Darrel Evans’ nightly tour of two D.C. universities begins late on Thursday evening when he swings his bus past the corner of P Street and Wisconsin Ave. There he picks up a loquacious Howard University student named Takeisha Carr (HWD ‘09), then rumbles down the uneven pavement towards Dupont Circle. The evening glow of orange street lamps reveals a cross-section of Northwest: of the front gates of Georgetown University, the quaint Dupont row-house mansions and ugly lots on 7th Street, the beautiful but barred front doors in the Shaw neighborhood and finally, the looming brick complex of Howard University.
The youthful G2 bus driver is full of greetings and compliments for everyone who gets on the bus, and quips for all the regulars. But when asked to describe the differences between the Georgetown and Howard passengers he sees every day, he simply shrugs his shoulders.
“I can’t really say there’s been a difference or what is the difference,” he said. “I can tell you this, there’s no difference in the students. A student is a student.”
‘Our side of town’
Georgetown-Howard relations aren’t always quite as easy as Evans might suspect. Last September the bus-bound connection faced difficulties when a large fight broke out in front of Reiss Science Building between revelers leaving an inter-school party in Henle Village. In an interview with the Voice at the time, Keegan Johnson (COL ‘09) said that he was assaulted near the Reiss building’s steps after leaving a party in Henle 1. When DPS officers attempted to intervene, his assailants turned on the officers, Johnson said.
Three DPS officers were injured in the melee, Department of Public Safety Director Darryl Harrison said, including Officer Timothy Desmond, who suffered head lacerations and a concussion. Desmond has since left DPS.
Harrison said there have not been any breaks in the case since, but confirmed that students from American, George Washington, and Howard Universities had been at the party. Television news reports at the time suggested that Howard students had been responsible for the assault.
Carr, who said she was present at the party, disputed those accounts.
“It really wasn’t the Georgetown students versus the Howard students,” she said. “The way the news portrayed it was that the hoodlums came to your school and it got all crazy, but … that wasn’t how it went.” In fact, she said, the fight was started by a non-Georgetown student who provoked a Howard student to fight him.
Regardless of the details of the case, the fight became a topic of discussion and media attention on campus. The issue of guests and Georgetown’s status as an open campus was raised, and concerns about safety persisted.
“That sort of skewed my view slightly,” said Margot Cardwell (SFS ‘09), who has visited Howard’s campus. “There’s sort of a lapse in the connection there,” she said, referring to the relationship between the two schools.
At Howard, where 85 percent of the student population describes itself as black/non-Hispanic, the incident stirred up concerns about the school’s image in D.C.
Candyce Paylor-Anderson (HWD ‘05) wrote in the Sept. 21 issue of The Hilltop, the University’s student newspaper, that she was appalled at the possibility that Howard students were involved in the incident.
“If this is true, then once again, we have given others [the chance] to look at the only Black University in the nation’s capital negatively,” Paylor-Anderson wrote.
The response five days later was just as acerbic.
“Should we be penalized for wanting to have a good time when we weren’t in the wrong?” Brittney Quarles (HWD ‘10), who said she was at the party, wrote in a letter to the editor. “And GT [Georgetown], nothing against you guys, but don’t worry, HU [Howard students] will gladly stay on our side of town.”
Across the park
Howard students bristle at the assumption that they were behind the fight—perhaps because they feel like they have heard it before.
Howard Vice Provost Orlando Taylor, attempting to describe the complex perceptions that the two institutions have of one another, said that Howard students sometimes feel unwelcome in the Georgetown neighborhood. It remains common knowledge, if non-discussed knowledge he said, that the neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park “connote race and class” in an elitist way even though the nightlife of M Street and Wisconsin seems more open to Howard guests, he said.
Georgetown’s elite reputation and high barriers to entry don’t help to smooth over that view.
“There’s a perception that Georgetown is a school of rich kids,” he said. “We know who can afford a $40,000 education, who scores well on SATs , and we know it ain’t minority students, generally.”
