On Monday, Georgetown University Student Association executives Mike Meaney (SFS ‘12) and Greg Laverriere (COL ‘12) sat down for separate interviews with the Voice to talk about their upcoming term. Interviews conducted and transcribed by Matt Kerwin.
You’ve talked about making big reforms to the Student Code of Conduct. What are some of the major areas you’d like to target?
Laverriere: Mike and I would like to see changes so that students have more of a say in the implementation and the interpretation of the Student Code of Conduct. There was just recently a town hall on possibly reinstituting the [Residential] Judicial Council. We think that’s a great first step. If not, kind of an advocacy board where students could have other students help them out in presenting before administrators. Right now, it’s you in a room with your hall director or your resident coordinator or whoever. We think that those settings should be open so students can see how the process works. We want make sure that if you do get hit with a violation you have some form of way of representing yourself to your hall director, whoever it is. … Right now, I don’t think the code of conduct is doing the job of protecting students.
Will GUSARides be an expansion of the buses GUSA runs right now?
Laverriere: GUSA currently funds the weekend GUTS bus services, which is Saturday and Sunday afternoon but it’s a practice that we don’t think GUSA should fund. … Our thinking is that students aren’t the majority users of those GUTS buses during the day. It’s a lot of hospital employees, employees of Georgetown, grad students. So why should the student activities fee money be going to pay for that?
Whether it’s going to be the afternoon service shifted or the University taking over the afternoon and then GUSA funding the nighttime, we’re not exactly sure yet. … I think the University should recognize the fact that it’s not only students using it, so it’s not something students should pay for. And it’s a basic service that many other peer institutions have, so Georgetown should be picking up the slack there too.
And the route would be similar to SafeRides?
Laverriere: It would be similar, except it kind of cuts through a lot of them. It would start near the front gates, and it’ll go down to let’s say Wisconsin and M, and then it would come back up down Prospect, stop at Leo’s, continue through campus and go up to the Reservoir entrance of school and then back to the front gates. It hits more areas students would be interested in, and working in conjunction with the SafeRides loop, I think it would give the coverage for students on weekend nights.
Will the GUSA Summer Fellowships be kept up?
Meaney: Because it’s for this coming summer, the responsibility for finding funding for that is mostly [Calen Angert’s (MSB ‘11)], but then I’ll obviously do a good deal myself. We’re hoping to send out those applications shortly after spring break.
Is the number of Fellows being kept the same?
Meaney: It’s not totally clear yet because we’re still in the process. … It should be.
In the GUSA Ambassadorship Program [which will pay for students to attend international conferences], how many students will be able to get spots?
Laverriere: There are still a bunch of variables to be determined. We presented our budget yesterday to the Finance and Appropriations Committee, so if we get the budget we requested that should give us $5,000 for the program. Really the number of students that we can send will depend on where the conference was and how many students want to go to that specific one. … It also depends what the students are asking for—if the students are asking us to just help cover part of their airfare or the whole thing. … In the end they would be forced to compile a report of what they’ve learned and how they can take what they’ve learned and give back to the Georgetown community.
Could you talk about the farmers’ market?
Meaney: A group of very innovative students came up with this idea for a farmers’ market and they just needed funding for it. And we think it’s a great idea. We think Georgetown students will benefit from it. We applied for funding to kind of help that get off of the ground.
Laverriere: They’re going to run a test pilot program this spring in hopes of fully implementing every weekend earlier on in the semester when it’s warm out in the fall and maybe do it in the later weeks of the spring semester. … [I]t’d be nice to have something right there out on the lawn. It’ll kind of help integrate us with the D.C. community, too.
