Kiran Marsh (SFS ’28) was celebrating a friend’s birthday in Village A when a residential assistant (RA) knocked on the door to investigate a noise complaint.
Marsh said the complaint was a surprise.
“This is pizza and brownies at nine o’clock on a Thursday. We’re playing some music— it’s pretty loud, but it’s nothing crazy,” Marsh told The Hoya. “We were just hanging. It’s 15 of us just watching baseball.”
Marsh, who also has received two noise citations, said that students are experiencing harsher restrictions on their social life.
“It feels like they’re just anti-fun for no reason,” said Marsh.
This year, Georgetown University amended the Code of Student Conduct to instruct residential assistants and community directors (CDs) to avoid informal warnings and instead submit incident reports for each violation, a process that could result in formal citations. In the past, staff could warn students about their noise levels without writing a formal complaint, allowing students to course-correct without involving the conduct process.
Off campus, students fear reports from the Student Neighborhood Assistant Program (SNAP), a university program proactively addressing community concerns about off-campus student behavior by patrolling surrounding neighborhoods.
In this landscape, students say they have adapted by shifting parties earlier in the evening, limiting event size and calling on the university to ease some limits on social gatherings in a recent Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) referendum.
Darius Wagner (CAS ’27), Georgetown University Student Association (GUSA) vice president and president-elect, said the university’s policy changes limit student activity both on and off campus.
“It makes everybody walk on eggshells; you want to have a night with your friends at the townhouse and you’re worried that it’ll be cut short,” Wagner told The Hoya. “Students are scared to host in spaces where they receive citations, and fear going through a conduct process.”
However, permanent neighborhood residents oppose relaxing current regulations.
Karen Cruse, who has lived in West Georgetown since the 1970s, said the referendum’s proposed changes could disrupt neighborhood life, compromising recent improvements in student-neighbor relationships.
“What we don’t want is any amplified sounds coming from campus or students and violating our quiet, our quality of life,” Cruse told The Hoya. “Anything that would lessen that would not be taken well by the community.”
Despite neighborhood pushback, students have called for greater social freedoms while administrators advocate heightened regulations.
A university spokesperson said Georgetown is committed to expanding on-campus housing options for seniors and addressing neighborhood concerns.
“The new addition of Hayden and Byrnes Halls, along with the renovation of Henle Hall, are part of the university’s goal to provide more housing options for juniors and seniors,” the spokesperson told The Hoya.
Discipline in the Dorms
As residential living employees enforce the conduct guidelines, students said increasingly stringent restrictions stifle their on-campus social life. Simultaneously, RAs have expressed pressure from the university to monitor dorms and strictly enforce The Code of Student Conduct.
John Lock (SFS ’28), an RA in Village A, said he was surprised to learn during university-led RA training that RAs were to omit informal warnings in favor of incident reports, a break from previous years.
“Last year it was more informal,” Lock told The Hoya. “But this year, they have made it more official that you do the citation first — I’ve been told that you’re supposed to issue that citation immediately.”
Amendments to the Code of Student Conduct created a formal citation process for housing violations, requiring RAs and CDs to submit incident reports for every violation, according to three RAs. The code also holds all residents present accountable, regardless of whether they were directly involved in the violation.
A citation’s severity depends on the specific violation, with possible violations including excessive noise, unauthorized guests and unauthorized parties. The incident reports then enter into the formal disciplinary or educational conference process.
Anna Holk (CAS ’27), who has been an RA in Reynolds Hall and Nevils, said the increase in directives has damaged the relationship among the university, RAs and students.
“My experience last year allowed me to build a more positive relationship with my residents, because I could be more reasonable about giving them a chance to correct any behavior that might have been bothering others,” Holk told The Hoya. “Instead, that has to go through the community director, and I think it kind of makes it difficult for RAs and residents to build trust.”
Lock said the new guidance forces RAs to report any infractions, which he sees as policing students and straining the relationship between RAs and residents.
“It makes it more like we’re cops,” Lock said. “Before, you could give out informal things and you’re helping them out. But now students can definitely see it more as an adversarial relationship in terms of conduct, because no matter what happens, the code is you need to give a report.”
“In previous years, there’s more of a chance for students to react, change what they were doing,” Lock added. “But this year, we have to document what’s happening.”
Ethan Henshaw (CAS ’26), GUSA president, said students who received citations may avoid hosting in the future for fear of more severe repercussions.
