Hollin Dwiggins has lived in Georgetown since May 1998. Like many residents, she’s had her complaints about Georgetown students’ perpetual noise and trash problems since moving here.
But her son’s lemonade stand last month showed that Georgetown students aren’t always looking to make trouble. Wells Dwiggins-Thomason, 7, set up shop outside his Prospect Street house to raise funds for the Oct. 2 Leukemia and Lymphoma Society “Light the Night Walk.” His grandmother suffers from leukemia.
After two weeks of selling lemonade, cupcakes and cookies, Dwiggins-Thomason had raised $687.04, and his mother estimates that about 85 to 90 percent of their customers were students.
“We just appreciate the students’ help,” Dwiggins says. “We can write a check, but he doesn’t get to feel like he’s a part of the solution.”
For his part, Wells said he was “happy because I think they really cared about helping me.” One group of business school students asked to sign up on the seven year-old’s waitlist to be his business partner “because they could see the bulging stack of cash,” his mom added.
Dwiggins acknowledges that she’s spoken with university officials before on “unhappy circumstances.”
But her first-grader’s lemonade stand showed that students can be considerate and generous in between their weekend excursions. And it showed students that we live as part of a community – the constant chorus of screams, curses and sirens might disturb the peace for others.
Every few months there’s a new horror story in town-gown relations that sets back progress. In December, both of my neighbors on O Street had an unexpected Christmas gift from students – bricks lobbed at their car hoods and windows. Nice.
A few months later a Burleith woman reported students urinating and vomiting in her front yard. Classy.
Desperate to maintain a decent quality of life, residents respond with solutions that only make matters worse. Two years ago the Citizens Association of Georgetown considered videotaping Georgetown students on weekend nights.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Lemonade stands can remind us that being a student and a resident aren’t mutually exclusive.
It’s as easy as getting to know your neighbor, whether you’re a student with resident neighbors or vice-versa. You know them and they know you. That means that you might be less inclined to completely ignore them the next time you throw a party. And they might be more forgiving when you do.
Militant students and militant community leaders love to make the same ridiculous arguments, the kind no one can win, like “we were here first.” Yes, the university has been in the area longer than anyone living in the neighborhood, but the students themselves have not.
Students and residents have been trained to think they can’t get along. It just won’t work. Students are going to party, and residents aren’t going to like it.
Georgetown students owe residents minimum standards of decency and respect. And residents owe students the same in return. It’s wise to assume that if you buy a house on this side of M and Wisconsin, you might have a bit more “neighborhood excitement” on Friday and Saturday nights. That said, the university offers valuable resources, from programming to scholarship, not to mention the thousands of students who contribute to the local economy.
Students, for their part, should know that they aren’t living in a vacuum. It serves us well to remember that we’re living in a great neighborhood, one of the nicest and safest (and certainly the most charming) in the District of Columbia.
Hoyas spend countless hours trying to make the world better, fasting for refugees in Darfur or simply trying to improve our own community within GUSA. But by 9 p.m. on Friday, we don’t care about the quality of life for the people we live with. That sets back any attempts to improve student life when we give residents reasons to stall expansion efforts before zoning boards.
The university does its best to police its students, but it shouldn’t have to. It wastes a good deal of money staffing hotlines and battling for new campus additions hung-up only because students and residents don’t know how to get along.
It’s just as counterproductive to have so many city police monitoring student behavior. Students frequently moan about the cops who spend more time cracking down on parties than stopping area crime.
But Georgetown residents pay taxes for those police, and they pay those police to ensure that they have a good quality of life. Less time patrolling student noise complaints could mean more time making sure that the streets are safe.
Few colleges can boast stellar relations with their towns, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be some middle ground. In town-gown relations, it’s give and take.
Sometimes it just takes a first-grader’s lemonade stand to realize it.
Nick Timiraos is a senior in the College and a former editor in chief of The Hoya. He can be reached at timiraosthehoya.com. Days on the Hilltop appears every Friday.
