Plan A: Hoyas for Reproductive Justice resorts to plan B

Based on reader comments on the Voice’s and The Hoya’s websites, students reacted almost uniformly to students chaining themselves to the statue of John Carroll as part of a Plan A: Hoyas they agreed with the protest’s cause, but not with the way in which it was executed. 

And with protesters demanding the on-campus sale of condoms as if it was a matter of life or death and shouting fabrications at families visiting for Georgetown Admissions Ambassador Program weekend—like the complete falsehood they spread at their March 26 protest that Georgetown has one of the highest rates of sexual assault of any college in the country—it was hard to disagree. Plan A’s manner of protest was a little over the top. At the same time, the University has proved over and over again that the best approach for students seeking radical change is to get, well, radical. I can hardly blame them.

Given their inflammatory tactics, it’s easy to forget that Plan A set out to change University policy through conversational, “normal” means. It was only after the group sent a letter to President John DeGioia in early February, without telling campus or the student press—in other words, without trying to garner campus-wide attention—and received a formulaic response that they took their campaign public. At a rally in Red Square, Plan A’s petition to make contraceptives, sex education, and other sexual health materials available on campus collected dozens of signatures. At this point, it should have been clear to the University that this group would not back down without a serious answer. Two weeks later, on Saint Patrick’s Day, a student dressed as condom-hoarding leprechaun “Jack O’Gioia” appeared in Red Square to shower passersby with prophylactics. The first GAAP weekend protest took place the following week. 

The student protesters had, and still have, the responsibility to effect change through truthful means—the falsehood-shouting has to stop. However, I’m hard pressed to think of another way a group of students could have gotten a meeting with administrators without being the squeaky wheel. That’s exactly how other groups with long-ignored agendas did it. 

A quick look at the Voice archives serves as a reminder that it wasn’t the three grisly hate crimes in the fall of 2007 that finally led to the establishment of the LGBTQ Center, but rather students’ loud reactions to the incidents. Following an assembly in Red Square, fruitless meetings with administrators and a town hall that was aborted when DeGioia would not participate, students marched into DeGioia’s office and staged a sit-in, finally effecting much-needed policy change.  Not coincidentally, Georgetown netted some negative outside media coverage in the interim.

Starting in the fall of 2008, the Student Commission for Unity was armed to the teeth with cold, hard data showing that an alarming number of students felt their school and peers had created an  unwelcoming and exclusionary campus atmosphere. What did it take to spur the school to commit to acting on SCU’s suggestions? Not just the astoundingly offensive April Fools’ Issue that The Hoya published last April, but students’ reaction to that issue—sit-ins and a four-hundred-person forum that demonstrated what SCU had already proved empirically.

For now, it’s still difficult to judge the extent to which Plan A’s noisy, disruptive approach  “worked” for them. While Plan A’s March 26 protest resulted in another letter from Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson—essentially a reiteration of his February 24 boilerplate letter—their Saturday, March 27 protest at the very least won them a meeting and a planned future follow-up meeting with school administrators. 

Depending on your perspective, you might consider the scheduling of this meeting as a victory. Of course, with Plan A providing only scant details on their blog and declining to comment on how their Tuesday, March 30 meeting with Olson and Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Jeanne Lord went, no one can say for sure how or even if the discussion differed from the rote letters they have already recieved. But even if the University refuses Plan A’s demands for the time being, Plan A has at least gotten the University to respond to the issue, the way that it should respond to an issue with substantial student support: not with a dismissive pair of letters, but with real discussion. And they only had to chain themselves to a statue and end up on NBC local news.