For several months, the Endowment Commission has been in a dialogue with Georgetown’s administration about investing the Student Activities Fee Endowment in a reincarnation of the famous Healy Pub. Despite the fact that the proposal is the product of broad-based student collaboration and extensive dialogue, the University has largely ignored the student body’s request for a student space in Healy and has yet to specify why the project would be truly infeasible.
The Endowment Commission, composed of a cross section of student leaders, spent weeks last semester vetting extensively researched proposals from students. However, University President John DeGioia has yet to meet with any students about the commission’s recommendations. The administration has instead refused to compromise at various stages of the negotiations, as the proposal has taken on different forms, ranging from a student lounge, to a restaurant, to a restaurant with the capacity to serve alcohol. Vice President of Student Affairs Todd Olson, the University’s liaison with the commission, tacitly acknowledged the dearth of student space on campus and offered the New South Student Center as consolation. This space, which is part of the 2010 Campus Plan, would include a restaurant. Olson has told student leaders the restaurant could have the capacity to serve alcohol.
But we don’t need another on-campus restaurant like Epicurean. This solution does little to address the spirit of the Healy Pub proposal—a gathering space infused with tradition that gives student leaders a fulfilling sense of ownership. The Healy Pub would make better use of the University’s most iconic building and give students a convenient, appealing place to work and socialize.
Olson and DeGioia seem less concerned with addressing students’ constructively expressed concerns than with pushing ahead with their own projects, which often do little more than pay lip service to students’ wishes. The whole affair is emblematic of the administration’s dysfunctional relationship with the student body. While DeGioia travels the world, a lack of leadership emerges on the hilltop. The student body has put forth collaborative, concrete proposals to address real problems on campus. Now would be the optimal time for the DeGioia administration to treat us like worthy members of the campus community and engage in an active, productive dialogue with the students who are, after all, the heart of the University.
As the creator of the Healy Pub proposal, I’ve been particularly dismayed with the refusal of the administration to give us a fair hearing on merits of Healy, as well as the shifting double-speak on what, exactly, is going to be in New South.
Healy Pub is feasible. Georgetown’s own Assistant Vice President of Planning & Project Management at Georgetown University confirmed it would only cost approximately $1.3m to build — with more than enough money left over to move any offices currently occupying Healy basement elsewhere, as well as infuse start-up capital in the project.
The only objection we’ve heard from the administration is, essentially, that they don’t want alcohol in Healy. Then again, from the interview the Voice had with DeGioia, it is clear he has no idea what our proposal is about (unfortunate yet unsurprising, as it was not proposed by either Hu Jintao or a million-dollar donor). He blithely responds, characterizing our proposal as a repeat or combination of the original University Center Pub and Rhinos, when from the get-go — indeed, on the first page of our proposal — we have always advocated “a dignified and student-run gathering place in Healy basement of historical character where students can study and enjoy food, drinks and one another’s company.”
DeGioia then offered the example of a pub in Leavey as one that failed: “When we built Leavey, we built it with a pub in mind. We put a pub in there. It just didn’t work. It didn’t work from a programming perspective and we couldn’t manage it—we couldn’t ensure we were monitoring the proper age for drinking.”
This is worrying from a number of levels, and not just for backers of Healy Pub.
(1) Does anyone think Leavey was built with a pub in mind? Has anyone ever visited the ‘pub’ — the anodyne, featureless restaurant that is tucked in a corner outside Leavey, difficult to access, bland to enter and mostly occupied (like most of Leavey) by hospital staff. If this is the administration’s idea of compromise, I feel very nervous about NSSC.
(2) What does this say about New South?
Olson had this to say about the New South ‘pub’: “The idea of gathering space where there’s food, where there may be some context of serving alcohol at some times, or there may not be, is part of what we’re talking about in New South. And clearly what’s going to be in there is not going to be the same as what the Healy Pub was, but I think it can be and very much wants to be an equally appealing place for students to gather and have fun together, and will be open late at night.”
Try to parse that: A ‘gathering space’ where ‘there may be some context’ of ‘serving alcohol’ at ‘some times’ or (and here’s the kicker) ‘there may not be.’ This could accurately describe my Village A apartment junior year. In short, it leaves everything to the imagination.
The administration has been playing a three-card monte with the students and alumni on New South and Healy Pub.
First, they claimed that Healy Pub was not feasible because of space and money concerns — they were proven wrong;
Next, they attempted to cut the legs from underneath Healy Pub backers by presenting slideshow plans for a “Pub/Bar” (their words, not mine) in New South, to gain student and alumni support, with surrounding buzzwords such as ‘student-run’ ‘performance’ ‘Ratskeller’ (The U Wisconsin beer hall in their student union) and ‘NSSC needs it’;
Then, Olson comes out and essentially negates all that. No longer a ‘pub’ or ‘bar’, instead it is a ‘gathering place’ that may have a ‘context’ of serving alcohol — or maybe not. And we can’t find out any more, since the updated New South plans have been carefully embargoed until the start of the Capital Campaign.
The Healy Pub proposal, as the Ed Board points out, gained unprecedented support from students, newspapers and alumni because it was about returning ownership of an iconic space back to students and providing a place where anyone — student or faculty — could interact and socialize over drinks or food. Something that students could take pride in and come back to years — decades, even — after they’d graduated. More a Morton’s than a Rhino’s, with a bit of the Corp’s student ownership and the Tombs’ tradition thrown in for good measure.
Instead, we have — well, who knows? And more importantly, why can’t whatever is being planned for New South take place in Healy, literally 300 feet away?