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Georgetown University’s Weekly Newsmagazine Since 1969 w October 10, 2013 w Volume 49, Issue 9 w georgetownvoice.com

The Hilltop at your fingertips: Online learning at Georgetown

by Isabel Echarte

2 the georgetown voice

october 10, 2013

georgetownvoice.com twitter.com/gtownvoice facebook.com/georgetownvoice

Voice Crossword “Themeless Thinker” by Tyler Pierce

Across 1. Sleepwear 8. Certain parasitic nematode worm 15. EPA subject 16. Formerly known as toluol

17. Tended to, like a wound 18. Work on 19. Congress is in it when they are actually doing their jobs 20. Commendation 21. Dog biter 23. About 1% of the atmo-

sphere 24. Reclined 28. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” artist 30. Colony members 32. Like some eclipses 34. Snail-like 36. “___ Ng” (They Might Be Giants song) 37. Compensate 38. Mafia 39. Fire remnant 41. Finish, with “up” 42. Ivan the Terrible, e.g.

44. City on the Arkansas River 45. “Absolutely!”

47. Kind of sandwich roll 50. Go well together 51. Woke Up 53. Impecuniosity 55. Kind of sauce for fish 57. Severe congenital mental illness 62. Occilate relatively 63. Puts back on 64. Flint shard nodules 65. Mail delivery 66. Israeli Parliament 67. Truck engines

Down 1. Vets’ concerns 2. A lot of lot 3. Average guys 4. “C’est la vie” 5. Recurring theme 6. Ancient 7. 2000 Olympics city 8. At the peak of 9. Female vocal part 10. Cloudless 11. Roman slave chauffeur constellation 12. Sane 13. Concern 14. “Get it?”

22. Election loser 24. Andean animal 25. Labor saver 26. Won’t work 27. Indian bread 29. Vatican vestment 31. Singer Vaughan 33. No longer working: Abbr.

35. Dripping 38. ___ Zedong 40. Closemouthed 43. Put away, in a way 46. Chuck, you should know his last name

Answers to last week’s sudoku

Answers to last week’s crossword

48. Adjusted 49. Sana’a native 52. Sports figures 54. Look closely 56. Medical advice, often 58. Denials 59. A fisherman may spin one 60. False god 61. Egyptian snakes 62. Albanian coin

editorial

georgetownvoice.com

VOICE the georgetown

Volume 49.09 October 10, 2013 Editor-in-Chief: Gavin Bade Managing Editor: Connor Jones Blog Editor: Julia Tanaka News Editor: Lucia He Sports Editor: Chris Almeida Feature Editor: Patricia Cipollitti Cover Editor: Kathleen Soriano-Taylor Leisure Editor: Heather Regen Voices Editor: Ana Smith Photo Editor: Andres Rengifo Design Editors: Lauren Ashley Panawa, Teddy Schaffer Projects Editors: Alec Graham, John Sapunor, Cannon Warren Puzzles Editor: Tyler Pierce Creative Directors: Madhuri Vairapandi, Amanda Dominguez Back Page Editor: Tiffany Lachonna Social Media Editor: Rio Djiwandana

Assistant Blog Editors: Minali Aggarwal, Isabel Echarte, Ryan Greene, Laura Kurek Assistant News Editors: Jeffrey Lin, Claire Zeng Assistant Sports Editors: Chris Castano, Brendan Crowley, Joe Pollicino Assistant Cover Editor: Neha Ghanshamdas Assistant Leisure Editor: Dayana Morales Gomez Assistant Photo Editors: Kathryn Easop, Joshua Raftis Assistant Design Editor: John Delgado-McCollum

Staff Writers:

Tim Barnicle, Emilia Brahm, Will Collins, Emlyn Crenshaw, Claire McDaniel, Liana Mehring, Dzarif Wan, Sam Wolter, Abby Greene, Abby Sherburne, Steven Criss, John Guzzetta, Jackson Sinnenberg, Joshua Ward, Annamarie White, Daniel Varghese, Max Roberts, Max Borowitz, Sourabh Bhat, Emmy Buck, Kevin Huggard, Chris Wadibia, Kenneth Lee

Staff Photographers:

Elizabeth Coscia, John Delgado-McCollum, Robin Go, Alan Liu

Staff Designers:

Karen Bu, John Delgado-McCollum, Mike Pacheco, Tom Pacheco, Sebastian Sotelo, Christina Libre, Sophia Super, Manuela Tobias, Shalina Chatlani, Pam Shu, Corrina Di Pirro, Katarina Chen, Dylan Cutler, Noah Buyon

Copy Chief: Sonia Okolie Copy Editors:

Grace Funsten, Caitlin Healey-Nash, Morgan Johansen, Sabrina Kayser, Samantha Meaden, Dana Suekoff, Isobel Taylor, Suzanne Trivette

Editorial Board Chair: Caitriona Pagni Editorial Board:

Gavin Bade, Patricia Cipollitti, Lucia He, Quaila Hugh, Connor Jones, Julia Tanaka

General Manager: Michael Grasso Managing Director: Nick Albanese The Georgetown Voice

The Georgetown Voice is published every Thursday.

Mailing Address: Georgetown University The Georgetown Voice Box 571066 Washington, D.C. 20057

Office: Leavey Center Room 424 Georgetown University Washington, D.C. 20057

Email: editor@georgetownvoice.com Advertising: business@georgetownvoice.com Web Site: georgetownvoice.com The opinions expressed in the Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated. Unsigned editorials represent the views of the Editorial Board. Columns, advertisements, cartoons and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of the Georgetown Voice. The University subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors. The Georgetown Voice is produced in the Georgetown Voice office and composed on Macintosh computers using the Adobe InDesign publishing system and is printed by Silver Communications. All materials copyright the Georgetown Voice. All rights reserved.

On this week’s cover: Online Education at Georgetown Cover Design: Chirstina Libre

the georgetown voice 3 MOOC TRIAL

Online courses break new academic ground

Following the precedent of Harvard and MIT, Georgetown is now offering its first online class this semester through the edX platform. The class is titled “Globalization’s Winners and Losers” and will feature recorded lectures by many professors covering different subjects. Additionally, the University has also invested $8 million into an initiative for technology-enhanced learning, with a third of the money probably going into the online education movement. Students can now expect to see more of these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered as an alternate method of earning academic credits.

As of now, Georgetown MOOCs are free and open to anyone who can access them via the edX website. This accessibility could be a major boon for providing access to higher education to students who, due to financial or locational obstacles, wouldn’t otherwise have had an opportunity to take these classes. Qual-

ity education shouldn’t only be an option for students from privileged backgrounds, and expanding online education options may be an effective method of equalizing the playing field.

As universities continue to expand the use of online education by offering paid, full-credit courses, some university faculty and administrators fear that mass-producing online lectures from elite universities will undermine the benefits of public education at other institutions.

San José State University faculty wrote an open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, claiming that MOOCs are a push to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.” Nevertheless, there is no clear evidence that reliably compares the performance of online courses vis-á-vis their traditional in-class counterparts. Recent studies and polls on the effectiveness of online learning have so

far shown inconclusive data, with results all over the spectrum.

Electronic learning may hold substantial benefits for students and is certainly an option worth exploring further. Substituting some classes with MOOCs could reduce tuition costs and increase accessibility without losing most of the benefits of a traditional lecture class.

However, sitting behind a screen, even if there is a chat room feature, will never be the same as participating in a classroom.

As this initiative develops, administrators and faculty must not forget that education should be as much about the material as it is about the experience. If, in the future, the University increases its online offerings, it must ensure that they meet the high standards students have come to expect from their academic experience here. A Georgetown education should always be a Georgetown education, and the chances that can happen online are slim.

GIVE IT TO ME, BABY

Student workers jipped by GMS inefficiency The Georgetown Management System, which is responsible for paying all campus employees, will roll out a new operating system on Oct. 14. Even though the new system will be a welcome change, for many student workers this transition came months too late. Due to what appears to be operating inefficiencies and human error, dozens of students, many of whom work for the Department of Residential Living, have reported going weeks without pay.

In an interview with the Voice, Associate Vice President of Student Housing Jonalyn Ware Green, said that, due to the large influx of new hires, housing receives at the beginning of the academic year, the department habitually falls behind on issuing paychecks to workers. Such delays are understandable to a certain extent.

However, the complications have evolved from a series of inconveniences into a dis-

graceful show of bureaucratic inefficiency.

Over a month has passed since the start of the academic year, and some students still have not been paid in full.

Student employees owed wages must be paid immediately. For many students, the income they make from these jobs amounts to more than mere pocket change.

Students rely on this income. They often depend upon this money to pay bills, buy books, and purchase food. The backlog of unpaid hours places significant financial pressure on students, especially those who receive financial aid.

The issue of unpaid wages, although important in itself, has revealed fundamental problems in the University’s communication with its student workers. The Department of Residential Living expects students who have complaints about wage delays to file complaints internally and wait for GMS to resolve the issue.

In this situation, when administrators insist on giving students the bureaucratic runaround, students should be aware of their ability to utilize other outlets to voice their concerns.

Many workers fear that complaining about their own experience to student media will result in termination of their employment. According to Director of Residential Education Ed Gilhool, students are actually free to speak independently to the press about their own experiences. Nevertheless, the fact that employees are not made aware of their rights by employers must be corrected.

Ideally, students will not have to seek out external platforms for advocacy in the future, and the introduction of this new system will eliminate payroll delays. In the event that past inefficiencies continue, GMS must be held publicly accountable by students for its inaction.

HOLY ROLLIN’

Canon law petition threatens Georgetown identity

Archbishop of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl recently approved the canon law petition against Georgetown University requesting that the Church revoke the school’s right to call itself Catholic if it doesn’t comply with the Vatican’s requirements for Catholic colleges.

The petition now makes its way to the Vatican, which will ultimately decide the case.

Author of the petition, William Peter Blatty (COL ’50), has been a vocal critic of University policy in the past few years –namely, of inviting pro-choice speakers and hosting pro-LGBTQ events such as Lavender graduation.Blatty accuses Georgetown of failing to comply with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, a 1990 apostolic constitution that outlines the Church’s requirements for Catholic colleges. The document requires that “the number of non-Catholic teachers should not be allowed to constitute a majority within the Institution, which is and must remain Catholic,” an absurd provision for a school such as ours.

