people that came to work for the administration.” D.C.’s changing demographic had a profound effect on the vintage business.

Another member of the vintage store community, Salvatore, concurs. Salvatore inherited the business now named Rock it Again from his mother. He migrated 3 years ago from New York to D.C. to join the District’s budding vintage industry. He placed particular emphasis on what he calls the new epicenter of thrifting: the U St. Corridor.

“I look at D.C. as what I would call the pond. If you throw a stone into a pond, that’s where the first ripple starts. It’s the biggest ripple, D.C. is the capital. I often tell people, look, this is where the money is,” said Salvatore.

He thinks U St. is going to follow in—and perhaps surpass—Georgetown’s footsteps as a major shopping district. “Stores don’t have a long shelf life in Georgetown,” he said. Rent is exorbitant, goods are overpriced, and the dearth of parking spots makes shopping difficult. Of U St., he said, “You have [the restaurant] Busboys and Poets up the street, and there is a ton of construction. This is becoming the new megacenter.”

Store owner Salvatore brings his own vintage philosophy to U St. He looks back at old Hollywood icons whose fame was bolstered through their trendsetting fashion choices, such as Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. “The good classic American pieces are the older pieces,” he claims. They do not exist in current retail outfitters. “So why not go for it again? That’s why it’s called Rock It Again.

“All the craftsmen actually created stuff for the human form,” Salvatore continued. “Older stuff was tapered to fit the contour of your body. Today everything is mass produced. You could get really tapered pieces, however you would have to pay a lot more.” Instead of succumbing to what he calls the “carbon copy syndrome” and buying what everyone else is, there is a growing desire to be unique. “With the advent of social media, for some reason, you see individualism coming out more.” Vintage gives you that something unique, as no two pieces are alike.

Salvatore’s philosophy became evident as I walked through his artfully constructed showroom. Old Ferragamo ties and shoes peak out of antique wooden armoires, thick tweeds and structured jackets hang alongside silk wrap dresses and slacks, and pearl earrings from the ‘50s shimmer atop the teak dresser.

A few blocks down in Adams Morgan, Cathy Chung, the manager of Meeps, has recently renovated her vintage boutique, which now caters to the young professional demographic of D.C. With reasonably priced fare, including vintage college t-shirts and sweatshirts, she hopes to “attract … people who live and go to school in the city.”

“There are a lot of great locally-owned boutiques in the area that people might not realize. It’s a great neighborhood to walk through.” She too has seen the increase in vintage shops in recent years and claims that “with the change in administration there was a demographic shift.” According to Chung, there are more young people “in tune with the urban lifestyle, and because of that there are more people who are interested in fashion and different types of fashion.”

All three managers are members of a supportive, tight-knit business community. Although they are all lumped into a monolithic vintage category, they each have their own niche, focus, or speciality. “For us it’s more important that people frequent our shops and neighborhoods versus going to big chain shops,” said Chung. Owners even send their customers to a neighboring shop to find something that they don’t have.

Such a spirit of camaraderie is unheard of in the Big Apple. New York City certainly boasts an unparalleled selection of secondhand fare, dispersed throughout a large number of thrift stores in the heart of Manhattan. The high turnover rate in merchandise—you can walk into a completely different store Friday than you visited Monday—ensures there is truly something for everyone. But this means it’s competitive. This means that if I call back on Thursday evening to ask about a bag I saw at Tokyo Joe on the Lower East Side on Tuesday afternoon, the woman scoffs at me on the phone. How silly of me, this is New York City.

However, New York has seen long-lived success, whereas the District has only recently launched its thrift/vintage/consignment endeavor. It simply does not have the resources to fill its streets with traditional charity thrift stores, so it’s making up for it with independent vintage boutiques. It is a numbers game, and D.C. is just going to have to catch up. Nonetheless, after a financially exhausting weekend, I found that we don’t have too far to go.

