If you’re obsessively checking your mailbox for an overdue absentee ballot: don’t hold your breath. At Georgetown, letters can take weeks to arrive when they should take mere days, students’ bills are placed in mailboxes from years past, and missent mail gets held up in sorting for indefinite periods of time or, worse, simply discarded by students who receive mail addressed to someone else. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to the problem of Georgetown’s unreliable mail system: get rid of it. In its place, Georgetown should establish a centralized mail system, with everyone’s P.O. boxes in one building and each student having the same box for all four years.
In a testament to how serious the problem of Georgetown’s mail system has become, during this election season, many students are having their absentee ballots sent to their parents at home and then FedExed to the more expeditious Residence Hall Office; others ask an upperclassman friend living off-campus to let them send their ballot to their non-university address. Those precious absentee ballots arrive more quickly at off-campus houses because their mail doesn’t pass through the labyrinthine network of Georgetown’s campus mail. All mail addressed to Georgetown University mailboxes arrives at the Friendship Heights Post Office and is then sent to the Harris Building off Wisconsin Avenue, where it is sorted by dormitory. This process is overly complicated and, despite the mail department’s best efforts, simply takes too long to be useful.
Instead, Georgetown should give students their own P.O. boxes for their entire time on the Hilltop, and have mail sent directly to each box by the U.S. Postal Service. With the mailboxes centralized in one location on campus, mail would be delivered as quickly as possible, and the four-year P.O. boxes would eliminate the problem of mail being sent to old addresses.
A drastic change of this nature can’t be accomplished overnight. If Georgetown were to adopt this plan, it would doubtless be a multi-year process. However, now is the time to begin considering the logistics required by such changes. When thinking about which building should house the mailboxes, Georgetown’s administration might consider the old Jesuit Residence, which sits dormant right in the middle of campus.
Last week, Georgetown announced that it would be switching e-mail systems from the notoriously inadequate GUMail system to the immeasurably superior Google Mail service. Now they need to do the same for snail mail: recognize, as students did long ago, that the current mail system isn’t up to par, and then fix it.
Correction Oct. 23, 2008
The article previously stated that mail in dormitories was sorted by students working in the RHOs. This is incorrect. The Voice regrets the error.
