Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Taking Back Campus

In the past, students congregated in Healy Hall and White-Gravenor Hall to socialize. Modern-day students, however, only get the mess of gray concrete and cinderblocks that is Lauinger Library, the sterile corridors of the Leavey Center and the faux hot spot called Sellinger Lounge. The soaring towers of Healy Hall and the cathedral splendor of White-Gravenor remain guarded against casual student use.

Though Georgetown creates the illusion of a centralized campus, the architectural flagships of our university are not its communal centers. Instead, they have become the residence of a patchwork of administrative organizations located in the spiritual nexus of the university.

While students are greatly restricted in their access to both buildings, the offices of Financial Aid, Student Employment and Faculty and Staff Benefits take up hundreds of square feet. The location of financial offices in the central pillars of campus represents a thoughtless tendency to use historic space primarily for workday academic and administrative purposes. These symbolic bastions of Georgetown need to be opened to students — the raison d’être of our university.

The Student Space Working Group and the Georgetown University Student Association have pushed the university to make student space a priority in its future building plans. Incorporating these concerns into new plans is important, but it is not enough. While we make progress in securing a balance of space and what in future buildings, students cannot abandon their efforts to reclaim our place in the current epicenter of campus.

The polling done by the SSWG indicates broad support in the student body for this effort, with 45 percent of students wanting Healy Hall to be the center of student life on campus. Only 5 percent believe that this currently a reality. This dissonance runs deeper than simple dissatisfaction with the anemic space allocations allotted for student use. Students want to inhabit the buildings that entranced them when they first visited Georgetown’s campus, they want to live and work in a place that connects them to a remarkable tradition and feel ownership in the community of which they are an essential part.

These spaces could be made accessible to students without incurring huge costs to the university. Historic buildings could be reopened to student life by allowing regular study hours in Riggs Library or transforming a classroom in White-Gravenor into offices for student clubs. Any number of transformations could draw students back into the signature buildings of our university if doing so is made a priority.

Recently, the movement to bring back Healy Pub has become a hot-button issue as students and administrators try to determine the best use of the $3.4 million in Student Activities Endowment funds currently at the disposal of the student body. The Philodemic Society is holding a debate this Thursday on this very topic and virtually every student paper has published an opinion on whether or not we should bring back the pub. Detractors of the Healy Pub proposal try to explain away its viral popularity by trivializing its significance, but it’s much more than just a bar.

Reclaiming a large chunk of the most coveted space on campus for student use has symbolic resonance that goes beyond its practical application. The pub would be bought with student money, it would exist primarily to serve students and it would be a public recognition that undergraduate student life is a top priority at Georgetown. The proposal isn’t popular because students drink excessively, it’s popular because it satisfies a deeply felt yearning among students and alumni to make our historic spaces more than monuments to former greatness and offices for faceless bureaucrats.

Re-establishing Healy Pub is an important first step in a larger effort to refocus our community, and more importantly, the university on the students it intends to serve and the alumni it depends upon. Put simply, Healy Hall should be our home not a short cut to some other part of campus. The Pub proposal has the best chance of catalyzing that transformation.

Our historic buildings project a splendor that is critical to the Georgetown experience. They are the pillars around which our campus is formed and distinguish us from the drab functionality of other urban universities. As students, we should not accept exile from the heart of historic beauty on Georgetown’s campus.

 

Alex Henderson is a junior in the College.

To send a letter to the editor on a recent campus issue or Hoya story or a viewpoint on any topic, contact [email protected]. Letters should not exceed 300 words, and viewpoints should be between 600 to 800 words.

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