This petition is far from the ideological revival its author envisions. In fact, it serves as a perfect example of the close-minded misinterpretation of Catholicism that breeds intolerance in our society. Pope Francis himself has stated that he wants to steer the Church’s focus away from the divisive social issues that constitute the bulk of Blatty’s grievances. Last September he told America magazine, a weekly Jesuit publication, that the Church “cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods.”

This attitude is a marked change from Francis’ past position on Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

In 2012, as the consequence of an adversarial relationship between local bishops and the Vatican, he backed then-Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to revoke the University of Peru’s designation as a Catholic university. Although the circumstances of the University of Peru differ from those of Georgetown, the Church’s decision in this case serves as a reminder of

how much work remains to promote inclusivity in Catholic institutions.

Blatty claims that his attack on Georgetown was motivated by “love” for the University.

However, this “love” threatens to strip the University of the identity that has guided Georgetown since its founding and continues to thrive today. Offering a wide range of theology courses and promoting LGBTQ equality makes Georgetown no less Catholic. Instead, it fosters a free exchange of ideas that should be the hallmark of a University whose mission is to educate the whole person The assertion of Blatty’s legal council that Georgetown is now “prisoner to intolerant new orthodoxies” could not be further from the truth.

The only intolerant orthodoxies at Georgetown are those Blatty himself is perpetuating with his misguided petition. We should be proud of our “radical autonomy” and continue promoting diversity and inclusivity as the foundational principles of Catholic education.

news

4 the georgetown voice

october 10, 2013

Georgetown Management System fails to pay student workers

by Ryan Greene Georgetown Management System has systematically failed to pay weeks’ worth of overdue wages for some of its student workers. The late wages for Student Housing and Activity Facilities workers was due to human error, since dozens of workers were not entered into GMS for weeks.

GMS is the human personnel database that the University uses to keep track of its workers’ information and distribute wages. Several Georgetown departments that hire students have failed to pay their workers for hours of work. In some cases, the overdue wages go back for months.

A department that has taken a particularly long time to pay back many of its new workers is Student Housing and Activity Facilities. One new Residence Hall Office worker, who has asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job, has worked 10 hours per week since the start of the academic year and Student Housing has still not paid her.

As this worker understands the situation, GMS has also failed to pay many of her peers. “There’s been a lot of pressure on [GMS] from the [RHO] managers,” she said in an interview. “I know some people who were hired this year and got in [to the system] immediately, but then there was this backup.”

“I heard [the problem] was sourced from one person, but I don’t

know who that person was,” she said.

“She was in charge of doing it and she just wasn’t on top of it.”

Vice President for Student Housing and Activity Facilities Jonalyn Ware Greene explained the source of the payment delay. “There’s been some delay in processing, primarily due to human error,” she said. “There’s been a delay in processing some of the newer students who were hired.”

Ware Greene is not in charge of GMS itself. Instead, she is the human resources contact for Student Housing and Activity Facilities employees in dealing with GMS. RHO student employees ordinarily submit electronic timesheets, which are then approved by their managers.

These approved timesheets then go on to the timekeeper for their department, who enters the work hours into the GMS system. At this point, the department can pay the employee.

Ware Greene said that sometimes departments cannot pay employees because the employees have not handed in all of their information. In many cases this school year, however, departments could not pay employees because they did not enter employees into the GMS system in the first place.

“We have a large volume [of new hires] that happens at this time of the year,” Ware Greene said. “There are multiple screens and multiple things that have to be entered, making sure that you have every single thing from

people. It is a long process for us to enter people. You can’t just put a person’s name in and they’re in the system.”

Ware Greene explained that during the past week, the department entered all new hires into the system.

She expects Student Housing will repay all of the overdue wages by the end of the next pay cycle.

GMS will be updated next week to offer a simpler way for logging workers’ hours. Currently, employees who work in multiple departments can have their hours logged by only one department. The new system will fix this annoyance, but it is not clear if the new system will solve GMS’s problem of entering new hires’ information so they can be paid more quickly.

When asked how unpaid students in her department are supposed to seek out their overdue wages, Ware Greene said they should go to her.

“The students who are being processed through our office should feel free to come to my office to speak to me about issues if they are concerned with talking to their manager,” she said.

Some student workers, however, have had a difficult time dealing with Ware Greene’s office when submitting claims for overdue wages. One student worker, who also asked to remain anonymous, worked in an RHO for over 200 hours at the start of last summer before Student Housing paid him. The overdue wages amounted to over $1,500.

University hosts Vietnam Veterans Memorial replica

At first, Student Housing told this worker that sometimes it does not pay new hires for short periods of time. When he was still unpaid, this worker took action.

“I sent an email to Ms. Ware Green to inquire about the delay in setting me up in GMS,” he wrote in an email to the Voice. “Days later, in the absence of any response, I sensed that no action was being taken, so I attempted to meet Ms. Ware Green in person. As it turns out, that is not an easy task. I went into the office multiple times at differing hours of the day, but invariably Ms. Ware Green was not in or was busy.”

“At this stage, I attempted to raise the issue with Ms. Ware Green’s superiors, hoping that some internal pressures would expedite things,” he wrote.

“Time and again I was told that only Jonalyn [Ware Greene] could make the inputs into GMS so that I could be issued a check, that she was aware of the issue, that they were working on it. …

There is a cultural malaise within the Housing Department in which these ‘professional’ staff are not responsive to their student employees because there is no accountability.”

This student worker and many others have felt uncomfortable speaking with the Voice for fear of being fired or not rehired for the next employment period. “Our boss sent out an email with reference to the upcoming Voice article and reminded us that,

CULP creates new tenure-line faculty position

by Lara Fishbane

by Manuela Tobias

After national monuments closed due to the government shutdown, the Georgetown University Student Veterans Association and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation arranged with the University to bring The Wall That Heals, a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to Healy Lawn.

“The VVMF came to [GUSVA] for the location. It was either Georgetown or Arlington National Cemetery,” Thomas Mitchell Gibbons-Neff (COL ‘15), president of GUSVA, wrote in an email to the Voice. “The Cemetery never got back to the VVMF.” The wall spans Healy Lawn across from Lauinger Library, dedicated to Joseph Mark Lauinger (COL ‘67), one of the 23 Georgetown alumni killed in combat in the Vietnam War. An accompanying trailer contains a few examples of the 400,000 items people have left at the memorial.

University administrators hope that having the memorial on campus will benefit both visitors and students.

The School of Foreign Service’s Field Chair of Culture and Politics, Shiloh Krupar, announced in an email to all CULP majors on Tuesday the creation of a new tenure-line faculty position responsible solely for the CULP major.

Until now, CULP has only retained one faculty member fully affiliated with the program, Professor Krupar. The new faculty position, in development since last spring, aims to bring a tenure-line faculty member specializing in visual culture and new media.

“In terms of culture and politics faculty, there’s only one person that’s actually fully affiliated, 100 percent affiliated with culture and politics, and that’s my faculty line. Everyone else is cross-affiliated. They’re very involved, it’s just that they have obligations elsewhere,” Krupar said. “A second person [fully] attached to CULP … would mean that we have a larger core than one person to provide stability with the curriculum.”

The Wall That Heals will be on display on Healy Lawn until Monday.

“Unfortunately, students don’t always take advantage of [opportunities to see D.C.],” Georgetown’s veterans office coordinator David Shearman (SFS ‘11, GRAD ‘14) said.

Gibbons-Neff acknowledged that the memorial was a bit of a surprise to students. “It wasn’t publicized more because it all came together in the course of 24 hours, as the shutdown is a pretty recent thing and securing Healy via the

joshua raftis

President’s office happened on Sunday,” he wrote.

Both GUSVA and VVMF expect the traffic to the memorial to drastically pick up this weekend and estimate hundreds will visit each day.

To transport tourists to the attraction, a free shuttle connecting Georgetown to the National Mall will run every hour from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. while the memorial is open on campus through Monday.

per our employment contract, talking to the press is grounds for dismissal,” this worker wrote.

Executive Director of Residential Living Patrick Killilee assured the Voice that this is not the department’s policy when dealing with its student employees.

“If someone is talking about their own personal experience and how the system has impacted them, we would not be concerned about that,” Killilee said. “An offense of not [re]hiring [an employee] would be more along the lines of a breach of confidentiality.

And that’s the issue for managers, because the managers have more issues of confidentiality.”

Killilee recognized the lack of clarity the department’s employees face on what is acceptable to tell the press.

“What we need to do is to help our staff understand that working for the Office of Residential Living does not take away your right to share your experiences, but what we do ask you is not to speak on behalf of the department,” Killilee said.

What is clear, however, is that these overdue wages have hurt student employees.

“I got the job with housing over the summer exactly because I needed the wages to cover my living expenses,” one of the student employees wrote. “All my budgeting was done according to the safe assumption that I would be paid on time.”

Having a permanent fulltime faculty member will allow CULP students to “get more creative [and] have more advising power from someone who would be able to advise in a way that would fit the specific goals of their CULP major,” said Kyle Zhu (SFS ‘14), president of the SFS Academic Council.

“The number one thing [for candidates] is to have some sort of visual expertise. More than anything, someone who does visual culture and new media would be great. … [We also] want somebody whose research is really integrated in what they teach and who, of course, is a really good teacher,” Krupar said.

‘We already have quite a number [of applicants]. The window is a month, it’s hard to say, [but] it’s going to be 50 at least.”

Candidates will visit campus in early December to give guest lectures, talk to deans, and engage with students. The University expects the new tenure-line faculty member to begin teaching in the fall of 2014.

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the georgetown voice 5

Leo’s workers discuss labor issues at Georgetown

by Shalina Chatlani A group of workers at Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall sat down with students to hold a discussion about labor conditions at Georgetown on Tuesday evening.

The event, organized in conjunction by the Kalmanovitz Initiative, Black Student Alliance, Caribbean Culture Circle, Black House, MEChA, and Georgetown’s NAACP chapter, highlighted the progress of the workers’ labor union since its formation in 2011, as well as existing problems that continue to pervade the workplace.

Despite advancements since the unionization of workers two years ago, two former Aramark employees, Donte Crestwell and Tarshea Smith, key players in the initial movement, said that there is still need for improvement in terms of granting employees a fair working environment. Aramark operates multiple dining locations on campus, including Leo’s.