As I wandered through Salvatore’s store, my eye was immediately drawn to a Harley Davidson motorcycle leather jacket. Weighing at least 6 pounds, it carried with it the biker tales of its previous owner. Worn in from black to a deep charcoal gray, the jacket was embellished with a Harley logo and heavily lined with sheep’s wool. I would have never found this three years ago in D.C. Perhaps I will give this city another chance …

The post I’m gonna pop some tags: Thrifting adventures on the East Coast appeared first on The Georgetown Voice.

Kohli is one of many Georgetown students who have served as senior staff members for the North American Invitational Model United Nations, the largest student-led high school Model United Nations conference in the world. Not only do students from 21 states attend, but it also has international draw, with delegates making the trip from 19 different countries.

Organized by the Georgetown International Relations Association, the four-day conference allows high school students to engage in debate and dialogue about current affairs with guidance from members of the Georgetown International Relations Club.

NAIMUN, Ivy League Model United Nations Conference, and the Harvard Model United Nations, the three largest high school conferences, are held in January and February, with NAIMUN wrapping up the MUN season this weekend. MUN conferences are simulations of the various committees within the United Nations, such as the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council. Students are encouraged to accurately role-play the countries they are assigned, requiring both extensive research and the development of negotiation skills. NAIMUN was established in 1963, but unfortunately, records previous to the 46th conference have been lost—nonetheless, students continue to uphold and improve upon the MUN traditions.

This weekend, NAIMUN will celebrate its 50th anniversary.The milestone conference will include a few special elements. “We have a heavy 1963 theme, which was the first year NAIMUN was founded,” said Secretary-General Theresa Lou (SFS ‘14). “We have a present-day U.N. Security Council and we also have a 1963 U.N. Security Council. It makes delegates think about where we’ve been, and how we’ve gotten where we are.”

For this anniversary conference, there will be 38 committees comprised of 12 to 320 delegates. “We hit full capacity this year in September, which is earlier than ever before,” said Executive Director Cody Cowan (SFS ‘14). “We broke 2,000 delegates in August.”

The IRC and GIRA are two distinct organizations separate from the University. “GIRA is a nonprofit organization, technically not affiliated with Georgetown at all,” said Kohli, now GIRA Director of Marketing and Public Affairs [full disclosure: Kohli is a former Voice staffer]. “It’s our overarching corporation, which we run both of the [MUN] conferences through, so we have full ownership of it. IRC provides the volunteer talent of the people who staff these conferences.” The IRC is a University-affiliated group.

Regarding University involvement with GIRA and its conferences, various staffers described a positive, symbiotic relationship between GIRA and the University.

This year’s Director General Luke Young (MSB ‘15) decided to attend Georgetown after winning a scholarship in his fourth year attending the conference. GIRA gives a $1,000 scholarship to a student who writes a compelling essay about his or her passion for MUN. Regarding his scholarship, Young said, “I was happy to reach out to [NAIMUN] and say … ‘You can just send it over to the registration office because I’m coming to Georgetown.’”

NAIMUN Chief of Staff Thomas Larson (SFS ‘13) also credits his matriculation at Georgetown to his contact with the conference. “It’s the best thing Georgetown students put together, in my opinion,” Larson said. “We make the Hilton that weekend feel like the center of the universe for those kids. They feel like they have the entire world at their fingertips, and they kind of do. That’s the weekend where the kids who are passionate and care about international affairs, the speakers, the politicians—the nerds become the rock stars. It’s cool to care at NAIMUN.”

Larson noted that despite staff members obtaining letters excusing absences from the IRC’s faculty representative, professors are often concerned with the amount of class students miss in order to participate in NAIMUN. “Some professors do have a problem with it,” Larson said. “The main reason I discourage [going to class] is not because a missing staffer for an hour can really drag down a committee…[it] is because one of the best parts about NAIMUN is that you can get sucked into that world we call the ‘NAIMUN bubble.’”

This dedication is a facet Larson deeply values about the conference. “There’s something very beautiful about that because in college, all of us feel pulled in six different directions—you have to worry about your career, your internship, your parents, your friends, your classes, your extracurriculars—and it’s important to multitask,” he said. “But at this conference, if you can let your entire consciousness settle on it. It’s just a great experience.”

