Opinion

Thoughts from the Georgetown community.



Voices

Rage against the machine

Teaching little kids English at a French school requires one thing: lots of photocopies. Recent favorites include color-it-yourself numbers, “Dick and Jane” and a scary page from a 1990 yearbook. With the right amount of energy and a not-so-sincere smile, these pages are portals into the magical world of the English language.

Voices

Left brain/left hand coordination

Walking into any given Barnes and Noble, the average pleasure reader is faced with stacks of titles like American Dynasty and Bushwacked, all railing against the actions, policies and general state of being of the Bush administration. While their conservative counterparts like Ann Coulter’s Treason are nearly as prevalent, the sheer quantity of inked vitriol directed towards the president is striking.

Voices

Correction

The Georgetown Voice takes mistakes seriously. We correct all errors of substance in our stories and publish appropriate clarifications as soon as possible.

Voices

Letter to the Editor

Corruption and inefficiency plague public schools

Editorials

Two up on the town

In the continuing battle between Hoya and Townie, the University has recently pulled ahead with several victories. On Dec. 4, the D.C. Court of Appeals struck down several D.C. Board of Zoning Adjustment provisions instituted against the University’s most recent 10-year plan.

Editorials

Don’t vouch for this

On Jan. 9, President Bush urged the Senate to pass a bill allotting 14 million tax dollars a year to low-income D.C. parents who want to send their children to private schools. This school voucher bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives on Dec.

Editorials

Ditching the District

This Tuesday, D.C. voters had the chance to participate in the District’s inaugural “Presidential Preference Primary.” By placing the District’s primary before the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, District officials hoped to attract national attention to its lack of congressional voting rights.

Voices

The real state of the union

VOICES BY BILL CLEVELAND Tuesday night Georgetown students gathered for “The Real State of the Union,” a panel discussion with several writers for the Atlantic Monthly.

Voices

Two questions for conservatives

Can you close your eyes and picture a scarier, more dangerous America? An America in which the ideas of The Nation or Marx’s Kapital had won the day, a world in which leftism had gone so far, become so extreme, that electing even a moderate conservative to national office proved impossible?

Voices

Housing development’s leftovers

Ever since I can remember, I’ve gone to my grandmother’s house in Rhode Island for Thanksgiving. Family and friends come together for a celebration and non-stop eating with leftovers for three days. As kids, my brother, sisters, and I always escaped the hedonistic feeding frenzy to go out and explore the woods behind Grandma’s house.

Editorials

Censorship in Red Square?

Students passing through Red Square on Thursday, Nov. 21 undoubtedly noticed representatives from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property waving a large red flag and handing out pamphlets. The following Tuesday, Interim Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson addressed the situation in a campus-wide e-mail, denouncing the outside organization’s distribution of “offensive and hateful material that attacked gays and lesbians.

Editorials

Accidental press conference

The rector of Georgetown’s Jesuit community, Rev. Brian McDermott, S.J., apologized to the Kennedy family last week for the University’s release of Jackie Kennedy’s personal correspondences with the late Rev. Richard McSorley, S.J. The damage had already been done, but McDermott tried to rectify the situation as much as possible.

Editorials

Bushgiving in Baghdad

On Thanksgiving, President George W. Bush took a trip to Iraq. Arriving at the former Saddam

International Airport under cover of darkness, he spent a few top-secret hours with American troops stationed in Baghdad. He posed with the troops, and with a turkey, and then headed back to the United States.

Voices

Brief encounters with luminary pundits

The other night I went to hear Martin Amis, one of my favorite authors, read at a Washington bookstore. hoping I would be able to suppress my inner stalker. I admire his novels, his cultural and literary criticisms, his examinations of history, and of course his contribution to Mars Attacks!, one of the most brilliant movies of the ‘90s not disgraced by the later atrocities of O.

Voices

The FTAA and state repression in Miami

Last week in Miami, tens of thousands protested the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. Trade ministers from 34 countries in the Western hemisphere assembled to discuss the proposed extension of NAFTA into the Caribbean and Central and Southern America.

Voices

Letters to the Editor

“Distorted depiction of Japanese TV programming” I was disappointed that the Voice printed such a poorly written article with no apparent point besides insulting Japanese people and all with an interest in Japanese society (Nov. 20, Japanese basic cable round-up).

Voices

Correction

The Georgetown Voice takes mistakes seriously. We correct all errors of substance in our stories and publish appropriate clarifications as soon as possible. In”Finding the Perfect Sound” (Cover, Nov. 20), we printed that Professor Robert Fair received a PhD from NYU.

Voices

Detroit to D.C. and back

VOICES BY ROB ANDERSON Over the course of five days, 43 men and women had been killed, 7,231 people had been arrested, 2,509 buildings had been destroyed, $36 million in insured property had been lost—and Detroit had changed forever.

Editorials

Broken confidence

In her innermost thoughts, a widowed woman contemplates committing suicide months after her husband’s murder. She confesses these feelings and others to a trusted friend, a priest, and asks whether or not God would forgive her. Later, after her piercing grief has dulled into a constant ache, she thanks him for his support.

Editorials

Maintaining excellence

Nationally, athlete graduation rates are on the upswing. Earlier this fall, the National Collegiate Athletics Association released its annual report on the graduation rates of scholarship athletes. Student athletes as a group continue to graduate at higher levels than the student body as a whole, and their graduation rate is increasing.