Crestwell said many of the issues still surrounding employees involve cases of harassment. “You have a lot of workers that feel like they are being harassed unnecessarily every day,” he said. “The P.M. shift is where we’re getting a lot of

calls from.” According to him, the working environment has improved since unionization, but managers and supervisors often harangue employees with belittling and condescending questions and comments such as, “How long are you going to the bathroom? Why do you need to go? Didn’t you just go? I haven’t seen you in 20 minutes.”

Aramark management could not be reached for comment when emailed and called multiple times, and the Leo’s management refused to comment when asked about these allegations.

Such inquiries bother employees because “workers just want to work and feed their families.

They’re living check to check … and they just want to work and go home,” Crestwell said.

Yet, both Crestwell and Smith emphasized that the working environment has improved tremendously since unionizing. “The workplace was horrible to work in [before],” Crestwell said. “A lot of people, in their late 50s, 60s, and 70s, were being treated horribly, [and] they knew they had to ignore it, because nobody else was going to hire them.”

According to Smith, thanks to new initiatives like grievance meetings, where employees can come to-

The white man’s footbal l

Usually, I stay away from writing about sports. It’s not a personal aversion. I’m as much of a fan as the next guy. I just like to leave it to the bros in the sports section and their hilarious podcasts. But I’ve gotta say something about the football team in D.C. Maybe it’s because people are sick of talking about the shutdown, but the namechange controversy has showed up everywhere this week. Hell, I even saw an article on it in McGill University’s student paper.

For the uninitiated, we have a football team in this city (or just outside of it) officially called the Washington Redskins. And that’s a problem for many people, because, by definition, “redskin” is a racial slur. There’s not a dictionary out there that would tell you otherwise. For years now, activist groups, both American Indian and non, have been pushing the team to change the name, but lately the debate’s reached a fever pitch. President Obama said on Tuesday that if he were the ‘skins owner, he would

consider changing the name. Various media outlets like Washington City Paper have ceased using the name altogether. (City Paper opts for “Pigskins.”)

The team’s owner Dan Snyder fired back in recent days. “We’ll never change the name,” he told USA Today on Tuesday. “It’s that simple.

NEVER—you can use caps.” Then, on Wednesday, he released a letter to the team’s fans outlining his position. His point is basically that the name has tradition and that it glorifies American Indians instead of insulting them because of the franchise’s great and storied history.

Now, that’s bullshit. Simply affiliating a slur with an organization, no matter how great, doesn’t make it not a slur. But there are better arguments out there for not changing the name. Storied ESPN columnist Rick Reilly made one a few weeks back. At the core of his argument is the fact that some American Indians don’t find the name offensive.

In fact, there are predominantly American Indian schools across

AMBIKA AHUJA

Leo’s workers speak to students about labor issues on campus during a panel. gether and discuss any abuses they may have encountered, conditions have gotten better.

GUSA Secretary of Social Justice Brittney Blakely (COL ‘14), noted that students still play an integral role in helping workers maintain their rights. “The power that we have, our voice, and our presence, and just standing behind the entity of them as workers—we have so much power to work toward change and to hold people accountable,” she said.

Much of the support from the administration has come from the Just Employment Policy, which the University implemented in 2005. The policy grants workers rights to a living wage, to form a union, to dignity in

the workplace, and to anti-discrimination on the basis of race and gender. “[During the unionization effort in 2011], the Georgetown administration actually sent a letter to Aramark reminding them that the workers on our campus, like workers everywhere, have the right to form a union,” Vail Kohnert-Yount (SFS ‘13), administrator for the Kalmanovitz Initiative and former GUSA vice president, said during the event. “[Nevertheless, Aramark has] almost horrifying records of workers’ rights systematically ... so it is particularly telling that in a place like Georgetown, we decided to contract with a company like Aramark which has a record of problematic

the West with “Redskins” as their mascot. It’s just another case of East Coast yuppies with racial sensitivity sticks up their asses.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Reilly writes, “telling the Kingston (Okla.) High School (57.7 percent Native American) Redskins that the name they’ve worn on their uniforms for 104 years has been a joke on them this whole time. Because they wear it with honor.”

can’t make the decision to change the name. They can refuse to use it, but if there’s gonna be a change, it has to be because the population in question requests it.

This is where Reilly’s argument breaks down. It’s not that American Indians as a whole don’t care about the name. There are plenty who do and who care a lot. Just ask the Oneida Indian Nation, who held a press conference with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) on Tuesday to demand the name be changed. Or just look at the comments section of any American Indian media site. They’re chock full of anger, not just at this name, but at other offensive ones as well.

So, if one thing’s clear, it’s that the community is somewhat divided. But they might also not care all that much. When Guardian contributor Dana Lone Hill asked around about the name on her reservation, she found “We have more important things to worry about” was the most popular response. She says this echoes sentiments she’s heard elsewhere.

City on a Hill

by Gavin Bade

A bi-weekly column about D.C. news and politics.

And later, “For the majority of Native Americans who don’t care, we’ll care for them. For the Native Americans who haven’t asked for help, we’re glad to give it to them.

Trust us. We know what’s best.”

Hate to say it, but he’s got a point. There are a lot of non-American Indian folks out there up in arms about the name, who won’t use it.

They’re obviously well-intentioned.

They’re trying to be allies. But they

treatment of their workers,” she added. “We’re a Jesuit university.

We’re a Catholic university, and we should hold ourselves to a higher standard for how we treat members of our community.”

The Just Employment Policy holds the administration accountable for protecting those employees who are not under the original union contract in new locations like Einstein Bros and the upcoming Elevation Burger and Salad Creations. However, the worry is that “Georgetown is not always the best at adhering to this contract we set for ourselves,” Kohnert-Yount said.

The workers will not be able to join the union until the original contract expires. “Our next contract will be January 1, 2015. The addition of the new stores will be one of the first things we ask for,” Crestwell said. The current contract encompasses Leo J. O’Donovan Dining Hall, Jesuit residence Wolfington Hall, the Cosi and Starbucks in the Leavey Center, and the Dr. Mug in the medical school.

“The university makes sure our contractors understand and adhere to our Just Employment Policy. We take any violations of the Just Employment Policy very seriously,” Rachel Pugh, director of Media Relations, wrote in an email to the Voice.

But, when Lone Hill asked “What would you do if someone called you a redskin?” she writes, “The answer was always the same.

Everyone thought it was offensive.”

That’s the crux of the debate.

The name is almost certainly offensive in a personal context to any American Indian. Even Snyder wouldn’t call Lone Hill a redskin to her face (I think). And if a name can’t pass that simple test, it’s probably got to go.

But, it’s a bridge too far for me to make that proscription. I don’t like the name, and I think a segment of the American Indian population being pissed about it is enough reason to make the change. But the opinion of a white kid like me won’t change things, nor should it. The American Indian community needs to come together and present as united a front as possible, either for change or the status quo. If they can’t, it’ll be true that we’re only talking about this because of shutdown fatigue.

Go see a Redskins game with Gavin at gbade@georgetownvoice.com

sports

6 the georgetown voice

october 10, 2013

Men’s soccer poised to finish the season strong

by Chris Castano For most of this year, the No. 8 Georgetown men’s soccer team (9-2-1, 2-0-1 Big East) has struggled to find an identity. Between an ever-changing back line, a lack of team understanding, and the integration of freshmen into the starting line up, Head Coach Brian Wiese has been trying to find how the puzzle fits together. After the Hoyas’ 8-0 drubbing of the Seton Hall Pirates in an intriguing Big East matchup, it looks as if everything is finally falling into place.

“I thought we did a really good job in possession,” Wiese said. “I thought our midfielders were keeping it well. I thought [senior midfielder] Stevie [Neumann] was finding it and doing good things with it and it was just another game and the next one’s gonna start 0-0. You don’t start with an 8-0 lead against Providence.”

While Wiese remains grounded in his approach to the rest of the upcoming season, his team has every right to be excited about the show they put on for fans at Shaw last Saturday. Team captain Steve Neumann should be especially happy with his performance as he led the Hoya charge from the front scoring a hat trick and his 100th career point as a Georgetown Hoya, the fourth player in the history of the soccer program to do so.

“Obviously, it’s a big honor.

We’ve had a lot of guys get impressive point tallies throughout the years at Georgetown, and it’s an honor to be in that category and it’s a testament to how good the program’s gotten,” Neumann said. “Over the past couple years, for it to pro-

vide for me those chances, it’s a sophomore forward Brandon weekend, the Hoyas are look- achieved in terms of results for Allen ensured the score ended ing to improve on their con- how good they are.” great honor.”

The Hoyas stepped up to The Hoyas began the game at 8-0. At the the final whistle, ference record. Georgetown brightly. The first goal sailed Neumann recorded his second is slated to play a tough game the challenge on Wednesday, into the net in the 11th min- career hat trick, and the Hoyas against Xavier this Saturday defeating Providence (7-2-2, ute thanks to an own goal by a left Shaw Field with their heads and Coach Wiese isn’t taking 2-1-0 Big East) 1-0 in a tightly contested match. Freshman any team lightly.

Seton Hall player. Junior mid- held high.

“It’s really hard. We have Bakie Goodman provided the “We did a lot of things fielder Tom Skelly received the ball from Neumann and fired right,” Allen said. “I thought maybe the hardest stretch of game-winner in the 69th minacross the box onto the foot of we held up the ball well, great our season coming up with at ute off of a cross junior midthe unfortunate pirate to make combinations out wide, and we Providence and at Xavier,” Wi- fielder Tyler Rudy.

Georgetown will play the made everything happen. We ese said. “Providence is having it 1-0 Hoyas.

The Hoyas combined beauti- found the net when we had a very good year and playing last leg of their two game them at home is never an easy roadtrip this Saturday in Cinfully for their second goal only chances.”

After a 0-0 tie against task for us to get results. And cinnati against Xavier (5-5-2, a minute later. Sophomore defender Keegan Rosenberry sent Creighton over Homecoming Xavier has probably under- 1-2-0 Big East) at 7p.m. a cross into the box to freshman forward Alex Muyl. He, in turn, crossed the ball back to Neumann at the other end of “Dirk Hayhurst...COULDNT hack it...Tom Verducci wasn’t even a water boy in high school...but yet they can still bash a player...SAVE IT NERDS.” - Tampa Bay Rays Pitcher David Price’s Twitter response to criticism from MLB analysts on TBS the box where he put the ball to take their talents elsewhere. the ball, there is always a good in. Muyl would get involved

by Chris Almeida Thus, the Hoyas are without a chance that he will either get again in the 23rd minute when fouled or score. center of the future.