“Being at Georgetown, we have such an excellence in substantive knowledge,” said Lou. “We are able to produce something that is unparalleled on the circuit, whether that is through crisis simulations, or just the way we guide them through their thought process. Seeing the conference planning … selecting topics for committees, getting chairs to write background guides for their delegates on time … it’s an experience like no other.  ”

Lou sees her leadership role as a way to give back to MUN, which she attributes as the reason for her acceptance to Georgetown. “MUN has given me so much that I feel further inspired to want to give back to the 3,000 high school kids that I can help shape, help inspire,” Lou said. “It’s obviously not an individual effort, but being able to spearhead such a movement where delegates can make a change, no matter how much time I give up, it’s worth it.”

Anupam Chakravarty (SFS ’10), who led NAIMUN XLVI, claims the conference shaped his leadership skills. “At 19 or 20, you’re not used to being able to build an institution,” Chakravarty said. “At Georgetown, as we’ve seen time and time again, whether it be Corp or GUASFCU, Hoyas get to build things; truly get to start from scratch and envision things in a new way.”

During his time as Secretary-General of NAIMUN XLVI, Chakravarty was responsible for implementing three essential elements of the conference. To begin with, his staff emphasized the idea of NAIMUN staff as a family. Second, Chakravarty said, “We added this really heavy Georgetown element we borrowed from other conferences, who would [invite] a cappella performances, to create Hilltop Madness. Even though we are not directly affiliated with Georgetown, we have Georgetown all over our programming.” Finally, his staff emphasized their model, “think globally, act locally”, by introducing a community service project into the conference’s program.

Cowan sacrificed studying abroad to help lead this conference. “I finally decided that passing up the opportunity was not worth it because there are few times in your life where you will be able to be a part of a family like NAIMUN’s,” Cowan said.

While there is a sense of community within the IRC, there is also a sense of competition. “We by nature are a competitive team,” said Kohli, “but I don’t think that’s native to the IRC. I think Georgetown is an extremely competitive, ambitious university … IRC is unique in that it has a lot of avenues for leadership. There’s a lot of different ways to be intense.”

Within the IRC, tensions can arise through working long hours on conferences, particularly NAIMUN. “One of the hardest parts can be once you get in the trenches with your friends,” said Larson, “You get to a point where there’s actually a challenge in front of you both and somebody has a different way to approach it than the other does and you actually do have to deal with real conflict of ideas … that can be a challenge to separate that from everything else and find a logical way through it.”

However, he notes the success of NAIMUN is due to the successful navigation of such a divergence of opinions. ”I think part of the evidence we do such a good job of it is that no one notices it,” said Larson. “That disharmony comes into this collective whole that seems pretty seamless.

Larson isn’t the only one who has noticed NAIMUN’s streamlined planning—it has been consistently ranked as the most competitive conference on the high school MUN circuit.

Kohli attributes the conference’s success to its appeal to every type of delegate, as well as the consistency of having strong Georgetown leaders. “The impression that we’ve left in terms of the circuit is that no matter what happens, you’ll always have a substantially strong conference,” she said. “We’re very lucky that we go to a school where people are so interested in politics and government and security and crisis, so we will always be a great feeder school for something like MUN.”

That dedication keeps the conference going even during the most trying times. “We ran this conference in Snowpocalypse, three years ago, where you started day one with 33 percent [of the attendees] and ended still making tens of thousands of dollars in philanthropy money,” Kohli said. “It still was an amazing conference. It amounts to dedication, and it amounts to we know what we’re doing.”

Young, who also helps coordinate feature articles for BestDelegate, a website devoted to MUN conferences, emphasized the scope of Georgetown’s MUN program. “Georgetown has a stellar reputation pretty much everywhere,” he said. “On the high school circuit, we’re probably thought of as the best, or one of the best, conferences.”

GIRA also organizes another conference for college students, the National Collegiate Security Conference. Young described the program: “We specialize in small committees moving at a very quick pace with moving elements such as crises that delegates have to respond to. That’s sort of our niche on the college circuit … we’re seen as one of the most challenging conferences.”

