Transparency needed on student-centric plans

In the coming months, students will have their say on the University’s Ten Year Plan, according to Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson, who said that the administration would hold a meeting for students “to inform and gather [their] input.”  Georgetown already explained its working plan—which outlines what Georgetown can build in the coming decade—to neighborhood residents more than three months ago.  The date for the meeting with students has not been set.  Worse yet, the university will only “present things students will be real interested in,” according to Olson.  Judging by the University’s historical ineptitude with informing and gathering student input until after the plan is a done deal, any future meeting will likely be a huge disappointment.
When the University made the two largest and most unpopular decisions regarding campus life—the changes to the campus alcohol policy in 1987 and 2007—it was summertime, with few students on campus, convenient timing for an unpopular announcement. In the same vein, when the University announced its decision to close the Georgetown University Dental School in the 1980s, it did so over a Spring Break.
It’s easy to see these decisions as a pattern of deviousness on Georgetown’s part. Last spring, the University began to test a potential new Dupont GUTS bus route—one that the student body received very poorly, and which may become part of the Ten Year Plan—on weekends, when few students were likely to be riding the buses and notice that they were taking a circuitous route, traveling to Dupont Circle via the Whitehurst Freeway.
Administrators in the past have not always been in touch with the concerns of students. Greg Smith (COL `88), one of only two or three student members of the working group that designed the 1987 alcohol policy, recalled feeling that some of the administrators in the working group were entirely unaware of the reality of Georgetown’s culture—so much so that some of them thought that they could turn Georgetown into a dry campus without much protest. Twenty years later, on a Saturday night, Georgetown University Student Association President Ben Shaw (COL `08) took administrators on a midnight walk through campus to demonstrate the devastating effect that the 2007 alcohol policy had on campus party life. Village A rooftops—just a year before the site of nightly parties—were nearly empty, and Henle courtyards were eerily quiet. The administrators were visibly dismayed at the toll their policy had taken.
Most likely, the current administration is not more informed about the realities of student life than its predecessors. In 1987, the administrator who was most in touch with students, according to Smith, insisted that they have student input in formulating the new alcohol policy. That administrator was the Dean of Students, Jack DeGioia, who had worked for Residential Life for years prior to that and was the faculty adviser to the on-campus bar, The Pub, where former General Manager Mark Corallo (COL `88) said DeGioia was known to stop in.
No administrator can supplant actual students’ voices. The University cannot design a beneficial plan without sincerely considering student opinion so the sooner the University invites student input the better. Most importantly, it should be up to the students to decide what in the plan is worth comment. Students deserve as detailed an accounting of the Plan as the University gave the neighbors. Administrators can assume that students will not care about the placement of new hospital facilities on campus, but if history is any indication, they ought to leave it up to students to decide what they do and don’t find important.