Imagine for a moment that it is 10 p.m. on a Tuesday during midterms week and you are meeting a few friends to review for an exam. Traditional on-campus study spaces filled up hours ago. But the Rafik B. Hariri building is lined with rows of comfortable seats, tables, and discussion rooms that would suit your study group’s needs perfectly. There’s just one problem—the doors of the McDonough School of Business’s glittering new building are locked.
The Hariri building is one of the best study spaces on Georgetown’s crowded campus, but the University has intentionally put policies in place that make it very difficult for non-MSB students to study there. This is absurd, and Georgetown should allow students access to Hariri’s breakout rooms and facilities on a first-come, first-serve basis. Not only is the building inaccessible to non-business students after hours and on weekends, only MSB students can reserve first-floor breakout rooms and spaces like the Shea Undergraduate Commons. Rooms on upper floors are reserved for graduate students, and are often empty and locked late at night when students living on campus could be using them.
Concern for the security of Hariri’s electronic equipment should not prevent Georgetown students from using the building and its resources. Other campus buildings such as the Intercultural Center are accessible even without a GoCard at all hours during the week. The University has solved the problem in this building by securing equipment with inexpensive locks and cables. If the University needs to make security arrangements before students can use Hariri, they should do so—on a campus constantly strained for a lack of resources, administrators cannot afford to let its existing facilities go underutilized.
Nowhere else on campus is there a building to which one undergraduate school has priority access over others. Tables in the ICC Galleria are not reserved for School of Foreign Service students, and College students do not have priority access to study carrels in Lauinger Library. With campus libraries overrun, the Intercultural Center lacking study space, and Sellinger Lounge unfit for quiet study, it’s difficult to find a suitable place to study in afternoons and evenings.
There is no conceivable reason why one portion of the student body should get special privileges based on their school affiliation when their needs are not much different from those of the rest of the student body. The Hariri building should be opened to students regardless of school affiliation or degree level. Georgetown’s space deprived student body deserves nothing less.
