Georgetown lost the Mount Vernon campus to George Washington University, once had the opportunity to buy the Cloisters and blew the chance to sell WGTB’s radio signal for $25 million. Even after all of those mistakes and poor choices, Georgetown hasn’t learned. The trend is about to continue: the choice to sell the Wormley school shows that this administration still hasn’t learned the lessons of Georgetown history.
The Wormley School on Prospect street has alternately served as a segregated school, a public school and a school for the learning impaired. For the last 10 years, though, it has simply been an abandoned building owned by the University. All attempts to do anything constructive with the building, from graduate student housing to the new home of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, were met with local opposition. Uncharacteristically, the University listened to the residents and has left the building vacant, a monument to indecision and poor management.
While we tend to give credence to residents’ complaints, it’s clear that turning Wormley into classrooms wouldn’t disrupt the neighborhood like other plans they’ve opposed. Normally, when the University is faced with a chance to compromise with residents, as with the recent decision to build a new boathouse for the crew team, it usually takes the path of most resistance, ignoring opponents in order to achieve its own ends. Now, the University, faced with rapidly declining space to expand, suddenly is willing to sell off property when 65 residents sign a petition?
It’s easy to suspect that the administration sees this as a quick fix for its financial problems, both Medical Center- and endowment-related, and an easy way to pick up a few million dollars and stop paying taxes on a building it isn’t using. It becomes even easier to suspect the University’s chronic inability to think in the long term is factored in.
To be sure, the University has cash-flow problems and an increasingly motivated living wage coalition to address. Both issues are going to require money to be solved. The answer, though, should not be a quick-fix that will present its own problems a few years down the road. A new capital fundraising campaign, cost-cutting in areas like executive salaries, and a willingness to creatively address these problems are all better solutions than setting up another roadblock for the future.
Georgetown administrators just aren’t learning from the past. If, as we hope, Georgetown continues to grow in excellence and prestige over the years, we will need more room to grow. It’s a shame that the administration forgets this in a hurried decision to fix a past mistake.