Though proud of the program’s success, Larson sees the competitive nature of MUN as potentially detrimental. “The competition aspect is something I’m hoping that MUN in general gets away from,” he said. “At the end of the day, if MUN is competitive, it loses what it’s meant to be … It’s not a competition as much as it is an educational and cultural activity with a competitive element.”

Aside from logistical excellence, Larson stressed other components crucial in NAIMUN’s continued success. “We’re good at creating a great out-of-committee experience with a dance and Hilltop Madness, and we really do give delegates a lot of opportunities to explore D.C.,” she said. “But I think what makes us number one is that we have the bigger picture in mind when we craft this whole conference, and that’s what MUN is supposed to be and what role it’s supposed to play in education in high school.”

While the BestDelegate website notes excellence in both the competition and entertainment aspects of NAIMUN, Larson says there are certain factors that are ignored. “This wouldn’t be something outside rankers would recognize, [but] we really do keep the ideals of MUN itself at heart,” he said. “I think some of that has to come from our Jesuit background, in that we’re dedicated to justice and things like that.

Beyond organizing NAIMUN, the Georgetown IRC is dominant in college-level MUN as well. The IRC’s traveling conference team is currently ranked first in the country, according to BestDelegate. Unlike at other schools, IRC members must reapply to go to every conference. Led by Dane Shikman (SFS ‘13), the team has consistently won Best Delegation and Outstanding Delegation, as well as Best and Outstanding delegates, at conferences such as McGill Model United Nations in Montreal, University of Pennsylvania Model United Nations Conference, Boston Area Model United Nations, and the Security Council Simulation at Yale. Additionally, the team is attending Harvard’s WORLDMUN in Melbourne, Australia for the first time this year.

But Georgetown is known not only for winning. It’s also known for how it wins.

“Part of the reason we do so well is because we continue to do this activity for the love of it rather than for the glory we get,” Larson said. “That’s kind of a bonus, or an affirmation of what we’re doing, but our ultimate goal is not to go dominate everyone at a competition, it’s to learn and to get better at these skills. And I think because we focus on the right things, we remain successful.”

Through the years, the Georgetown team has developed a friendship with the University of Pennsylvania’s MUN squad. University of Pennsylvania student Yadavan Mahendraraj, Secretary-General of the Ivy League Model United Nations Conference, has experienced Georgetown’s planning expertise himself.

“Funnily enough, my first conference ever freshman year was NAIMUN,” said Mahendraraj. “I can say this because we didn’t go to ILMUNC at my high school, NAIMUN was by far the best conference we went to. I still have a lot of respect for NAIMUN.”

Though the University of Pennsylvania’s International Affairs Association is very similar to Georgetown’s IRC, Mahendraraj notes one main difference. “The presence of the SFS at Georgetown lets them do something that’s different to us in that they turn away staff members [who apply],” he said. “They try out for their team, and [at Penn] as soon as you staff our conferences you’re allowed to go on a trip. We take everyone and have a larger staff. It’s an interesting difference.”

Mahendraraj describes both universities as ones that push innovation rather than adapt to the circuit. “As the largest conferences, we have an outside effect on how the world perceives MUN. If we do it, or if NAIMUN does it, it’s almost accepted or it becomes mainstream pretty fast,” he said.

NAIMUN’s 50th conference is a testament to the dedication the staffers have put into the extensive process of planning the conference year after year—the spirit of service permeates the attitudes of NAIMUN staffers. “The reason I love NAIMUN is because of what it gives back to high school students,” said Executive Assistant Jennifer Zink (SFS ‘15), whose immersion in NAIMUN and IRC occurred early on in her Georgetown career.

No matter what the future holds, Chakravarty says he’s confident it will continue to educate and inspire politically-minded high schoolers for ages to come.

“NAIMUN has consistently put Georgetown out there to the world and made us part of a really important conversation about youth empowerment,” he said. “I’m so glad to see that continues to grow stronger and stronger every year.”