The Hilltop is famous for a corner found the head of juThis is a change of pace Enter Josh Smith.

The transproducing great centers.

Over nior midfielder Tyler Rudy, the from the current situation for fer from UCLA entered college the past few years, however, this foot of Muyl, and then the back the Hoyas.

Mikael Hopkins has as a prized five star recruit.

The hasn’t been the case.

What has of the net. struggled on the offensive end, Hoyas’ last five star player?

None happened to Big Man U? Freshman forward Brett in part to his height—Hopkins other than Monroe.

But Smith’s Since the departure of Greg Campbell scored his first goal stands at only 6-9.

Moses Ayegstory is not so simple.

While at Monroe in 2010, the Hoyas have from a corner kick by Neuba has shown promise on the UCLA, Smith showed flashes of been without a strong center.

The mann to make the score 4-0 for boards, but is nonexistent on the his vast potential but struggled squad has become much more the Hoyas. In the 43rd minute, offensive end.

The absence of a with his weight and conditionof a lanky forward’s team.

Otto Neumann and junior midfieldpost presence has put extra presing.

During his time under Ben Porter is now the archetype for er Austin Martz combined to the Georgetown centerpiece, Howland, Smith’s productivi- sure on the backcourt. Though give Neumann his second goal with Greg Whittington, Stephen ty and minutes waned. Against Starks and D’Vauntes Smith-Riof the game. The Hoyas went Domingo, Reggie Cameron, and Georgetown last year, Smith only vera have excelled, without Porinto the break up 5-0. recruits Isaac Copeland and Paul played 12 minutes and scored ter attracting the brunt of defenThe Hoyas have struggled sive attention, opposing defenses White also fitting into this mold. four points. to get on the board this year, will be able to closely watch the Since coming to the Hilltop While Otto certainly brought but worry lines left Wiese’s face perimeter. Last season, the abilmidway through last year, Smith excitement and success to the as he reflected on the chances ity to cut to the basket was sehas supposedly cut weight in program, the lack of a big man Georgetown created. “Today riously lacking. Only perimeter preparation for the season but rehas been a key weakness in the we played how we train and shooting and Porter’s wizardry mains a question mark.

“He has Hoyas’ system.

The absence of it was very good and we crekept the Hoyas in games. Howto make a decision if he wants an inside threat has made it easated a ton of chances. I think ever, if Smith enters the mix, he to be good or not.

He has all the ier for defenses to focus on the we match up well with Seton could spread the floor and help tools.

He always has.

When and guard play, while the absence of Hall,” Wiese said. “With how the guards slash to the hoop. if he commits, he’ll see the posia rim protector on the defensive we play and how they play, Smith’s tenure on the Hilltop tive results.

It’s a process,” Head end makes inside scoring much it’s always been hard for Seton could be yet another disappointCoach John Thompson III said of more effective against the Hoyas.

Hall to play us. And today the ment, but it could also be the reSmith.

The big man’s eligibility In the vaunted 2014 recruitgoals just came in.” turn to the glory days of Big Man for the first semester remains in ing class, the Hoyas have seAfter the break, a Neumann U. With an experienced team of question as there is currently a cured four highly-ranked playpenalty kick and a double from ers: White and Copeland, as well waiver pending for Smith to play smaller players on the roster this year, Smith could complete the as guard LJ Peak and Markel in the first semester.

“We don’t know when or how puzzle and make the Hoyas a Starks’s replacement, Tre Campbell. However, the glaring hole in long we’ll have him, But we think top force on the national scene. If this class is a center. The Hoyas we should know pretty soon,” Smith doesn’t leave for the NBA, missed out on big men China- Thompson said. But when Smith the talent injection coming next nu Onuaku, who committed to returns, he could be the final year could make the 2014-2015 Louisville, and Elbert Robinson, necessary piece for the Hoyas to Hoyas one of the most formidable teams in recent memory. who committed to LSU amid have a great run.

Who are the players you asSmith, at his best, is an unrumors of recruiting corruption.

These players were two of the stoppable offensive force. In sociate with Georgetown? Patmost prominent inside forces in the post, Smith’s size is lethal rick Ewing, Dikembe Mutombo, the class of 2014 and had George- to opposing defenses. If Kenner Alonzo Mourning, Roy Hibbert, town among their final choic- League play is any indicator of Greg Monroe. Could the next es for schools before deciding Smith’s prowess, after getting man on the list be Josh Smith?

ANDRES RENGIFO

Men’s soccer enters the home stretch of its season in good form.

the sports sermon

sports

georgetownvoice.com

the georgetown voice 7

Women’s soccer remains undefeated Cross country excels in heat

by Chris Wadibia After two consecutive wins against conference opponents, the No. 4 Hoyas (11-0-2, 3-0-1 Big East) are looking to extend their streak of dominance over the course of their five final games of the regular season. The Hoyas’ 3-0 victory against the Butler Bulldogs (8-4-2, 1-3-0 Big East) demonstrated the team’s stout defense and offensive chemistry, while the Hoyas’ 2-1 win over Providence (4-6-3, 1-3-0 Big East) showed the team’s ability to earn victories in difficult playing conditions.

When speaking about the priorities of the defense, senior defender and captain Emily Menges said, “Our ultimate goal, if you ask any of the defenders, is to get shutouts. Last season we set the standard very high for ourselves with 12 shutouts. It is the defenders’ job to not give up goals. …

The back four is solid and it is pretty

much unchanged from last year, so we all know that we can rely on each other. That being said, we also know our true potential and we … are the ones who put the most pressure on ourselves to perform at our best.”

The game against Providence provided the Hoyas with another opportunity to test their strength as a team. With goals from senior defender Kailey Blain and junior midfielder Daphne Corboz during the 46th and 66th minutes respectively, the Hoyas closed the door on any opportunities for the Friars to come back for a late victory.

Corboz stressed the key role the Hoyas’ midfield plays: “We know how important the midfield is to the team’s success and hope to be able to win as many midfield battles as we can,” she said.

In addition, Corboz commented on the team’s offensive production and potential as the season progresses.

JORDAN SMITH

Women’s soccer will look to stay unbeaten this weekend against Marquette.

Back with a Vengeance

2013 seemed like the end of the world for Boston sports fans. The year before was full of heartbreak: Ray Allen’s departure from the Celtics, a Patriots’ loss in the Super Bowl (to New York, no less), the Red Sox had their first losing season since 1997, and we didn’t even have the Bruins to distract us. Our empire seemed to be crashing around us, and there was no end in sight. Even early 2013 was rough—with a AFC title loss to the Ravens and a first round loss to New York, yet again, in the NBA playoffs. But never fear, New England, because Boston is coming back with a vengeance.

Tuesday, news broke that Rob Gronkowski, a tight end for the New England Patriots, would finally be cleared to play next week, after sitting on the sidelines, recuperating from spinal surgery and other injuries. Last season, Gronkowski broke his arm in a playoff game against the Houston Texans and wasn’t

able to play with the team in their loss to the Ravens. With the loss of Wes Welker, Gronkowski’s absence has been even more evident. And coming off an embarrassing loss to the Bengals, his recovery couldn’t be more timely. The Patriots’ offense has been struggling, to say the least.

While much of that blame has fallen on Tom Brady, it’s not really his fault. He’s working with a limited number of options, and he’s quick to admit there’s room for improvement.

Sunday’s Saints matchup will be a great test for Gronkowski and the Patriots. New Orleans is still the strong and balanced team they were in 2009. With Brees at the helm and their defense winning them games, the Saints will be an even match for the Pats. Brees and Brady, while different in leadership styles, both are the lynchpin of their teams and make intelligent decisions on the field. With more options open,

“The cohesiveness between the lines has been good, although it can always get better,” she said. “We always try to play out of the back, which is fantastic. Up front, I think we could be more effective with combinations in the attacking third, our final passes, and our finishing.

All in all, we have tried to play some good soccer but I look forward to the team’s continued improvement.”

As the Hoyas prepare for the final games of the regular season, one area where they can improve is maintaining their focus.

“There is not one thing that constitutes as our biggest weakness, but I do think we are most vulnerable during games when we lose focus,” said Menges. “That is, when we make… unintelligent plays that put our back line under pressure. We all do it sometimes and it is not a matter of practicing, it’s a matter of staying focused and making smarter decisions.”

The Hoyas have performed well on the field so far this season, but they believe their best games have yet to be played. “The team has worked very well together so far, which has been shown by our record, however, this weekend against Marquette will be a great test,” Corboz said.

The Hoyas’ will look to stay undefeated when they take on No. 11 Marquette (11-3-0, 4-0-0 Big East) this Saturday at 2p.m.

Brady can match Brees this weekend. As far as defense goes, we’ve been matching the Saints all season. With the irrefutable offensive drought, defense has kept the Pats alive thus far. I think that they’ve got a shot at a home win, but regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s match—the Pats are still looking at the playoffs.

Sporty Spice

by Abby Sherburne A bi-weekly column about sports

And so are the Red Sox. Early Wednesday morning, the Sox beat the Tampa Bay Rays to advance to the American League Championship Series. With the World Series in sight and coming fresh off a victory, the Sox are feeling good. Jake Peavy took the lead from Jon Lester in the final game against the Rays, and pitched over five innings. With three other talented pitchers behind Peavy and Lester, the Sox are

by Max Roberts Georgetown’s men’s and women’s cross country teams both had strong showings in their second competition at the Paul Short Invitational in Bethlehem, Penn. this past weekend. The men’s team, now ranked 24th in the country, finished 3rd out of 47 teams. The now 5th ranked women’s team finished first among the 47-team field.

“I think it showed that we still have some work to do,” Head Men’s Distance Coach Brandon Bonsey said.

Despite not finishing as strongly as he would have liked, Bonsey was upbeat about the potential his team showed.

“It also showed that we are really good and we’re really deep. … With 1k left to go we were dominating the meet, we had 7 guys in the top 30.”

The men were led by graduate student Andrew Springer who finished fourth overall with a time of 23:52, and senior Brian King, who finished 9th with a time of 24:12. They battled difficult conditions as the large field size and heat took a toll on the runners.

“We knew it was going to be hot, but we didn’t know it was going to that hot,” Bonsey said.

looking strong against all batters, regardless of whether they’re from Oakland or Detroit.

