With the first GAAP weekend just days away, Georgetown will soon be flooded with masses of accepted students anxious to get a first taste of the environment where they may be spending the next four years of their lives. Many will be amazed by the university’s physical splendor: the blossoming Healy lawn, bustling with spring activity, Hariri’s sleek modern lines, and the picturesque view across the river from the New South terrace. But behind the Hilltop’s outward-facing beauty lie conspicuous scars, representing the many failures of the last major construction planning initiative put into place five years ago.
One cannot venture far on the Hilltop without encountering some byproduct of the disastrous 2010 Campus Plan. The Leavey Center has been essentially barricaded, burdening the lives of the many students and workers who rely on access to this hub of university activity every day. Entrances to Henle Village and Village A have been similarly blocked by new housing construction, clogging walkways in some of the most heavily trafficked areas on campus. And some living in Southwest Quad triples next year will likely wonder why their dorms appear no larger than a standard double. The reason? These rooms were, only months before, indeed intended for two.
Yet perhaps the most disheartening facet of this situation is not the proliferation of current construction, but rather the areas on campus that have not been designated by the administration as in need of renovation. Lauinger Library, Yates Field House, Kehoe Field, Village A, and Henle Village are all in need of significant repair or replacement, yet work on these structures has been deemphasized, pushed back into an uncertain and increasingly bleak future.
Since the implementation of the 2010 Campus Plan, the university has spent approximately $72.4 million on construction costs, leaving many students to question why this money was allocated to seemingly impose unnecessary burdens upon the Georgetown community while not addressing the areas most in need of refurbishment. The answer lies with the interests of powerful neighborhood organizations, namely the Citizen’s Association of Georgetown (CAG) and Burleith Citizens Association (BCA), which for years have been pushing for increased on-campus housing as a means of carving out a residential lifestyle in what has long been a college neighborhood.
In direct response to protests by concerned neighbors, the 2010 Campus Plan included provisions for 385 students to move back on campus and designated that 90 percent of students must live on campus by 2025, forcing the university to adopt seemingly desperate measures such as converting two floors of the Leavey Center hotel into temporary residences. Demands for the future, however, are even more audacious. Among the proposals advocated by the CAG, BCA, and other groups is eventually mandating that 100 percent of undergraduates spend their four years at Georgetown living on campus.
Most frustrating about the 2010 Campus Plan, however, is the lack of student input that characterized its development and implementation. Unencumbered by significant opposition from the student body, neighborhood activists were able to exert marked influence during the crafting of the original proposal, producing a document whose detrimental effects upon the student population will continue to be felt for years to come.
As it comes time to shape the provisions constituting the 2018 Campus Plan, this generation of Georgetown students cannot afford to remain idle. For not only will the current proposal determine the status of the aforementioned campus landmarks most in need of improvement, Lauinger being perhaps the most prominent, but its tenets will shape the nature of how master planning at Georgetown is enacted for the next twenty years.
As undergraduates, we have the best possible perspective to observe how a lack of administrative transparency and accountability may mar an otherwise consummate collegiate experience. It is we who are forced to suffer the consequences of insufficient student input in the 2010 plan, and, fittingly, it is our responsibility to ensure that similar or worse hardships are not forced upon our successors in the years to come. Moreover, in a university located in Washington with one of the nation’s most politically-engaged student populations, it is emblematic of the Georgetown ethos to organize, protest, and advocate for a cause that we consider to be just and beneficial to our collective future.
Consequently, students from all segments of Georgetown life must unite—in dialogue, to represent our objectives for the future of our campus; in collaboration, working to hone a proposal that we consider an acceptable framework for the ensuing decades of development; and in action, rallying behind the shared vision that we have put forth. We ask all students to sign the 2018 Campus Plan Petition, so that in twenty years, we may once again admire the beauty of the Georgetown campus, content in our knowledge that we did everything possible to preserve and safeguard the institution that we love.