Editor’s Note: The Voice incorrectly identified the founding year of NAIMUN as 1953 instead of 1963. This, among other errors, has been corrected in the online version of the article.

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This feature is a report of our findings. It is not intended to be a scientific representation of Georgetown’s politics or speak to the specific policy preferences of each student. Rather, the questions were designed to leave some room for ambiguity and to shed light on the underlying political ideologies of different segments of the student body. The full results of the survey are available at georgetownvoice.com.

Responses indicate that Georgetown students on the whole identify more frequently with the Democratic Party than the national average. Dems are the plurality here with 42 percent, and non-affiliated, or, independents, comprise the second largest group with 29 percent. Less than a quarter of respondents consider themselves Republicans. 2 percent consider themselves Libertarian, and 2 percent described themselves as “other.” 1 percent say they belong to the Green Party. Gallup poll numbers from January 2013 indicate a third of the national population is registered Democrat, about 38 percent is Independent, and slightly more than a quarter is Republican.

Overall the respondents tended to be liberal, especially on social issues, but there seems to be more economic progressivism on campus than the typical Georgetown moniker “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” would suggest.

For instance, a majority of respondents (around 60 percent) say they disagree or strongly disagree with the statements that regulation of business is usually harmful and that “poor people rely too much on government assistance programs.” 71 percent disagree or strongly disagree with the idea that the rich are too highly taxed.

On the social side, 78 percent support increasing limits on the sales of firearms. The same percentage of respondents approve of protecting the environment at the cost of economic growth. Slightly less than three-quarters believe that not only does immigration benefit the US, but that immigration laws should also be made less restrictive.
More than 80 percent agreed that same-sex marriage should be legalized and that healthcare should be more affordable and accessible. Close to 67 percent of respondents disagree or strongly disagree that abortion should be illegal in most cases.

“College students tend to lean left, so that Democrats dominate at 42 percent at Georgetown is not surprising,” said Matthew Carnes, S.J., an assistant professor in the Government Department. Referring to the Gallup poll numbers, he also said that independents outnumber Republicans nationally as well, so that result is not surprising.

“Because Georgetown tends to draw, in many cases, from a more educated and, in some cases, affluent background, I would expect that [norm] to be tempered more to the right,” he said, comparing Georgetown students to other college students.

On issues of national security, however, the University is almost evenly split. 52 percent of respondents do not believe counter-terrorism measures infringe upon citizens’ civil liberties, while 48 percent believe that they do. 48 percent also disagree or strongly disagree with the statement that the U.S. military should play a significant role as a global peacekeeper, with the rest of the respondents agreeing or strongly agreeing.
Respondents are also divided on the issue of whether the primary social responsibility of a company is the interest of shareholders: 47 percent reported that they agree or strongly agree with this claim, while 53 percent disagreed.

The schools vary widely in terms of their political beliefs, with the McDonough School of Business and the School of Nursing and Health Studies reporting more conservative responses than the College and the School of Foreign Service. Each school varies on which political party dominates its population. About half of the respondents from the College and NHS are Democrats, while more of the MSB respondents identify as Republicans than any other party. While Democrats are the majority in the SFS, the school has the highest percentage of independents, at about 35 percent.

MSB respondents agree with conservative views on fiscal issues, but lean toward more liberal stances on social concerns. About 62 percent of these respondents say government regulation of business is usually harmful, compared to the University-wide rate of 32 percent. Almost 39 percent of MSB respondents also believe the rich are too highly taxed, while the overall rate is 29 percent.

“MSB students are more tuned in to the ramifications of the fiscal crisis, recession, and crippling debt, and recognize the need for realistic solutions to the problems our economy continues to face,” said Mallory Carr (COL ‘15), Vice Chair of the College Republicans.

MSB responses match the overall rates more closely in regards to social concerns, though they are still slightly more conservative. Almost 72 percent, compared with 78 percent overall, agree or strongly agree the government should protect the environment, even if it has negative effects on the economy. About 72 percent of MSB respondents also favor the government making healthcare more affordable and accessible, compared with a school-wide rate of 81 percent. The school, however, overwhelmingly supports the use of the death penalty, with over 70 percent of respondents saying it should be an option for “the most heinous of crimes.”

