Opinion

Thoughts from the Georgetown community.



Voices

The most forsaken place

From the outside, 2019 Igania Street looked like a slightly dirty brick house with an overgrown lawn in a rough section of town.

Editorials

The principal of Fentytown

The confetti has barely finished falling and the last of the 15,000 guests are still trickling out of Adrian Fenty’s lavish inaugural ball, but the mayor is already delivering on the cornerstone promise of his campaign: change.

Voices

Less grey, more anatomy

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Halfway through winter break, with all the current TV shows on a holiday hiatus, I had grown tired of dabbling in The West Wing, Seinfeld and Weeds and without an engaging television drama to amuse me, I took a desperate measure. I turned to a show that I’d promised myself to never watch: the bastard child of the soap opera and the medical show—Grey’s Anatomy.

Voices

Georgetown can’t handle the truth

After half a semester of backyard noise, late night weekend parties and one living room rock concert, an anonymous neighbor complained about a radio station event at my house to the University as well as the police in the early hours of Sunday, Oct. 12. Two days later, my housemates and I trudged into the Office of Off Campus Student Life to meet with Chuck VanSant about the incident, and were summarily punished for our honesty.

Editorials

Giving professors a deadline

Course selection period can be a rough time for students as they attempt to strike a delicate balance between hard and easy classes. They try to put together the ideal schedule by avoiding 8:50 time slots and bypassing Fridays while still fulfilling requirements. But the situation is exacerbated by the fact that many of the courses listed online don’t include up-to-date syllabi or even a course description at all.

Voices

Negating affirmative action

Last Monday night I felt like the white kid from a black school in a white state sitting in a room full of black students at a white university. Issues of race, usually lurking in the unspeakable shadows, were then front and center in a panel discussion that dealt with whether the historically ivory tower of academics would be able to keep embracing students of color through affirmative action in the future, a possibility that I, apparently alone in my stand, look at with dismay. I see a legitimate alternative: class-based affirmative action, unfairly discounted by backward-looking ideology at American universities.

Editorials

And now, our feature presentation

Far too frequently, it is not the professor so much as the students who are acually teaching the material. You are forced to listen to the student who happens to be doing a “class presentation” that day.

Voices

Barackin’ in the free world

I worked in the Senate with Mercy, a tall, pretty senior from UMass who lived for movie stars. The interns had a game inspired by Kevin Bacon’s six degrees of separation in which we’d name an actor and a movie as dissimilar as possible (try James Dean and National Treasure) and Mercy would have to connect them from memory. After two weeks of the game, it was Mercy: 46, interns: 0.

Editorials

War, hugh, what is it good for?

Last week, campus religious groups united to memorialize the massive loss of life that has flowed from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They covered Copley lawn with red flags, each symbolizing 100 Iraq War casualties. The flags were so numerous that the lawn became practically unusable, and the statement was impossible to overlook. Such demonstrations are encouraging, but they do not occur frequently enough.

Voices

Carrying On: From the sidelines: across the desert and far away

Last Thursday, during halftime of the Men’s basketball game against Oregon, ten individuals—men and women—filed onto the court. Some walked with a limp, some with a cane, all were veterans of the Iraq war. Most of them looked to be in their early 20s. I distinctly remember one of them, a young man with crutches and a missing leg.

Voices

The good, the bad and the ugly

I rode the escalator into the subway station. “Gray? or Gorgeous?” the older woman in the first poster asked.

Voices

Rainboots: bringing kindergarten sexy back

I was that girl who stood outside the RHO at 10:13 watching time pass with impatient anticipation.

Editorials

Ka-ching: the universal language

The University needs to take steps towards enacting a foreign language requirement for International Business majors so that they can be familiar with a second language when they pursue careers that will put them in contact with non-English-speaking business leaders.

Voices

Swiping your card, stealing your heart

Carrying On: A rotating column by Voice senior staffers

Editorials

And we’ll have fun fun fun

The University ought to reconsider the funds they allocate to student entertainment in order to strengthen GPB.

Voices

Ask Annabelle

Ask Annabelle: the Voice’s new advice column

Editorials

The sound of silence

We all need to exercise a little common courtesy in the library to allow our fellow studiers to do just that: be quiet and study.

Voices

Tracking down the dream

It’s hard to know how to start an Op-Ed about streetcar tracks.

Voices

Turkey and tanning: Thanksgiving in July

My cousins were born and bred in Italy.

Voices

Grades schmades: why the GPA system stinks

Carrying On: A rotating column by Voice senior staffers