No more futile concessions on Campus Plan

Last week, the University announced a series of concessions in the bitter fight over the 2010 Campus Plan, including the addition of 250 undergraduate beds either on-campus or at a satellite location and the introduction of a hard enrollment cap of 15,000 students. Administrators agreed to these conditions after weighing suggestions from the District Department of Transportation, the Office of Planning, and the community. However, signals from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission and lessons from previous campus plans show that such concessions are nothing more than useless and unwise capitulations.

Monday night’s ANC meeting made clear that the commission remains stubbornly committed to its own vision for the plan, which would prohibit future building in East Campus, place a hard cap on students living in the community, discontinue student housing on Magis Row, disallow student vehicles from parking on neighborhood streets, and prohibit the University from acquiring neighborhood property without Zoning Commission approval.

Such unreasonable demands are nothing new. During consideration of the 2000 Campus Plan, the Zoning Commission tried to insert an involuntary enrollment cap in the plan. Ultimately, the D.C. Court of Appeals stuck down the cap, along with a provision that gave the Zoning Commission review over the student conduct of conduct.

Past behavior shows that community organizations will settle for nothing less than full acceptance of their illegal and discriminatory measures. But, the University remains naively committed to making onerous concessions. The University would save time and better serve students by sticking to the original plan that it drew up. Concessions won’t please neighbors, but they will greatly hurt students.

Notably, the on-campus housing increase will stretch already crowded Georgetown housing to the breaking point and draw critical funding away from the University’s academic mission—even though Georgetown’s on-campus residency rate is comparable to urban universities of similar size. Moreover, these actions concede the neighbor’s argument that students don’t deserve a place in the neighborhood. Students have been an important part of the neighborhood’s makeup for hundreds of years and they have every right to remain there.

It is incredibly disappointing that the University would put forward this misguided proposal in an unlikely gamble to curry the favor of the ANC and other implacable community groups. They will not relent in their own destructive demands, even though they go against good sense and the law. If the University wants to protect the interest of its students, it will retract these amendments and stick to its original proposal.