November 17 - The Georgetown Voice

georgetownvoice.com
the georgetown
VOICE
Volume 45.13
November 17, 2011
Editor-in-Chief: Tim Shine
Managing Editor: Sean Quigley
Blog Editor: Leigh Finnegan
News Editor: Holly Tao
Sports Editor: Daniel Kellner
Feature Editor: Kara Brandeisky
Cover Editor: Iris Kim
Leisure Editor: John Sapunor
Voices Editor: Kate Imel
Photo Editor: Max Blodgett
Design Editors: Catherine Johnson,
Kathleen Soriano-Taylor
Projects Editor: Rob Sapunor
Crossword Editor: Scott Fligor
Assistant Blog Editor: Ryan Bellmore
Assistant News Editor: Neha Ghanshamdas,
Vanya Mehta
Assistant Sports Editors: Abby Sherburne, Kevin Joseph
Assistant Leisure Editors: Mary Borowiec,
Heather Regen
Assistant Photo Editors: Julianne Deno,
Matthew Funk
Contributing Editor: Nico Dodd
Staff Writers:
Nick Berti, Geoffrey Bible, Rachel Calvert, Mary Cass, Soo Chae,
Patricia Cipollitti, Jane Conroy, Emma Forster, Julia Lloyd-George,
Kirill Makarenko, Morgan Manger, Kelsey McCullough, Eileen
McFarland, Vanya Mehta, Sadaf Qureshi, Adam Rosenfeld, Jake
Schindler, Melissa Sullivan, Fatima Toskomur
Staff Photographers:
Sam Brothers, Julian De La Paz, Abby Greene, Helen Guo, Lucia
He, Kirill Makarenko, Tim Markatos, Jackson Perry
Staff Designer:
Julia Kwon
Copy Chief: Aodhan Beirne
Copy Editors:
Connor Jones, Claire McDaniel, Jordan Moeny, Neil Sood, Kim
Tay, Chris Yamada
Editorial Board Chair: Jackson Perry
Editorial Board:
Gavin Bade, Tiffany Brown, Rachel Calvert, Ethan Chess, Nicolo
Dona Dalle Rose, Julia Jester, Sean Quigley, Julia Tanaka, J.
Galen Weber
Head of Business: Keaton Hoffman
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On this week’s cover: 2010 Campus Plan
Cover Design: Iris Kim
Today, after years of planning and negotiating,
D.C.’s Zoning Commission will
officially begin considering Georgetown’s
final 2010 campus plan, the decennial review
of plans for expansion and growth that all
District universities must submit. In looking
at the University’s proposal, the Commission
must remember that Georgetown, the
District’s largest private employer, has gone
to great lengths to consider and address the
complaints of the local neighborhood organizations
that have spoken out so vehemently
against the plan.
The District’s interests are inextricably
linked with the University’s, especially since
Georgetown employs almost 4,000 D.C. residents.
If Georgetown’s growth is halted, the
city’s economy will suffer. In theory, city officials
would want to encourage a large economic
engine to grow, but groups like the
Advisory Neighborhood Commission have
so vocally opposed any expansion that Mayor
As Rick Perry struggles to count to
three, and Herman Cain is forgetful of
both his own sexual wrongdoing and basic
facts about Libya, we are reminded yet
again of the stunning collapse of the Republican
Party as a coherent and mature
political entity.
The 2012 Republican field is a laughable
parody of presidential candidates.
Perry and Michelle Bachmann are under-informed
extremists, and Cain is an
unqualified pizza magnate dogged by
sexual harassment allegations. All three
have become popular because Republicans
can’t stomach the idea that a nominal
moderate like Mitt Romney might
actually be the nominee. Meanwhile, less
than half of Republicans even recognize
the name of candidate Jon Huntsman, a
successful two-term governor and former
U.S. Ambassador to Singapore and
China.
editorial the georgetown voice 3
GU offers Zoning Commission a fair plan
Last week, the Potomac Conservancy
downgraded its rating of the health of the
Potomac River from the D+ it received in
the land trust’s first report in 2007 to a D.
The report on the State of the Nation’s
River is a frightening document,
citing increases in both human and agricultural
waste along with the emergence
of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the
waterway. These chemicals, though they
are linked to a wide-range of biological
disruptions, remain largely unregulated.
“In essence,” the report said, “we are conducting
a grand chemistry experiment on
the Potomac; so far, the results don’t seem
encouraging.”
The river’s condition demands immediate
action to prevent further deterioration.
