Articles tagged: Saxa Politica


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Saxa Politica: Breaking promises, slowly

If it seemed to casual observers that the GUSA leaders were violating the trust of administrators when they chose to publicly reveal what they had learned in private discussions, it... Read more

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Saxa Politica: The case for a satellite campus

GUSA leaders talk at length about the need to “start a campus discussion” surrounding whether to create a satellite campus. In the same breath, they condemn it as an abomination... Read more

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Saxa Politica: The dog days of summer

It’s well known that organizations announce bad news on Friday afternoons. However, instead of these Friday news dumps, the University has been engaging in “summer news dumps.” In place of... Read more

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Saxa Politica: Kegging it back to campus

Last week, Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson lifted the years-old ban on having multiple kegs in University-owned housing. While Olson’s move is the most recent in the first... Read more

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Saxa Politica: Slow but steady progress?

Writing this column has yielded copious amounts of startling conclusions regarding the state of Georgetown’s internal structure. As expected, most of said revelations revealed the University as ideal porn for fans of institutional ineptitude, self-imposed and self-aware bureaucratic asphyxiation, and inexplicable breakdowns in otherwise intuitive communication structures.

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Saxa Politica: Sandy brings out the best

Just after 6 p.m. on Oct. 28, Georgetown students rejoiced; University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr sent a broadcast email to the campus community cancelling Monday classes in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught.

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Saxa Politica: ‘Drunken’ misses the point

“They don’t get much ruder than this bunch who seems to feel the need to host a party anytime they can,” writes Burlieth resident and former American University photography professor Stephen R. Brown under a video depicting a 37th Street party. His website, “Drunken” Georgetown Students, launched in April 2010, is once again in full swing, cataloguing the drunken debauchery of Georgetown students and “young professionals” in their own back yards.

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Saxa Politica: Clearly Unconvincing

On the evening of student government senate elections, student rights supporters scored a major victory in a referendum put forward by GUSA supporting a burden-of-proof alteration to the Student Code of Conduct. The recommendation for raising the evidentiary standard in all cases except instances of sexual assault was first proposed in April by the Disciplinary Review Committee. In the vote, the current “more likely than not” standard received a total of 93 votes, while the now well-advertised “clear and convincing” proposal received 2,507.

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Saxa Politica: Technological Disconnects

We’ve all seen the signs on vending machines scattered across campus and felt the tinge of frustration and hopelessness. “Out of order,” reads the black box hammered onto an otherwise sleek dispenser. While the uncertainty of being able to purchase Coke at machines in the Leavey Center or in shadowy corners of the campus does not necessarily condemn the GOCard Office, the prevalence of frequently nonfunctional equipment points to a deeper issue with Auxiliary Business Services, GOCard’s parent institution.

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Saxa Politica: A Blueprint for success

This semester, the Center for Student Programs, the Center for Social Justice, and Campus Ministry collaborated to launch a daring initiative entitled The Blueprint. This set of two training sessions, which concluded Saturday, was designed to educate the leaders of student organizations on the resources available under the University’s access to benefits policies and, of course, the consequences of abusing organizational privileges.

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Saxa Politica: The new license to spill

In the wake of the unanimous approval of the 2010 Campus Plan by the D.C. Zoning Commission this July, students had remarkably little to celebrate. Still, the University’s apparent caving in to the demands of the Advisory Neighborhood Committee did produce a gem of a regulation—students living in University-owned apartments and townhouses are no longer required to register parties prior to their raucous merrymaking.

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Saxa Politica: Wax-a nostalgic-a

Over the past 10 or so years, the crusade to improve student organizations has focused on programming. The creation of the student activities fee and the subsequent funding board reforms increased groups’ financial capabilities. The ongoing discussions about space are trying to make it easier for groups to find places to program. Although the obvious mission of organizations is programming, their function on campus is to facilitate social life.

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Saxa Politica: Oppose the campus plan!

In a Feb. 9 D.C. Zoning Commission hearing, Zoning Commissioner Peter May picked up a stack of letters written by Georgetown neighborhood residents, read off some excerpts, and said that students were creating objectionable impacts in the neighborhood.And with that, the neighbors won in their opposition to the University’s 2010 Campus Plan. Georgetown now has to prove that it will reduce student impact before the plan can be approved.

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Saxa Politica: Life report lacks data

Last April, the GUSA Executive commissioned the 2012 Report on Student Life, and allocated a large portion of their budget to the project. Although they call the resulting 73-page report “rigorous” and “empirical,” the report’s findings and methods are dubious at best.

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Saxa Politica: GUSA exec, represent!

There is a certain vocal, insatiable group of neighbors who dislike facets of Georgetown, namely the students.

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Saxa Politica: This is what bureaucracy looks like!

In the press conference for the release of the 2012 Student Life Report, the GUSA President Mike Meaney (SFS ’12) and Vice President Greg Laverriere (COL ’12) were asked when they thought another large-scale, student-driven self-study should be executed.

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Saxa Politica: Leave(y) your worries behind

Last spring, the University administration committed to converting the Leavey Hotel into a dorm to reduce the number of students living off campus. But, as former Voice columnist Kara Brandeisky... Read more

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Saxa Politica: Budget summit breakdown

In Nov. 2008, Nick Troiano (COL ‘12), then a GUSA senator, staged a sit-in in a Student Activities Commission constitutional meeting to protest SAC’s closed voting policy. In response, SAC chair Sophia Behnia (COL ‘09) shouted, “You can all stay in here for this vote, I don’t give a damn!”

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Saxa Politica: Magis Row not at fault

On November 8, the Citizens Association of Georgetown and the Burleith Citizens Association jointly filed a supplemental submission to the D.C. Zoning Commission ahead of tonight’s final hearing on the proposed Georgetown Campus Plan. Among the countless complaints about the University, the neighborhood associations continue to rail against the Magis Row townhouses.

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Saxa Politica: A campaign for all students

Images of the doors of Georgetown’s iconic buildings have become omnipresent on campus in the past few weeks due to the kickoff of the University’s capital campaign, “For Generations to Come: The Campaign for Georgetown.” They have supplanted the blue “Spirit of Georgetown” banners typically bound to the light poles and mounted on the face of the Intercultural Center building. It’s hard to walk anywhere on campus without seeing something about it.