Especially after last year’s losing record, their combeack is astounding. No one anticipated such a strong performance from the Red Sox after last year’s flop, but somehow, resolve and camaraderie, like that exemplified from Peavy, have propelled the Red Sox to the top of the field. With the Red Sox first, this Boston spirit can only keep spreading throughout the sports culture and fanbase of New England.

Now even though we can get excited about playoffs for the Sox, Pats, and Bruins, we can’t expect too much from the Celtics. After the giant Nets trade, our squad is young, inexperienced, and rallying behind a rookie coach in Brad Stevens.

However, General Manager Danny Ainge knows what he’s doing. From his experience on the court, Ainge knows the importance of “out with the old and in with the new.” And he’s giving Stevens a chance to

Women’s Cross Country Coach Michael Smith shared very positive feelings after the meet.

“This meet confirmed that we are a very good cross country team,” Smith said.

The women did not have a single runner finish in the top 10, but they were powered by a trio of girls in the top 15. Sophomore Samantha Nadel led the team in 11th place with a time of 20:40 while graduate student Rachel Schneider and sophomore Haley Pierce followed in 13th and 15th places, respectively.

The heat undoubtedly affected the runners, which gave Smith more cause for optimism, as even in compromising conditions his team was able to grind out a victory.

“My initial feeling was being really concerned for our athletes because they were just terrible, terrible conditions,” he said.

With the win and bump up to the 5th best team, Smith wants to see his team stay focused and not be influenced by the pressure.

“Keep calm and carry on,” Smith said.

This coming weekend, the men will travel to Neward, Delaware for the Blue-Gold Invitational, while the women will have the weekend off.

prove himself, with a 6-year contract and a bright-eyed squad. Rajon Rondo may be headlining the team, but Stevens has some up-andcoming talent too. Kris Humphries (known for his Kardashian fame, but he’s actually a decent ball player), Jared Sullinger, and Jeff Green are all intelligent, unselfish players, dedicated to rebuilding a squad worthy of the next Celtics dynasty.

Hell, getting rid of punks like Rondo could be a blessing in disguise for rebuilding a tighter, less superstar-oriented team—more like what the championship Celtics look like.

So this year might not be stellar for the Celtics, but we’re rebuilding. Just like the rest of Boston, our fanbase can find comfort in the fact that we won’t have another 2012 anytime soon. Even if there are no rings, no championships, and no record-setting seasons, we’ve been and we’re holding Boston strong.

Celebrate Boston with Abby at asherburne@georgetownvoice.com

8 the georgetown voice

feature

october 10, 2013

georgetownvoice.com

feature

the new (inter)face of higher ed

the georgetown voice 9

IT WAS IMPORTANT THAT GEORGETOWN EXPLORE WHAT ITS PLACE IN THIS NEW LANDSCAPE MIGHT BE .

how online technologies are transforming traditional education

BY ISABEL ECHARTE ITEL has allocated $8 million to improving online learning and classroom technology over three years. “[This initiative] came together, by Georgetown standards, fairly quickly last fall with the decision to sign up with edX,” said David Edelstein, associate professor in the SFS. Edelstein was part of the faculty working group that helped advise ITEL, which is allocating a third of its funds to MOOC development under the edX platform.

When asked why Georgetown decided to explore electronic learning options, Edelstein said, “I think the highest levels of the University thought it was important that Georgetown explore what its place in this new landscape [of higher education] might be.”

According to Randall Bass, associate provost and director of GU’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship, one of ITEL’s primary goals in reshaping on-cam-

consultant group Ithaka, students who took a hybrid statistics course “paid no price” in terms of passing rates, final exam scores, and standardized test scores.

The decisions of other universities to join the MOOC consortia—including edX, Udacity, and Coursera—in the past two years prompted Georgetown’s decision to look into such initiatives as MOOCs, hybrid classes, and other online options, according to Bass.

“There is ... a lot of change and disruption in online learning going on,” Bass said.

“We knew we wanted to both accelerate what it was we were doing on campus and we knew we wanted to do something related to joining one of the consortia.”

Though the MOOCs trend among peer universities made creating such an initiative like ITEL a “matter of urgency,” Bass said the University had been looking for a comprehensive project that would also

izes Georgetown’s experimentation with electronic learning as a research venture that allows the University to explore innovative teaching and learning methodologies.

Professor Maggie Little, who helped create and teach Georgetown’s bioethics MOOC as the director of the KIE, believes these types of disruptive technologies compel educators to take another look at how they teach. “An unstated premise is that the current way we deliver education in the aggregate is actually decent; [but] let’s not assume that’s correct just because it’s the way we do things now,” she said. “One thing that’s really good about [MOOCs] is [that] it’s asking us for empirical evidence on the effectiveness of learning.”

At the end of the spectrum of technological integration, Georgetown aspires to the possibility of an undergraduate course taught entirely online. In particular, it hopes

course this spring or next fall. The University also hopes to have its first entirely online for-credit undergraduate course ready for summer 2014.

Through these projects, Georgetown is rapidly moving into the technological arena by making online learning a substantial part of the undergraduate experience. While this puts Georgetown on par with its tech-savvy peers and presents students with a cheaper, more diverse course selection, faculty members on the Hilltop and elsewhere are raising concerns about the pedagogical effectiveness of online courses, in addition to the broader implications for higher education.

In one of his first undertakings as Provost, Robert Groves began introducing technology into Georgetown’s curriculum with the Initiative on Technology-Enhanced Learning, which launched last December.

pus education is “flipping” the traditional classroom. Under this model, students are assigned “passive learning” for homework, like watching the video of a lecture, and then partake in active learning through collaborative projects or problem sets in class.

The upcoming hybrid bioethics course will experiment with this teaching method and will potentially include parts of the “Introduction to Bioethics” MOOC through the Kennedy Institute of Ethics.

Though professors and administrators have expressed interest in entirely re-thinking how they teach traditional material through ideas such as the “flipped classroom,” some faculty members have pointed out that there is scant evidence on the pedagogical effectiveness of these methods because they are so new. Nevertheless, according to research done by

transform learning on campus.

Richard Boyd, associate professor of Government and director of the Social and Political Thought certificate program, worries that universities like Georgetown are rushing to adapt online models for education for the wrong reasons.

“Some of the discussions I have seem to assume that this is inevitable…[referencing] the notion that we as a university don’t want to fall behind other universities somehow, or even the idea that somehow we want to democratize education,” Boyd said.

“Those all may be important things, but I think you have to make a pedagogical case for this.” According to Boyd, this case is not yet being adequately made at Georgetown.

On the other hand, the language used by many administrators and faculty members involved in these initiatives character-

to launch a course taught entirely online for summer 2014. According to Bass, Georgetown students transfer over $2 million worth of credits from summer courses taken at other colleges, so the expansion to online summer courses would help fill that revenue gap.

“They’ll be set at all the same standards as the courses taught during the year,” Bass said. In terms of credit-hours and cost, the summer class would be equivalent to an on-campus course.

Edelstein says that the decision to make the online courses cost the same as on-campus courses reflects basic economics: “If they’re going to give the same credit for [an online course], they have to charge the same. Otherwise everyone is going to start taking the online version ... because it is cheaper.”

COURTESY OF KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS

Last week, Georgetown joined the ranks of Harvard and MIT in offering a range of new digital learning alternatives by launching its first Massive Open Online Course. The MOOC, entitled “Globalization’s Winners and Losers,” taught by SFS Professor Theodore Moran, will be available at no charge to anyone with an internet connection via the edX online platform.

In addition to Professor Moran’s course and various other MOOCs the University has numerous other electronic learning projects in the works. The NHS recently transitioned four out of its five master’s degree programs online, with some in-person training sessions. The MSB also recently introduced an online Master of Science in Finance, set to launch this January. And for the undergraduate curriculum, the Department of Philosophy plans to pilot a hybrid online and in-person bioethics

COURTESY OF KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS

– DAVID EDELSTEIN

As of now, the University does not have plans to offer an entirely online course during the school year, though Bass sees this as an inevitable move. “I think doing the summer pilot is the beginning of experimentation with online learning in the undergrad space,” he said.

Although there is discomfort regarding Georgetown’s interest in merging education with technology among some faculty, most professors and administrators agree that the current model of education is unsustainable: Higher education is becoming increasingly expensive without a corresponding increase in efficiency.

The types of online courses Georgetown is exploring, however, could help students financially by helping them complete credits in a more flexible manner, which, in turn, could allow them to graduate earlier, according to Edelstein.

Online courses could also save universities money. For example, Georgetown’s online summer course is estimated to cost roughly $25,000 in start-up expenses, though it will not cost that much every time the course is offered. “In terms of running it, it’s probably cheaper [than a traditional class],” Bass said. “Once it’s up, it’s probably cheaper [than] all the things that go with the classroom.”

Nevertheless, he did not seem worried that such moves could affect the job market or pay for professors. “I think our biggest hope is that we are figuring out ways to free faculty to do the things that they are best at,” he said.

Edelstein, on the other hand, expressed a higher level of concern about the possible effects of an increasingly electronic classroom on the already limited national academic job market, which is under the strain of potentially detrimental practices, including the hiring of part-time adjunct professors instead of full-time, tenure-track professors. “I would say it’s very controversial in my world, because the implication of this is: [employing a] MOOC is a lot cheaper than hiring a new faculty member.”

While fully online courses may begin to be incorporated into the University’s curriculum, at least at Georgetown, MOOCs won’t be a part of standard undergraduate

education any time soon. To Bass, these have never been seen as stand-alone courses. For the time being, they remain a means of exploring online education.

While Georgetown students will not benefit from them in the near future, over the course of this academic year the University will introduce three MOOCs from its most renowned departments. Aside from the SFS “Globalization” course that went live just over a week ago, a genomics course put together by GU’s medical school will join the KIE’s bioethics MOOC for its launch on the edX platform in the spring.

Moreover, the bioethics team plans to have three topic-specific modules, or shorter MOOCs, into which users can enroll according to their interests. The next course the SFS is preparing to launch will focus on terrorism and counterterrorism.

Since Georgetown’s contract with edX lasts three years and covers six to ten courses, according to Bass, the University has a few more courses it hopes to create over the next few years.

Despite its short-term goals for its partnership with edX, given the experimental nature of these initiatives Georgetown has not yet made a definitive plan for making these courses financially sustainable. Each of these early MOOCs is expected to cost at least $100,000, but, since each course is different and no precise cost projections can be made, Bass said each MOOC could cost up to twice that sum.

