I’ll admit that, upon first hearing about GUSA President Pat Dowd’s (SFS ‘09) ambitious $40,000 Summer Fellows program, which would give 20 students free summer housing so that they could pursue unpaid internships that would be otherwise unavailable, I was skeptical. Given the interminable amount of time it takes most collaborative initiatives at Georgetown to get off the ground—former GUSA President Ben Shaw (COL ‘08) spent almost a year trying to get free newspapers on campus—the apparent ease with which Dowd and Vice President James Kelly (COL ‘09) were approved for funding (on April 14) and released a GUSA Summer Fellows application (April 15) was both surprising and commendable. The feat, however, would have been impossible without the cooperation of the GUSA Senate.
Granted, the final 2008-2009 student activities budget passed on April 14 allocated only $10,820 to the Summer Fellows Program. This will fund five students’ housing, only a quarter of what Dowd had originally hoped for. It’s a good thing that the funding board pared down Dowd’s vision for this pilot program from 20 students to five; as of the deadline this past Monday, only 11 students had submitted applications. The boards reasoned that Dowd and Kelly hadn’t thought through the logistics of the program, such as whether or not free summer housing would affect a student’s financial aid package (it won’t). It’s also worth noting that the Summer Fellows Program, or an idea like it, had been kicked around by GUSA Senate members Eden Schiffmann (COL ‘08) and Matt Stoller (COL ‘08), who was one of Dowd and Kelly’s campaign managers, for about two years now.
The main obstacle for passing a Fellows Program two years ago was funding: with no access to student activities funds, GUSA-types would have to raise the money from outside donors, which, with an untested pilot program, is not easy. But after GUSA passed the Accountability and Reform Amendment (known in GUSA circles as the ARA) in the fall of 2006, the Senate created a Finance and Appropriations Committee, which gained control of the money from the student activities fee—the $310,000 dealt out at the big budget meeting in the beginning of April. So, when Dowd gave a less-than-stellar presentation in front of the seven GUSA members on the Finance and Appropriations Committee and the six representatives from various funding boards, he had at least seven people able to answer the questions about the Summer Fellows that he perhaps stumbled over.
This kind of cooperation between the GUSA Senate and executives is a testament to how useless petty power struggles are. During Dowd’s update during the Senate meeting Monday night, a senator typed on his computer for the person sitting next to him to see, “we do not work for them, why are they talking to us like we owe them something?” Then again, Dowd said he was emboldened by the skepticism that University administrators, some Senate members and campus newspapers expressed over his ability to get the program started quickly. Summer Fellows is “bold” and it’s “sexy,” Dowd said, and that’s how he intends the next year of his administrations to operate.
And aside from Dowd’s almost creepy sense of patronage over the future Fellows—“we want our babies in the same place” Dowd said of why he wants them housed in the same Village B apartments— his initiative in placing the Fellows Program as a first priority and following through so quickly, bodes well for the next year. Especially if he and the Senate continue to back each other up, Dowd ought to be able to keep the sexy in student government.
Get housed with Kate at kkm28@georgetown.edu