“Once you’re in that process, the first time, you’re obviously more hesitant to throw a social event the second time,” Henshaw said. “Imagine your roommate has a birthday party or something like that, now you can’t have a social event, because if you do, the repercussions are significantly more severe, even though you’ve never even thrown anything before.”
Marsh said the RA who issued the complaint informed him she was required to do so.
“She was like, ‘Gun to my head, I have to do this.’ Like there’s nothing she could do, because there’s a record of somebody calling in, so she has to cite us,” Marsh told The Hoya.
Wagner said on-campus crackdowns have encouraged students to move parties off campus, where they fear SNAP.
“With SNAP, it’s easy to say that it’s probably going to be safer to host on campus,” Wagner said. “But with the increase in citations and crackdowns on the on-campus side, we’re seeing a decline in both.”
Knock, Knock
While Georgetown students have looked to off-campus areas for greater social freedom, the surrounding neighborhoods have not always been welcoming.
For permanent residents of the Georgetown neighborhood — including West Georgetown, Foxhall and Burleith — regulating student conduct has been key to improving relationships with the university, which used to be much more adversarial.
Cruse said the community did not feel the university was regulating off-campus student behavior in the 1980s and 90s, which fueled animosity from neighbors.
“If you had flowers planted out front, they’d be picked up and thrown around,” Cruse said. “I have to laugh when I see all the pumpkins and gourds people are putting on their front steps now, because you wouldn’t dare to put it up out before Halloween evening, and then you’d be lucky if you made it to the next morning with the pumpkin still on your front steps, not smashed down the block.”
The Georgetown Campus Plan, a strategic proposal for enrollment and development, must be approved by the D.C. Zoning Commission every 10 years. It has been an outlet for neighborhood grievances, often compounding into legal fights.
In 2010, the university and Washington, D.C., formed the Georgetown Community Partnership (GCP), a forum between students, university administrators and community leaders, to ameliorate these tensions. In 2016, the GCP successfully negotiated the 2017-2036 campus plan, which was endorsed by all relevant citizens’ associations.
Since 2001, Georgetown has increased its enrollment by approximately 1,500 undergraduate students, including an additional 300 students who live off campus each year, according to university data.
To mitigate concerns about university expansion, the plan capped main campus undergraduate enrollment at 6,675 and required Georgetown to maintain beds for at least 550 undergraduate seniors, aiming to fill 95% of them. According to the plan, Georgetown must “work to develop additional strategies and incentives” alongside the GCP if it does not meet the 95% threshold in any semester.
To address neighborhood concerns, the university has adopted different strategies to attract seniors back to campus and expand undergraduate enrollment.
Nico Hohman, Georgetown’s director of construction, previously said the GCP helped develop plans for the renovated Henle Village, which opened in Fall 2025, to encourage more students to live on campus.
“One of the things of the university being a part of that is we want to be a good neighbor, and part of that is understanding that the neighborhood prefers when students are on campus,” Hohman told The Hoya during a tour of Henle in February. “The university just didn’t have enough physical beds to be able to house all students on campus.”
“The idea was to attract seniors back on campus,” Hohman added.
In recent years, the university has also expanded its downtown Capitol Campus, including moving undergraduate programs, thereby reducing the number of students who would live on the main campus. In July, the university updated the campus plan to exclude undergraduates studying at the Capitol Campus from the on-campus housing headcount.
The campus plan also solidified the SNAP program, which was originally piloted in 2005, as an additional enforcement mechanism for student conduct.
Since the GCP was formed, the number of SNAP interventions has steadily decreased each semester, according to data from the university’s Office of Neighborhood Life. Data is not available for the Spring 2025 or Fall 2025 semesters.
Students living off campus who receive at least three conduct violations for excessive noise may lose the “privilege of living off-campus,” forcing them to relocate to on-campus housing, according to the Code of Student Conduct.
Lauralyn Lee, Georgetown’s former assistant vice president for strategic initiatives and planning and a principal architect of the GCP, said the university and the community became less antagonistic to one another as a result of SNAP and GCP.
“One of the great advantages that emerged as a result of this process is that the issues became less ‘us against them,’ and more a shared understanding of complexity,” Lee told The Hoya. “So fundamentally, our neighbors weren’t unreasonable, and neither were our students, and the university wasn’t trying to be unreasonable.”
Eric Langenbacher (GRD ’02) — a Georgetown government professor and president of the Burleith Citizens Association, a group promoting neighborhood interests — said the university used the GCP to take a more active role in regulating student conduct.
