Lindsay Anderson/The Hoya Chenel Josaphat (SFS ’06) poses beside Healy Circle’s John Carroll statue.
Whenever I make that familiar trip back to Georgetown from Reagan National Airport, the first thing I like to tell the cabbie is that I’m the son of a cab driver. There’s nothing quite like experiencing that instant change in perception. A few seconds earlier, I was a snotty college-aged kid. Suddenly, I become a surrogate son.
During my last cab ride back to Georgetown after Easter Break, my Somalian Muslim driver, upon finding out my graduation was imminent, crammed a lifetime of aphorisms, apothegms, maxims and proverbs into that 20-minute trip. What struck me most, however, was how quickly he seized on the need to travel and be intertwined with the world.
“Americans think they can study about the Middle East in there and become an instant expert,” he declared, pointing in the general direction of Healy Tower. “Until you go there you know nothing. You need to always travel so you can see, touch and feel how it is to be different over there.”
While I usually roll my eyes at people who “surrogate” me, this cabbie’s comment stayed with me. Four years earlier, I knew that leaving Miami, my hometown and lifeblood for 18 years, and coming to Georgetown was a huge step. I would be somewhere different. I would go there to become different. That’s what college was all about, right? “Off the beaten path” and all that jazz.
That was my initial thinking when I came into Georgetown. Four years later, I see I was wrong. On a campus that stresses “community” the way that Georgetown does, community only seems to be acceptable when everyone thinks, acts and (just for insurance) votes the same way.
Georgetown seems to be falling into a weird parallel of what Samuel Huntington theorized as his infamous “Clash of Civilizations” (an essay which any SFS student should be able to recite off the top of his or her head). Huntington prophesized a world where international conflict would be predicated on conflict along ethnic lines: Western versus Arabic versus African versus Confucian versus Slavic, etc.
While I don’t expect the South Asian Society to start lobbing homemade mortars at the Caribbean Culture Circle anytime soon, there have been numerous clashes at Georgetown over these past four years that have been hard to ignore. Republicans against Democrats. Living Wage against the university administration. Boston sports fans against everyone else.
Working at The Hoya for years, it has been easy to notice that Georgetown has become a campus of confrontation as much as a campus of community. Not that there is anything wrong with confrontation; I enjoy a good battle as much as the next person, but what has been lacking is the rapprochement at the end.
Being different used to get some extended lip service as being the best way to learn and grow as a person. Not anymore. If you have the wrong party affiliation on your voter registration card, what could have been a fulfilling friendship is now assured fodder for ridicule, if not animosity.
Stubbornness is acceptable if you’re a boulder or a donkey, but we are living, breathing, growing individuals. To think that our passions, feelings and views are set long before we step onto a college campus is a sad thought indeed. If that was the case, then the vibrancy of college life would be lost forever and there would be absolutely no reason to take on a $160,000 bill over four years.
What’s the point of being able to rub elbows and take classes with some of the most promising young minds of your generation, if you arrive to Georgetown set in your ways? Sure, you’ll have no problem accepting that they might have a different skin color or be in a separate socioeconomic class than you are, but if they try to tell you that watching television is not the end of the universe, they should go to hell?
The fragmentation of culture and ideas is not something that is unique to Georgetown, but a trend that has gripped the United States as a whole over these past four years. “Listening” is dangerously close to becoming a 20th-century phenomenon and now the only thing one must do to prove their point is scream the loudest.
That’s not the way the university experience should unfold. Discovering new ideas and points of view is not only fundamental to learning different aspects of life, but also to keeping one grounded in the most important beliefs. I’ve heard the spiel from some leftist professors I’ve had here. I’ve read their books and done well on their exams, but I still think communists are a joke.
I’ve come to Washington and seen the Patriots win two Super Bowls with a bunch of Boston fans, and I still leave Georgetown firm in my belief that the majority of Boston sports fans are the most obnoxious, clueless and self-important group of fools ever created.
And I’ve learned to change my opinions in a variety of ways too. For example, New Jersey isn’t the trash bin that northerners make it out to be. As a sophomore columnist for The Hoya, I wrote a piece lambasting the West Coast (“Revenge of the East: We Know What Matters,” The Hoya, Sept. 9, 2003). Three years later, the majority of the best friends I’ve made while here are from the sunny state of California.
I came into the School of Foreign Service ready to understand Russia inside and out, and now I leave with an intense desire to visit the Middle East and learn Chinese.
“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is now one of my favorite movies ever.
The set-in-stone mentality must change if Georgetown is to remain as one of the ideal places to learn in the country. It’s something that future classes must actively strive for because change is not at what humans excel. People like what they know – after all these years, vanilla is still the best-selling ice cream flavor in the country.
Chenel Josaphat is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He is a former senior Guide editor, contributing editor, member of The Hoya’s editorial board and columnist for The Hoya.