The environmental degradation of
D.C.’s largest source of drinking water
harms not only the District but also the entire
Chesapeake watershed, which already
A MODEST PROPOSAL
Vincent Gray has condemned the proposal.
The University has been more than just
a stable employer for thousands of D.C. residents.
Georgetown students volunteer to tutor
the District’s less-privileged students, and
countless more volunteer in other roles that
serve the city. University students put on
concerts and theatrical performances, and
many University facilities and areas, including
Lauinger Library, are open to all D.C.
residents.
The positive benefits that Georgetown
brings to D.C. aside, the campus plan will
simply not harm the surrounding neighborhoods.
The campus plan is a reasonable proposal,
one that respects the neighbors’ desires
by trying to limit student presence off-campus
while acknowledging the fact that students
need to live somewhere, and the limited
space on campus simply is not sufficient
The truth is that uncompromising neighborhood
groups such as the Burleith Citizens
STATE OF THE POTOMAC
faces tremendous ecological disruptions.
Every level of government must protect
these waterways that affect the livelihood
of millions of citizens.
According to the Conservancy, there
are already ways for government to begin
reducing pollution. Watershed Implementation
Plans developed by the
surrounding state governments and the
Environmental Protection Agency outline
specific amounts of yearly chemical reductions
necessary to reverse the Potomac’s
environmental collapse. The EPA’s final
versions of the plans, due out next year,
will also detail specific policy steps needed
to achieve the abatement goals. The jury is
out on whether the pollution targets are
ambitious enough to really turn the river’s
health around, but they represent realistic
goals to aim for.
Georgetown has an important role
to play in saving the Potomac. There are
Huntsman is a descendant of the
classically conservative GOP of Nixon,
for which principles guided policy decisions.
He upholds conservative economic
values and a pragmatic, realist foreign
policy perspective. Huntsman should
be a viable Republican candidate, yet he
has been shunned in favor of the radical
circus. He is an example of the moderate
conservative voices that the GOP has
shoved out of the discourse in favor of a
callous, reactionary desire to score cheap
points at the expense of the public interest.
Today’s Republican elected official
flippantly neglects the search for meaningful
solutions to America’s woes in favor
of indulging his or her crass desire to
bring down President Obama.
Fringe radicals have hijacked the
GOP at the expense of unifying, reasonable
figures like Huntsman. One of the
most extreme examples of this radicaliza-
Association and the Citizens Association of
Georgetown will be unsatisfied with any
plan that does not move every single undergraduate
into on-campus housing. Despite
the University’s efforts to mollify neighbors’
concerns—including the nixing of proposed
shuttle routes, the elimination of plans for
the development of the 1789 housing block,
and the abandonment of the environmentally
beneficial extension of the power plant
smokestack—neighborhood groups have
shown no willingness to reciprocate.
The University’s efforts to craft a workable
campus plan deserve praise, even if the
concessions have not changed the opinions
of certain neighbors. The Zoning Commission
must take note of the University’s reasonable
behavior throughout this process, in
contrast to the stubborn and insane behavior
of the organizations that falsely claim to
represent the best interests of Georgetown’s
neighbors.
Immediate action needed to save our river
SENSELESS ELEPHANTS
many infrastructure upgrades the University
can and should make in the coming
years to have a positive impact on the
river’s ecology. One excellent example is
green-roofing systems, which place sod,
grass, and gardens on the top of flat-roofed
buildings. The plants not only insulate
buildings and prevent leaks, but they also
absorb harmful runoff that would otherwise
enter the river system.
It is obvious that our current pattern of
environmental neglect of the Potomac is
not sustainable, economically or ecologically.
It is the explicit role of government
to protect its citizens from the toxic byproducts
of the industrial and agricultural
processes present in our drinking water
today. As long as it stands by and does
not take meaningful action to clean up this
environmental and health tragedy in our
backyard, it is abandoning one of its core
responsibilities.
Today’s GOP has succumbed to extremism
tion is the “birther” movement that led
to clownish failed real estate magnate
Donald Trump’s brief appearance in the
field. Republicans today obstruct the political
process without principle or alternatives.
Instead of defining themselves
as a conservative party, Republicans have
become the rigidly anti-Obama party.
In this time of global economic malaise
and mounting societal discontent,
America needs two fully-formed ideologies,
and two qualified presidential
candidates, that together represent the
American people and American potential.
Instead we are given the politics of
personality, not policy. As long as Republicans
continue to promote extremist
fringe candidates at the expense of
politicians who may demonstrate some
complexity of opinion, they continue to
participate in the gradual destruction of
the party and country they claim to love.