When the Advisory Neighborhood Council approved the Student Bill of Rights last week, the first reaction of most Georgetown students was one of relief. The ANC proposal stated that Georgetown students should have “an equal opportunity” to participate in D.C.-area activities and “the right of University students to fully participate in community and civic affairs and opposes all illegal discrimination against citizens based upon matriculation status.”
Hooray! Now students’ rights are protected! Now the discrimination of Georgetown students in the D.C. will finally come to an end.
While the approval of the Student Bill of Rights is most definitely a welcome step in the right direction for Georgetown students, one has to wonder why such a bill of rights is necessary in the first place. Shouldn’t it be assumed that students have equal rights with other D.C. citizens? When was it decided by the greater Washington community that students did not possess the same rights as everybody else? Surely the fact that we even need to ask these questions reflects an underlying problem beneath student-community relations that needs to be directly addressed.
Some community members question whether Georgetown students are really discriminated against. To answer this, one only needs to look back a few years to the Office of Planning’s proposal to amend the D.C. Human Rights Law to place housing restrictions on University students. The proposal pushed for a limit to be placed on the number of Georgetown students allowed to reside in the 20007 zip code. It is unfortunate for students that the entire area immediately surrounding the University falls under this category.
Imagine if any other group had been specified in this amendment. Substitute “African-Americans” for “Georgetown University students” and one can only imagine the uproar that would ensue. This amendment ultimately was not approved, but one has to question the thought-process of the individuals who were unable to recognize the similarities of these situations.
Students losing their right to vote in local elections, students being forced to give the University records of their vehicle license plates, students having their disciplinary records made public … the list goes on. All these have been proposed in recent years by neighborhood organizations and all blatantly marginalize University students.
While some University neighbors see the inherent problems of such proposals, other community members fail to see any problem with making special legal restrictions on students’ rights. It is true that the majority of students at Georgetown do not permanently reside in the D.C. area, however, the fact that students live here for at least nine out of 12 months of the year should surely allow them the same rights of their neighbors.
Hopefully, with the approval of the Student Bill of Rights, the voicing of these sorts of proposals will cease to occur. In the simplest terms, the approval of the Student Bill of Rights is a success for Georgetown students. However, it is ridiculous that this sort of document was necessary in the first place. Instead, the equal rights of students should have been assumed and respected from the very beginning.