“I anticipate [that] within the next year we’ll see revenue, or cost recovery from a few different sources. Charging [enrolled students] for certificates of completion is one possibility,” said Bass. Alternatively, he speculated that Georgetown could also offer small private closed courses­­—more intensive, selective versions of MOOCs for which the University could charge tuition.

Bass also articulated that the University is beginning conversations on a third option: licensing content. Licensing would allow the University to “sell” its MOOCs for use on other higher education campuses worldwide.

The licensing of online courses appears to be having the largest impact on transforming traditional models of higher education. As the debate sparked by a group

THERE’S A HUGE WORRY FOR MANY THAT THE ONLINE STUFF ... WILL CROWD OUT FACE-TO-FACE TEACHING. – MAGGIE LITTLE of professors at San José State University shows, as MOOCs and other technological advances pick up speed, academia is beginning to earnestly consider what the shift to electronic methods of learning is having on the way it operates.

Last April, San José State’s president announced that the school would experiment with multiple edX MOOC courses for undergraduates after seeing positive results with incorporating lectures from MIT’s “Circuits & Electronics” course into one of San José State’s engineering classes.

But when San José State encouraged its philosophy professors to teach Harvard’s nationally acclaimed “Justice” course, the entire department refused, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In an open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, who teaches “Justice,” the department expressed that it did not want to contribute to a move to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

While the professors made clear that they are not opposed to hybrid or partially online courses, they were distressed at the lack of control inherent in purchasing pre-packaged licensed courses. Although this use of a valuable tool has the potential to save tightly-budgeted universities large sums, professors were apprehensive of homogenizing education in terms defined by elite schools.

“We fear that two classes of universities will be created: one, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available,” the letter reads.

They concluded the letter saying that those who “care about public education” should not generate products that undermine it.

After being approached by MOOC platform Coursera to license his course, Mitchell Duneier, a Princeton professor the Chronicle called a “MOOC star,” has chosen not to participate in these online courses—at least for the time being. He

cites reasons similar to those expressed by San José State’s philosophy department.

“I think it’s an excuse for state legislatures to cut funding to state universities,” Duneier told the Chronicle. “I’m really uncomfortable being part of a movement that’s going to get its revenue in that way.”

Duneier also expressed doubts about whether using his course in such a way could even be pedagogically effective.

Amherst College has also turned down offers from edX to create a MOOC program on philosophical grounds. The College voted against joining edX since, according to the school, the format runs contrary to its commitment to “learning through colloquy” in addition to worries that certain uses of the courses could jeopardize “more-vulnerable” colleges and possibly Amherst itself, according to another Chronicle article.

There is also a worry that MOOCs could “enable the centralization” of education and possibly lead to “the obsolescence of the B.A. degree.”

“There’s a huge worry for many that the online stuff, even if it starts hybrid, will crowd out face-to-face teaching because it’s so much cheaper to deliver,” Professor Little said about similar fears at Georgetown.

Though Little believes the MOOC format is not necessarily going to increase the gap between “haves and have-nots” in education, she acknowledged that “because of the [online] efficiencies of scale and ... the limited budgets [of universities and students], you really could get fewer people getting an on-campus experience.”

“But for a place like Georgetown, I don’t worry about that at all, because if we offer a watered-down on-campus experience, we don’t exist,” Little said. “So our whole ... comparative advantage ... or our mission will be about developing on-campus experiences. That’s very much the way the President, the Provost, and the Board of Directors are thinking about it.”

All things considered, Bass and Little acknowledge that Georgetown plans to move ahead of this technological curve to define itself along the lines of what will, in the future, be considered “elite”: having a functioning, physical campus and face-toface intellectual community students are willing to pay for.

leisure

10 the georgetown voice

october 10, 2013

The District’s record stores will spin you right round, baby

by Shalina Chatlani & Josh Ward If you’re fed up with pseudo indie, overpriced, and pretentiously displayed record collections, despair no more. The Voice has uncovered some gems that are sure to satisfy your craving for quality vinyl. So, leave the comfort of your Urban Outfitters hovel and hop on a joyride through some of D.C.’s noteworthy record stores.

Som Records 1843 14th Street, N.W. Founded in 2007 by Neil Benton, Som Records is a music lover’s oasis, tucked away in a funky little basement on 14th street. Upon entering the store, customers find themselves entranced in the discovery process, flipping through the overflow of new and used LPs from some of history’s greatest R&B, soul, and jazz artists.

This soothing experience is accentuated by vinyl decorated walls and a jazzy New Orleans aura that easily captivates music aficionados. Although Som Records specializes in soulful genres, the store also receives a number of rock & roll, electronic, and indie records, as well as new releases from artists like 2Chainz, Animal Collective, and Toro y Moi. Smash! Records 2314 18th Street, N.W. Before its 2007 move to Adams Morgan, Smash! Records was the center of Georgetown punk culture.

Since 1984, this outfit has been curating the punk subculture movement, from studded leather bomber jackets to a satisfying array of vinyl records

for D.C.’s own punks. Smash!’s role has not changed much in its current permutation—it remains a sanctuary for rockers, young and old. This niche retailer holds a comprehensive collection of new and used punk, hardcore, and garage records, which is nicely padded with an eclectic cross-section of other genres. The store’s welcoming staff makes digging through records, band merch, and used clothing an inviting and relaxing afternoon activity.

Red Onion Records 1901 18th Street, N.W. What Red Onion Records, a petite store on 18th street, lacks in size, it easily makes up for in a fantastic collection of used and inexpensive LPs from a range of genres. This location is full of rare treasures, including collectable items from artists like jazz legend John Coltrane to rock & roller Bruce Springsteen. Customers immediately find themselves ensconced in the store’s easy-going vibes, soulful ambient music, and colorfully decorated walls, all of which are lined with bins of highly organized and incredibly diversified vinyl. It’s difficult not to get lost in this musical Narnia.

If you’re looking for something specific from the days of old, Red Onion Records is a great place to start.

Crooked Beat Records 2116 18th Street, N.W. Just up the street from Red Onion, nestled beneath a halal meat shop, lies Crooked Beat Records. This shop sacrifices the thrill of digging through crate after crate of used LPs for the sim-

SHALINA CHATLANI

These records are so indie, even the hipsters haven’t heard of them.

plicity of an efficient organization system. The well-stocked dugout anchors its collection in an extensive selection of rock, ranging from classic to punk to alternative. New and used records are separated, and within each section albums are organized by genre and artist. The bright lights

and energetic alt rock bumping in this lovely hole-in-the-wall gives Crooked Beat an up-tempo vibe perfect for quick, pre-planned vinyl cruising.

Join the support of the vinyl revival in the nation’s capital.

If you’re interested in records

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Breakfast was never big on my radar. In high school, it was a major accomplishment for me to remember to eat a Pop Tart, let alone actually put it in the toaster.

Cold pizza was a go-to breakfast item. Occasionally, if I felt especially ambitious, I would crack an egg (and a few pieces of shell) into a cup of Bisquik in an attempt to make pancakes.

It took several jaunts abroad for me to appreciate breakfast’s full potential. On my first foray out of the United States, in addition to discovering the magic of overnight buses, I hit breakfast rock bottom.

Paris should have been a culinary dream—croissants, quiche, and café-au-lait galore. Instead, because of a self-imposed food budget, my friends and I found ourselves pouring ramen noodles into a bathroom sink filled with scalding water. We turned on the shower for extra steam, to make sure the noodles cooked all the way through. Still, this stroke of culinary brilliance didn’t have the intended effect, and we pitifully slurped half-cooked ramen from Styrofoam cups at eight in the morning.

Literally anything could taste better than soggy sink noodles. It was a miracle, then, that our next hostel advertised every backpacker’s favorite two-word combination: “free breakfast.” They served us Nutella, which wields the power to compel any previous breakfast hater to greet the first meal of the day with open arms.

A year later, I found myself in Russia to welcome in 2012. I stayed with a lovely older couple in St. Petersburg for New Year’s, and it was there that my relationship with breakfast experienced serious mood swings.

Some mornings, I was greeted with kasha, Eastern European porridge that can be made with one of eight different cereals.

Count ‘em: eight. Everything

from raisins to mushy bananas to brown sugar was fair game for mixing into kasha, allowing for endless possible combinations of delicious breakfast.

Imagine how sad I was one morning to find, instead of a heaping bowl of kasha, a plate of small slices of white bread smeared in butter and topped with sizeable dollops of red caviar. Confused, I asked if this was really breakfast.

“Of course,” my host responded, bewildered at my question.

Somehow, I managed to gobble down several scoops of caviar before 9 a.m. Apparently, by finishing the meal so quickly, I had signaled my affinity

Plate of the Union

by Rebecca Barr & Colleen Wood a bi-weekly column about food for breakfast fish eggs, because the next morning I found the same meal on the table. Unfortunately, I was never able to get myself back on the kasha train during my time in Russia.

On the plus side, I managed to avoid caviar as a breakfast dish on subsequent trips back to Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, I had a brief culinary love affair with tvorog, known in the States as farmer ’s cheese.

Before boarding the minibus to Odessa, my friend Marina and I drank green tea and ate tvorog mixed with strawberry preserves.

Although I loved my breakfast ritual in Ukraine, Turkey boasts the best breakfast spread my stomach has ever had the opportunity to digest.

I spent a semester at Georgetown’s villa in Alanya, a small tourist town nestled between mountains and the Mediterranean coast. One of many perks involved with studying

for the music they hold and not for their merit as cheesy wall decorations, blissfully lighten your wallet, walk past the bougie joints on M St., and take advantage of these hi-fi hotspots, conveniently clustered just a pop, skip, and a crackle from the Healy gates. in Alanya was the weekly Turkish breakfast at a local café. We would carefully walk down the hill from our apartment building to the restaurant, our mouths instantly watering at the sight of the table covered in plates of food.

Bread is the essence of Turkish breakfast. You haven’t done Turkish breakfast right if you haven’t had at least a loaf of bread. On what else are you supposed to spread feta cheese and drizzle honey?

Carbs aren’t the only item on the menu, however. Tiny bowls containing a rainbow of preserves, ranging from the familiar strawberry to the exotic quince, were scattered across the table. Menemen, an omelet-like dish with peppers and onions, was served in small copper pans.

After returning from these adventures abroad, I have learned to balance my natural apathy for breakfast with an acquired affinity for the first meal of the day. We’re told from a young age that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When you look at the average college student’s breakfast habits, though, it’s not clear that this wisdom has sunk in.

