Walking through Red Square yesterday, I happened to overhear a conversation that the two guys behind me were having. “Dude, where are you living this year?” one kid asked his friend. “LXFar, man,” the other kid replied.
As a resident of the maligned building myself, I feel his pain. But lately, rumors have been floating around campus that the University is trying to discourage the disparaging nickname by forcing students to refer to LXR and Nevils as “East Campus.”
In a similar vein, many Southwest Quad residents have convinced themselves that Resident Assistants and campus officials are bent on making them call their home “MKR” to more appropriately honor the people the buildings are named after.
But are the new nicknames a University policy, or just an irritating idea that paranoid students have interpreted as a threat to their autonomy?
“There’s nothing really official, I don’t think, in any of the terminology,” East Campus Hall Director Natasha Basey Pedroza said.
While Basey Pedroza chooses to refer to her place of work as East Campus, it’s just a preference, and she said Residence Life has no actual policy on the name issue.
The same holds true for the brick monolith across from Leo’s. According to Reynolds Hall Assistant Hall Director LeNaya Crandall, MKR is not necessarily preferred over Southwest Quad or vice versa.
“As far as I know, it’s pretty much half and half,” she said. “I’ve heard it interchangeably, to be honest.”
While I’ve personally never heard anyone use MKR without joking, there’s clearly no vendetta against referring to it as the Quad. And no one seems too concerned with honoring Mr. Reynolds, Mr. McCarthy, and Mr. Kennedy, either; Crandall doesn’t even know who they are. “I just know they donated money,” she said.
Maybe Hoyas are so quick to criticize ridiculous measures that actually are enforced, like weekly meal plans for sophomores or the poorly run add/drop waitlist, that they naturally assume that any hint of change in campus life is initiated by the administration.
But in the case of dorm nomenclature, the conspiracy theory doesn’t seem to apply. Not only is Residence Life not attempting to impose a particular naming system, they don’t even have a system to impose.
So whether you live in MKR or LXFar, call it whatever you want. For once, Georgetown isn’t trying to control you; stop whining and take advantage of it. A friend of mine who used to live in the Southwest Quad is trying to start a trend by calling his former residence the Squad. I’m all for it.