“I think that the university essentially took a very laissez-faire approach before then to students living in the neighborhoods around the university,” Langenbacher told The Hoya.
“Now that there’s more oversight and more regulation, it really has improved things from the perspective of the community,” Langenbacher added. “I know that opinions differ within the student body, but I think that it’s also been good for students as well.”
No Place to Party
For many Georgetown students, however, this peaceful relationship has come at a cost: declining student life and increasing self-policing as they fear SNAP complaints and university reprimands.
Daniel Tomas (SFS ’26), a Georgetown University senior living off campus in Burleith, said he was excited to host a Nov. 6 opening night cast and crew party for the student production “Heathers: The Musical.”
However, the presence of SNAP in the neighborhood discouraged Tomas from hosting. Tomas said this presence of SNAP patrols has created a climate of fear that deters students from throwing social events off campus.
“It has been a big no-no, the idea of hosting any single event in my house, simply because I know the university would just come and shut it down, even if we follow D.C. laws and regulations regarding noise,” Tomas told The Hoya. “The university has a very broad policy in terms of noise that could immediately just get us a warning or a violation.”
“For everyone who’s living off campus, we’ve heard and also noticed from experience how aggressive SNAP has been with its policies,” Tomas added.
Elliot Anderson (CAS ’28) said he has been to off-campus events where SNAP was called, including performances for student bands and parties with limited noise.
“The music was so quiet that you couldn’t even hear it,” Anderson told The Hoya. “It was a no-phones party, so it was pretty much just everyone talking, and still, somehow SNAP came and shut the party down before it even hit midnight.”
SNAP both responds to helpline calls from neighbors and patrols for conduct violations proactively, which Henshaw said leads to overpolicing of student social life, even when student activity does not impact neighbors.
“If the neighbors are not calling, and SNAP is just driving by, when it very clearly wasn’t even a problem yet, why not just knock on the door and be like, ‘Time to quiet down,’” Henshaw said.
Many students said they view the years-long decrease in SNAP interventions as a reflection of the chilling effect the enforcement has on student life.
Anderson said that permanent residents’ use of SNAP discourages students from hosting social and extracurricular gatherings.
“People are potentially rightfully scared of them,” Anderson said. “My one friend who had his Tombs night shut down has yet to host since for anything. Another place, my band was going to do a show there, and we never got the opportunity to because the house got SNAPed.”
Residents face escalating consequences for each additional SNAP citation, including conduct probation, property party restrictions, required community service, and potential loss of off campus living privileges and suspension.
Joe Massaua (SFS ’25) — a former commissioner on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 2E, a local government entity that represents the Georgetown, Burleith and Hillandale neighborhoods — said strict off-campus regulations make it difficult for students to have a fulfilling college experience.
“Students are hesitant to host because the university advertises these sanctions so strongly if you step anywhere out of line,” Massaua told The Hoya. “Fun falls by the wayside because the university has scared students.”
Amid these increasing concerns, Massaua said the GCP is no longer an effective liaison between residents and students.
“The Georgetown Community Partnership currently does not adequately represent student interests because the university doesn’t make a genuine commitment to training students or inviting students into relationships with the community,” Massaua said.
Henshaw said that by eliminating viable party spaces, the university is harming student culture.
“It’s having damaging effects on community, and is preventing organizations from coming together and students from having social events together, in a way that I think is very counterproductive for building a college campus where life is good and where people are happy to be here and where the culture is positive,” Henshaw said.
In the Oct. 22-24 GUSA election, students overwhelmingly passed the Restore Student Life Act, a nonbinding referendum requesting that Georgetown repeal changes to the student code of conduct, allowing one notice for noise complaints, extending quiet hours from midnight to 1:30 a.m. on weekends and renegotiating noise restrictions with the surrounding neighborhoods.
Tomas said the threat of SNAP looms over off-campus social gatherings.
“Even though we’re all just sitting down in a circle and talking, we have the threat of SNAP coming and saying that we’re being too loud or that there’s too many people in the house and it seems like a party, and us getting shut down and then receiving a violation,” Tomas said.
“Because of university policies, we are deterred from actually getting together and really sharing with each other,” Tomas added.
Marsh said he no longer hosts gatherings in his dorm since receiving citations.
“I’m not even more afraid, just I don’t anymore — I’ve limited my social life that I was expecting to have for my dorm,” Marsh said.
Angie Wang contributed to reporting.
