Georgetown shares little more than a name with the community that surrounds it. While students inhabit streets, sidewalks, and buildings alongside neighborhood residents, their political interactions are limited. The Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E, one of seven advisory boards throughout northwest D.C, gives citizens a venue to represent their community interests. The two ANC 2E seats annually allocated to Georgetown students were recently vacated, with elections for their replacements coming on Nov. 4. Although commonly known for political savvy, Georgetown students display a woeful lack of knowledge about this vital point of connection with the neighborhood.
This disconnect has been made abundantly clear by the increasingly contentious relationship between Georgetown and the wider residential area. The 2010 Campus Plan, which was updated in 2012 and which restricts the number of students who can live off campus, has forced discussions of a satellite campus, as well as widespread construction on campus grounds. If changes forced by the current plan prove anything, it’s that students should have a vested interest both in ANC discussions and in rehabilitating our relationship with our neighbors.
It’s been said that what’s past is prologue, and more student involvement in future decisions that directly affect them will help avoid extending the errors of the 2010 Campus Plan into future plans. It will also allow students to reset their political interactions with the neighborhood through new channels and capabilities. The 2010 plan created Georgetown Community Partnership working group forums in order to help develop the next plan, which will cover the next 20 years.
Although the GCP forums are intended to give Hoyas a larger voice in how the university will be physically developed over the next two decades, they are threatened by the same factors that delayed student concern over the 2010 plan until its provisions were already being implemented. Student apathy, disengagement, and impatience toward discussions of future issues that may not directly affect their time on campus will be as present in the future as they are now. They will also be as difficult—and necessary—to surmount.
The effort to change this must come from students. Most Hoyas regard GUSA as a forum for self-advocacy, but they rarely look to micro-level government outside the front gates as a way of exercising influence. This cannot be a task reserved for the ANC’s student representatives alone, as general student support will be essential going forward.
Regardless of the extent to which students become involved, relations between campus and the wider Georgetown community may never be wholly smooth. And, realistically, it seems apparent that the town’s interests, prerogatives, and ANC recommendations will never align wholly with those of the university or the student body. In matters of such importance to Georgetown’s future, however, Hoyas cannot afford to accept either the university or their ANC representatives alone as stewards. If we are to exercise a voice in advocating on our own behalf, the responsibility of actively—rather than nominally—having a seat at the table falls to us all.