An extra fifteen minutes of sleep trumps making oatmeal.

We delude ourselves into considering coffee from MUG a full breakfast. Yet I watch my roommate-turned-chef-goddess in awe as she whips up meals of avocado and toast, sauces from pomegranate and honey, and eggs prepared according to three different methods. It’s a miracle if I don’t burn my cheesy scrambled eggs, but it’s a first step in a positive direction.

Get some Turkish breakfast sausage with Rebecca and Colleen at rbarr@georgetownvoice.com and cwood@georgetownvoice.com

georgetownvoice.com

“Let’s divert federal resources and man hours so I can have my collegiate lesbian fling.” — D.E.B.S.

the georgetown voice 11

Newton’s Noodles proves derivative Comic relief hits D.C.

by Josh Ward Newton’s Noodles just added two items to the District’s gastronomic lexicon: the Fuzu and the Chork. No, this isn’t a culinary fable, but the new joint may be able to leave you with a lesson on how to do Asian-infused, fast-casual dining right.

Dennis Friedman, executive chef of the upscale Bethesda restaurant Newton’s Table, left the white tablecloth and superfluous fussiness behind in this new project. Wrapped in sleek lines, slabs of wood, and earthy tones, and accentuated by flashes of lime green and glass paneling, the eatery is invitingly simple.

If anything, Friedman has taken this minimalism too far. The lighting is bright and harsh, making it difficult to settle in and relax. The restaurant is also dead quiet, with the dull hum of the ventilation system providing the only ambient noise. This sterile atmosphere, while consistent with the

simplicity of the decor, stifles conversation and puts the practicality of the eatery—and not the satisfaction of the dining experience—first.

The hurry of Newton’s Noodles manifests in the joint’s signature dish, Fuzu. Like Chipotle, and at a similar price, this dish gives customers the freedom to customize their noodles without the three-hour wait for Leo’s Wok. The easy decisions come first: rice or soba noodles, original soy or coco-curry sauce, and a one, two, or three flame spice level. Then decisions start to get tougher, with two choices of the six proteins offered, and three out of the seven veggies.

The fuzu doesn’t disappoint. The noodles are fluffy but not overcooked, and the mix-ins are heaped on generously. Although Friedman and I seem to be at odds when it comes to what a three flame spice level tastes like, the flavors are robust and live up to the Newton’s Noodles corny tagline: “the

Slurp down Newton’s Noodle. Satisfaction not guaranteed.

vicky gu

perfect balance of salty and sweet with a touch of heat.”

The menu offers a handful of non-noodle dishes as well. The duck confit spring rolls give an interesting take on a classic, although the tuna bites are overcooked.

Every meal is predictably served in a Chinese takeout box and comes with a black plastic Chork. This signature yet hilariously clumsy and ineffective utensil combines the fork and chopsticks in a gimmicky attempt at ethnic fusion. Friedman could have just as easily provided forks and chopsticks, rather than a silly mutation of the two.

Though it delivers its food rapidly and will soon get even faster with online ordering options, Newton’s Noodles pays particular attention to distinguishing itself from a fast food stop. In fact, Friedman has not just built a new downtown lunch stop. He has created a new model for the fast-casual restaurant that can be easily transformed into a franchise.

Meals are delivered on sturdy brushed aluminum trays, not flimsy, brown plastic ones. The typical Coke or Pepsi products are replaced with artisanal Maine Root sodas. It’s these deliberate touches that work to remind you that even though you’re eating quickly, you’re not filling up on pink slime and high-fructose corn syrup.

Newton’s Noodles 1129 20th Street, N.W. Monday-Saturday newtonsnoodles.com

by Justin Chen Midterm season is upon us.

That means late nights in Lau, struggling to stay awake while reading “The Clash of Civilizations” for the eighth time, and gulping down that fifth cup of Corp coffee. Spirits are not so high around the Hilltop, but starting Oct. 10, the Bentzen Ball Comedy Festival offers a way to fix that.

“It’s basically a smorgasbord of awesome,” Svetlana Legetic told the Voice. She is one of the founders of BrightestYoungThings.com, the web magazine and event production agency behind the festival. Back in 2009, BYT hosted the first Bentzen Ball, flying in a whole bunch of comedians, booking a whole bunch of venues, and putting on a bunch of hilarious performances for audiences around D.C. After a brief hiatus, they’re bringing the festival back this year.

In its debut, the Bentzen Ball brought out the big guns of comedy, uniting comedians like Sarah Silverman, Nick Offerman, and Patton Oswalt.

This year’s lineup doesn’t disappoint, slating appearances from more stars like Rachel Dratch from Saturday Night Live, Wyatt Cenac from The

Daily Show, and Kate Flannery from The Office.

Legetic seems ecstatic to be gearing up for another festival. “We have a lot of special, non-traditional comedy shows,” she said, noting in particular the music revue at the Lincoln Theatre. Also unique to this year’s festival is the first D.C. taping of Doug Benson’s comedy podcast “Doug Loves Movies.” Legetic emphasized that despite boasting big names, the festival doesn’t skimp on local talent—19 of the comedians hail from the D.C. area.

“Trust me, it is both a great weekend for those who are very into the comedy universe and those who are just trying to dip their toes into it,” Legetic plugged.

The Bentzen Ball Festival opens Oct. 10 at the 9:30 Club and moves around to the Sphinx Club, Howard Theatre, Lincoln Theatre, and U Street Music Hall. The lineup, though dauntingly large, is a crafted collection of diverse performers who cover all niches of comedy, from music to standup to digital shorts. All of the shows are priced between $15 and $30, making them just as affordable as a dinner on M Street—and Pizzeria Paradiso can’t make you laugh.

Like half of American marriages, A.C.O.D. ends in failure

by Sarah Quincy The day-to-day struggles familiar to children of divorce—like scrolling through a voicemail list only to find alternating angry messages from mom and dad—are fodder for comedy in the cute and sappy new film, A.C.O.D. (Adult Children of Divorce).

Carter, played by the mousy yet charming Adam Scott, is the eldest son of a pair of self-centered parents (Catherine O’Hara and Richard Jenkins) and suffers as a pawn in their raging divorce.

At the outset of the film, Carter is a stable adult with a steady girlfriend and a job. But when his brother (Clark Duke) announces his engagement, and once Carter discovers that he was a subject in a pseudo-psychological study of children of divorce, his seemingly secure life begins to crumble.

If it weren’t for the parade of familiar comedic faces, this film would likely be overlooked. Carter’s soft-spoken manner makes him the composed adult perfect to be targeted by absurd family members and fake therapists. The dynamic between Scott and his new stepmother, Parks and Recreation co-star Amy Poehler, grounds the film and offers far more comedic jewels than watching the two surly parents’ banter.

Some other A-listers are not as stellar, however. Jessica Alba, a flat, underdeveloped fellow survivor of divorce proves disappointing in her limited screen presence, especially when juxtaposed with vibrant cast mates like Jane Lynch. The only fault with Lynch’s fake therapist character is that she doesn’t get more screen time. Her acerbic, hippie guru-like character proceeds to

pop up in Carter’s life with the intention of writing a follow-up book titled Adult Children of Divorce.

Looking mainly at how Carter’s life is shaped by divorce and how he works tirelessly to be less like his parents, the film feels very much like a sitcom as it dips

into the hilarity of everyday life.

A.C.O.D. retains a nice balance between a preserved sentimentality and an acknowledgment of ludicrous family dynamics. It stays relatable even in its distanced approach to the absurdity of parental relationships.

However, A.C.O.D. occasionally feels a bit too drawn out despite clocking in at a mere 87 minutes. Although it attempts to differentiate itself from other divorce-themed flicks, the material is far from fresh. It may be time for the theme of divorce to annul its relationship with comedy.

“My God, if your father asks for vegan, gluten-free gnocchi again I swear we’re getting another divorce...”

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leisure

12 the georgetown voice

october 10, 2013

C r i t i c a l V o i c es

Glasser, Interiors, True Panther Sounds Glasser’s second full-length release, Interiors, shows no evidence of the structure its name might suggest.

Instead, the expansive hollowness of this album gives Cameron Mesirow the freedom to drift through her musical dream world, but it leaves her audience yearning for something tangible to hold on to.

Inspired by Mesirow’s recent move to New York City, this album is fixated on transformation.

Glasser continuously plays with change, varying every element of her sound except her beautifully surreal, dominant vocals.

Interiors’ first track, “Shape,” starts off weightlessly with a single floating synth note, soon accompanied by Mesirow’s soft and serene,

yet attention-grabbing vocals. This open sound is quickly grounded as the heavy drum line hits, ushering in a thicker, more robust and layered instrumental line. This hard-hitting track thumps along, swelling and throbbing as Glasser explores her environment while still staying grounded in a concrete and relatable sound.

After a brief loss of foundation in “Design,” Glasser touches back down with a more full sound on “Landscape.” The song starts with a playful synth riff, shortly followed by a deep drum line and Mesirow’s beautiful vibrato in a lower range than elsewhere in the album. As its title suggests, this tune is still exploratory, playing with changes in dynamics and tempo.

But Glasser proceeds to get lost in the vast openness of her sound.

Her songs drift upwards, into an airy, elevated space that lacks the layered foundation of her more successful tracks. Her brief interludes “Window I,” “Window II,” and “Window III” break her momentum and suggest that the album might come back down to a relatable sphere, but following these breaks Glasser’s sound quickly gets lost once more.

Still, there are glimpses of brilliance along the way. In “Keam Theme” she incorporates enough

Honey, I brainwashed the kids!

Children experience a handful of formative moments: the first sleepover, the birth of a sibling, joining the Boy Scouts, getting kicked out of the Boy Scouts … the list goes on. But, today, our offspring are increasingly shaped by the media we subject them to.

Parents face a constant stream of decisions about the shows and movies their children watch, the video games they play, the music they listen to, and the websites they visit. These are not decisions that should be taken lightly. They may ultimately determine whether your child grows up to be a Ron Howard or a Clint Howard.

I’m here to show you how a list of hand-picked movies shown in the right order will shape my children. When my baby boy is fresh out of the womb, there is little chance he will remember any of the movies I show him, and their only real presence will be in the subconscious. So why not start out

with some Star Wars? The original trilogy will obviously be shown multiple times before he gets his first glimpse of Jar Jar Binks, and an Ewok baby costume will be his outfit for his first Halloween.