As the bus neared Howard, Carr offered an account of the schools’ relationship that fell along very similar lines. She works in a Georgetown shoe store but has come to campus only a handful of times. For her, the divide between the two neighborhoods is evidenced by the greater number of police on Georgetown’s streets. On the night of the Final Four game between Georgetown and Ohio State, for example, she noted the large contingent of Metropolitan Police Department officers deployed on Georgetown’s streets to provide security amidst the expected pandemonium. When she went home to her neighborhood near Howard, however, she was greeted with the unmistakable pop of gunfire outside her window and no police in sight.
Even before last September’s fight, she said, some Howard students felt unwelcome at Georgetown.
“Even though we’re on the same side of town, we’re in different parts of the same side of town,” she said.
On the flip side, Taylor noted, majority-white Georgetown students appear to think they are even more unwelcome at Howard, both because they are entering a school where their majority status is reversed and because they think that their cross-town neighbor has inferior academic programs.
“I feel more reticence on the part of whites coming to Howard than on the part of blacks going to Georgetown,” he noted.
His portrait of the Georgetown-Howard relationship is bolstered by the numbers. Since 1964, the two schools have been part of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area, which is composed of 15 area schools that include Georgetown, Howard, George Washington, Gallaudet, George Mason, Catholic U. and the University of Maryland.
The program allows students of any of the schools to take classes at any one of the other member schools.
The flow of Consortium students between Georgetown and Howard, however, has been oriented in the direction of Georgetown and remains limited. In the 2006-07 school year, for example, four Howard undergraduates have come to study at Georgetown, according to University Registrar John Q. Pierce. Nine Georgetown undergrads have gone to Howard, but all have limited themselves to attending the school’s Air Force ROTC program, which is not offered by Georgetown.
The current exchange of graduate students is “in the same order of magnitude,” Pierce said.
Over the course of the year, Georgetown took in 217 undergraduate and graduate students from the Consortium, and sent off 175, according to Pierce.
With the limited visibility of the Consortium, the two schools remain relatively isolated from one another. No Georgetown students interviewed for this story had seriously pursued taking a class through the Consortium at Howard.
Amoy Frost (HWD ‘08), who was also on the G2 Thursday night, said that she would hang out more often with Georgetown students if she knew more of them. She said she was reluctant to make assumptions about the school merely on the basis of the September fight.
“It’s more that I don’t have any associations with that school,” she said.
The gulf between the two schools is deepened by the fact that Georgetown does not have a Metro stop and has long been more involved with the politics of the federal government than with the city government.
“To me it is utterly unconscionable that we’ve been in this town longer than this town has existed, and we’re quite isolated from the community,” Jim Schaefer, an associate dean in Georgetown’s graduate school said. The degree of institution-to-institution interactions on both the student and faculty levels remain too low, he said.
Ashley Turner (NHS ‘07) was not alone when she said that she knew little about Howard other than the fact that it is a historically black college.
“I don’t even know where in D.C. it actually is,” she said.
A new partnership
Aside from differences in the makeup of their respective student bodies, the schools in some ways share more similarities than differences. Like Georgetown, Howard is a historically elite college that rises above its surrounding neighborhood atop a sloping hill. As Taylor notes, its student body is solidly middle class and is drawn from across the nation and the world.
“I would say that it’s a typical medium-sized research institution,” Taylor said.
And although Howard ranks significantly lower than Georgetown on national college rankings (U.S. News and World Report ranks it 88th, as opposed to Georgetown, which is 23rd) and is less selective, it has long been regarded as one of the best, if not the best, historically black college in the country. It is also significantly less expensive. Tuition for the 2006-7 school year was $11,490 compared with $33,552 at Georgetown.
Just as Georgetown is often characterized as the flagship Jesuit college, Howard is cast in the same role in the context of the African-American community.
Those similarities may finally be recognized as the two schools launch the G2 Project, the brain child of a collaboration between Taylor, who is also the dean of Howard’s graduate school, and Schaefer.