The NHS were, for the most part, more conservative than MSB students on fiscal issues. 71 percent say that they agree or strongly agree that disadvantaged rely too much on government assistance, compared with about 63 percent of MSB respondents.

The NHS responses also tend to agree with conservative views on social issues more so than other schools. The school has the lowest rate of respondents supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage at about 71 percent—13 points lower than the University-wide rate. About 19 percent fewer NHS respondents supported the legalization of marijuana than the rest of the schools; the others average almost 69 percent of respondents supporting legalization.

The only exceptions to this trend are in their responses on abortion and the sale of firearms. About 62 percent of NHS respondents say they disagree or strongly disagree that abortion should be illegal in most cases. This response closely matched the school-wide rate, which is about 67 percent. Almost 80 percent also say that they believe the government should increase limits on the sales of firearms, a rate just 0.4 percent below that of the College.

The College respondents, on the other hand, agree mostly with liberal stances, though they are divided on national security issues, similar to the overall trend. Students in the College disapprove of the idea that regulation of business is usually harmful, with over 61 percent disagreeing. Over 65 percent say they do not believe the disadvantaged rely too much on government assistance, and over 62 percent disagree with the idea that the interest of shareholders is the primary social responsibility of a company.

The College and the SFS have similar rates of disagreement with the statement “the rich in the U.S. are too highly taxed;” both are just above 70 percent for students who disagree and strongly disagree.

On many social issues, the College supports liberal stances at a higher rate than any other school. Respondents support the legalization of same-sex marriage at almost 91 percent, close to 8 percentage points above the SFS and 20 above the NHS. The College also supports protecting the environment, even if it worsens the economy, at more than 81 percent. This is almost 4 percentage points above the SFS and about 10 above both the MSB and NHS. The College is about 6 percentage points lower than the SFS in supporting the idea that immigration should be less restrictive.

The SFS responses almost mirror those of the College. The biggest discrepancy between the two comes with the statement that the interest of shareholders is the primary social responsibility of companies—14 percent fewer in the SFS disagree with the statement than their College counterparts.

The same occurred with social issues, where the two schools did not vary more than 10 percentage points. About 60 percent of SFS respondents believe counter-terrorism measures infringe upon civil liberties, compared to about half of the College.

Georgetown students do not follow national trends when it comes to voting. 11 percent of respondents say they do not vote, while the national estimate shows more than half of young voters—ages 18 through 29—did not vote in the national election, according to a study by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

The NHS has the highest turnout rate; over 95 percent vote (though their respondent pool is much smaller than the rest and may therefore be less accurate). The MSB has the lowest voter turnout, with about 18 percent of respondents saying they do not vote. The respondents from the College and the SFS vote most often, over 40 percent in each school reporting they vote in every national, mid-term, and local election.
Students do not only vote to involve themselves in politics; exactly 60 percent of respondents report having participated in a political march, campaign, or protest.

College Democrats President Trevor Tezel (SFS ‘15) described his experience with the Obama campaign in 2012. “Especially as we got closer to the election it was pretty inspiring to see so many students out there every weekend,” he said, “even in the midst of midterms and schoolwork.”
SFS students have the highest rate of participation in such activities, at almost 70 percent. The College is slightly below that at 60 percent. Both the NHS and MSB have less than half of respondents participating in such activities, with about 42 and 36 percent, respectively.

The independent respondents, who make up about 29 percent of the student body, are the least politically active. Over 21 percent of them say they do not vote; this rate is surpassed only by 7 of the 13 students who identify their political party as “other.” Independents also have the lowest rate of respondents who say they have been involved in a political march, campaign, or protest. Almost 42 percent say they have not been involved with any of those activities.

“I guess I am a little bit surprised it’s not higher,” Carnes said about the rate of student participation in political activities. “But having said that, in other environments I’ve been in, I’m willing to guess it’s lower there. To have more than half the student body participate in some way in elections and in campaigns, that’s pretty impressive.”

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