According to Schaefer, the program will support the exchange of two graduate teaching assistants from each university each semester. The grad students will fill a teaching role that their respective host institutions would be unable to provide themselves. Ph.D. and M.A. students from Howard will teach classes to less-advanced students at Georgetown, and vice-versa, Schaefer said.
Taylor said the program, if it is successfully institutionalized, may be the first of its kind in the country. A similar program, with Penn State, failed several years ago due to the geographical distance between the schools.
The program intends to build on the inherent strengths of each institution. As examples, both Schaefer and Taylor noted that Howard will be able to send over Ph.D. candidates in English, education, and mathematics since Georgetown does not have Ph.D. programs in those disciplines. Georgetown, conversely, will be able to send over students from its strong public policy, government and philosophy programs.
Taylor said that the academic strength of Howard programs often win over Georgetown students who are worried they are “taking a step down” in quality.
“When they [Georgetown students] come, they’re often pleasantly surprised,” he said.
The program will cost the schools little and allow graduate students access to teaching opportunities in front of audiences to which they are not accustomed to lecturing. Taylor noted the program will prep graduates for academic careers at institutions that are vastly different from the one from which they received their own degrees.
It reflects the direction of higher education in general, Taylor noted.
“Partnerships are almost becoming a norm in higher education,” he said.
Partnership between Howard and Georgetown has already proved its utility in the field of scientific research, where faculty from both universities have long collaborated. Taylor said that medical researchers have been interested in genetically-influenced diseases that tend to occur more often among African-American populations. These projects draw interest from Georgetown researchers, Taylor said.
First-year Georgetown Medical School student Matt Ronan knew little about research opportunities at Howard but said he was excited by the idea of cooperation between the schools.
Katherine McGraw, for one, has made the graduate jump from Georgetown to Howard. McGraw, who is white, received her M.A. in Liberal Studies from Georgetown and is now seeking a Ph.D. in l8th century literature from Howard, even as she juggles the demands of an administrative position in its graduate school.
A foundation for something more?
Schaefer and Taylor are dreaming big, and hope to see this as the first step in a new chapter of collaboration between the two universities.
Schaefer said that graduate schools are in a unique position to reach across traditional barriers that divide undergraduate institutions. Among talented students focused single-mindedly on the goal of research, he said, traditional sports rivalries and socio-economic barriers tend to melt away.
For his part, Taylor hopes that collaboration will expand from its rich role in the world of local science research, and affect full-time faculty aspirations for research on both ends of the G2 bus line.
“We will have set the stage for collaborations of a much richer nature,” he said.
It was not by accident that Taylor and Schaefer seized on the motif of the G2 to describe plans for a new collaboration between the schools. Interaction between the schools is an obvious, if vastly underutilized resource that stares Georetown students in the face every time the bus roars past with “Howard University” illuminated in orange on its front. Schaefer said he would “bet you dollars to doughnuts that no one takes it the whole way.”
On that point, at least, he exaggerates a little. Darrel Evans, the impartial bus driver, can testify to that.
He said that his college student-passengers on the G2 make it a far easier trip to navigate than the 70 routes he drives weekly that go through some of the roughest parts of town. Evans looks forward to the opportunity to strike up a conversationshy;—or receive a smile—from any one of the number of cute college girls who get on at both ends of the line.
The bus can be rowdy on weekends—Evans notes that he tries to let party-goers have a good time on their ride through D.C.
“[I say] do whatever you want, just take the body with you,” he jokes.
Every so often he has to tell an overly enthusiastic party-goer that he’s heard enoughshy;—a cake walk compared to the confrontations he has had with knife-wielding passengers in other parts of the city.
As for the perception of a Georgetown-Howard divide, he would have dismissed it with a wave of his hand—if he wasn’t at that moment carefully guiding the bus through the narrow passes of O Street.
“No real difference, it’s just each thinks it’s better,” he said. “They all have the same thing in mind: money or knowledge or going out to parties.”
Additional reporting by Michael J. Bruns, Keenan Steiner and Sam Sweeney.