Next, I’m going to need to develop his sense of comedy from an early age. (Let’s say between two and four years old.) To get his silly muscles going, he’ll be spoon fed some Mel Brooks (with Spaceballs as an apt introduction to satire), a little bit of the Holy Grail, The Princess Bride, The Blues Brothers, and some physical comedy from the old Pink Panthers. One of the most important responsibilities of parenting is getting your kid ready for your secretions of pop culture references and, since we tend to pull our references from comedies, this exposure will let you quote Austin Powers at the dinner table without leaving your youngster in the dark.

Between the ages of five and eight, I’m going to assume my

bass and rhythmic consistency to keep listeners engaged. Unfortunately, Mesirow’s obsession with oscillation and variance ensures that such glimpses do not define her sound.

This LP’s journey through change and ephemerality liberates Glasser from a rigid musical identity. Yet this freedom causes Mesirow to desert the scattered moments of full, well-developed sound for her transcendent, unapproachable exploration.

Voice’s Choices: “Landscape”

“Shape,” —Josh Ward

Miley Cyrus, Bangerz, RCA Records Four months ago, when the music video for “We Can’t Stop” was son will have an appetite for movies with a little more edge. This is where parental discretion is key, since my kid will have more independence in the media he is exposed to as soon as he is strong enough to pick up a remote. Some required action/adventure movies include Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Independence Day, The Good, the Bad

Reel Talk

by John Sapunor a bi-weekly column about film and the Ugly, a few James Bonds, and The Lord of the Rings. This period of movie watching may not have the most noticeable impact on a child, so think of it as a tool for inspiring imagination. When I see my son reenacting scenes from Back to the Future with his Lego set, I’ll know I’ve done my job.

As soon as my son turns nine, I’ll be on a mission to show him as many genres as possible. Between the ages of nine and 13 is the last

uploaded to YouTube, the newest iteration of Miley Cyrus was presented to the world—and it was weird. On Tuesday, this changed version of the pop star we all knew and loved released Bangerz, and like the new version of Cyrus, it’s weird.

Thematically, much of the album simply isn’t that engaging.

A good amount of the record’s 52-minute grind belongs in dark, damp basement nightclubs where the sun doesn’t shine and the music doesn’t matter. “SMS (Bangerz)” is a particularly repugnant example of the LP’s distastefulness.

This song shows the album at its worst, employing uninteresting melodies, lackluster beats, and detestable lyrics. The chorus is literally the repetition of the album title—an apt slang synonym for messy, boozey ragers.

Miley insists that she “can strut in [her] stuff,” but by the end of the song, which includes a discouraging feature by Britney Spears, it’s clear no one really cares.

The album definitely deserves credit in some places though. Many of the songs are not half bad, even bordering on good. “#GETITRIGHT” has a Beyoncé-esque feel, with an offbeat rhythm driven by a clean guitar riff and simple whistle ornamentatime I’ll have a significant amount of control over his movie choices, so it is essential that I educate him on the overwhelming selection of movies he will face as soon as he is out of my hands. Really, this is about telling him what he should like, but more importantly, telling him what he should hate.

I’ll introduce him to some of my favorite directors suitable to his age, such as Stephen Spielberg, Chris Nolan, Tim Burton, and possibly the Coen brothers. Then I’ll show him movies by some of the filmmakers I despise, like latter-day Tim Burton, Baz Luhrmann, the guys who made Date Movie, Diablo Cody, etc. And I won’t be disappointed if he likes the movies I hate. There’s nothing I like more than arguing with wellversed movie fans.

After he hits the big one-three, my teenager will probably have made up his mind on what he likes or doesn’t like, and I won’t be able to force him to sit down and watch movies with me. However, I know exactly what he’ll want to see: any-

tions. But again, the song disappoints with unimpressive lyricism.

“Wrecking Ball,” actually addresses both of these issues with a relatable emotional ballad directed towards an ex-lover. When you look past the controversy surrounding the song’s music video, you can hear the despair in Cyrus’ voice.

The final song, “Someone Else,” similarly shows a deeper sense of self-awareness. Cyrus addresses her own flaws through the context of her failed relationships, coming to the conclusion that she’s partly at fault—a profound revelation from the twerking queen. But the song still fails despite its distinct message because of the clunky production that plagues the whole album. Bangerz is massively overproduced, lacking any nuance or restraint.

Ultimately, Bangerz benefits from extremely low expectations. The album contains more great musical moments than anyone could have anticipated. And for that reason alone, perhaps you won’t feel ashamed playing it at your next banger.

Voice’s Choices: “FU,” “Wrecking Ball” —Daniel Varghese thing stamped with an R-rating.

This trend marks the dirty phase in his movie education, the part I most look forward to. Assuming he hasn’t already seen Gladiator, Apocalypse Now, Superbad, Eyes Wide Shut, and some of my other favorite movies only suitable for “mature audiences,” I’ll have him bingeing on raunchy comedies, violent war dramas, and gory slasher movies. If he’s thirteen and asks me to take him to the newest Quentin Tarantino movie, I’ll do as he commands. Lars von Trier?

We’ll be first in line. Judd Apatow?

I’ll forge his doctor’s note.

By his freshman year in high school, he’ll be out in the real world.

He will no longer defer to me for opinions, and my only input will be used to maintain his interest in films. But goddammit I’ll have my belt out in a heartbeat if he calls James Franco’s newest 10-hour performance art a masterpiece.

Tell John you want him to be the father of your children at jsapunor@ georgetownvoice.com

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october 10, 2013

Beauty shouldn’t be standardized at expense of identity

by Julia Tanaka Last month, talk show host Julie Chen revealed on The Talk that she had undergone plastic surgery on her eyes after being told by both her boss and an agent, on separate occasions, that the shape of her Asian eyes were going to hinder her career.

“Let’s face it, Julie, … How relatable are you to our community?” her news director told her. “I’ve noticed that when you’re interviewing someone, you look disinterested and bored ... because your eyes are so small.”

The reaction from the audience was clear as she recounted the incident. Gasps of shock and dismay rang out. Immediately after, her co-hosts extended their comfort: A chorus of “You did the right thing!”—instant validation for her choices. “I choose to live with no regrets,” Chen said, invoking the middle-aged YOLO. A part of me has a sharp disdain for Chen for not having the strength to ignore those pressures, for giving in to such racist beauty norms. Far East Asian standards of beauty are specific

to their cultures, and it’s simplistic to universally equate plastic surgery with a desire to look white. In Chen’s case, however, it is clear that the surgery was done to alter ethnic characteristics.

“But she’s just more marketable with wider eyes!” some jerkoff will smarm, giddy at the hollow argument that he’s just being pragmatic. If he took one second to think, he would see that certain norms persist as pathetic veils for blatant racism. Chen was told that her face was wrong because of her ethnicity, so she paid someone to cut her open and change her eyes to satisfy these external standards.

The idea that viewers would be totally unable to relate to her because of her race is ridiculous. Orcs look radically alien. Julie Chen is simply Chinese. But the notion that the validity of American citizenship is contingent on whiteness still hasn’t died the painful death it deserves. It lives on despite our president being black, despite the mayor of San Antonio being Latino, despite the fact that when I vote in the United States, it counts just as much as the WASP-iest of Mayflower descendants.

There is a tender part of myself, nonetheless, that empathizes with the complexity of the choice that Chen faced—as an Asian-American, as a woman, and as someone who hopes to succeed professionally.

The pressures facing women today—to be poreless, HD-ready embodiments of beauty at all costs— have been well documented by feminists and mainstream media alike.

What is ignored is that for women of color, there is the added difficulty of also being born the wrong race.

Attending an international school abroad, I grew up around women from a wide range of countries, races, religions, and ethnicities. The easy version of the story is that this has made me greatly accepting of different types of beauty, including my own. The truth is that as diplomats’ daughters and children of investment bankers, so used to being shunted around from country to country, we clung to the unified Western pop culture that glorified white faces. This influence is not a two-way street.

Asian features are considered exotic,

but only beautiful for their strangeness and not in and of themselves.

My awkward adolescent stage was inhabited by a peculiar and specific self-loathing. I learned the right way to apply eyeliner to make my eyes look as large as possible, I learned how to angle myself for photos so my nose would look smaller, and I learned to stay out of the sun.

The history of my family is written in my bones. My Okinawan heritage finds itself in my thick hair and strong eyebrows, and, of course, my Japanese genes are expressed through my eyes. I would profess to be proud of my heritage, just as Chen declares in the segment, but making eye contact with my reflection is still a brutal exercise in bitter rejection.

My story is intertwined with Julie Chen’s. It extends outside the private realm, because Chen did not merely accede to a beauty standard, or to a culture of normative whiteness. She also buckled under the weight of her own ambition—a familiar weight. She was told that in order to succeed and get ahead, she needed to get plastic

surgery. She chose to and has become accomplished in her own right. The question of “What if?” wasn’t worth entertaining in the face of success.

The problem Julie Chen faced wasn’t solely an Asian or female question. Who among us has not mutilated our dreams, even in the thinnest paper cut of an increment, in order to satisfy a societal standard? Who of us has not allowed small explosions in the realm of our ideals, allowing structures to collapse as we get that internship, clinch that interview? These concessions stick in us like shrapnel, and it’s all we think we can do.

I hope that one day I will look in the mirror with the same conviction that Chen purportedly does today. But the question is, at what cost? If I have to anesthetize myself like she did to go under the knife, perhaps the pain is worth it.

Julia Tanaka is a junior in the SFS. Her boyfriend won her heart with the pickup line “girl, you look smokin’ in dem genes.”

U.S. education gets low marks: City Year provides better model

by Ian Philbrick It’s only 8 a.m., but my calves are already on fire. Sun lights the apartments lining the streets of Mattapan, Mass., a suburb of Boston. My backpack jostles on my shoulder. I feel the beat of my heart beneath the tucked-in shirt I’m trying not to get sticky with sweat, and slog slowly up the hill toward one of the few credible organizations in U.S. education.

On average, a public school student drops out of high school every 26 seconds—a nationwide education crisis founded in bad habits that take root in students’ formative years. The dropout rate and lack of quality ed-

ucation are pandemics in the United States. Students who fail either English or mathematics, exhibit poor behavior, or are habitually absent by sixth grade are 75 percent less likely to acquire a secondary education degree, and are eight times more likely than their peers to end up in prison. Minorities, particularly African Americans and Hispanics, are disproportionately represented in these statistics. For a nation that has relied on the education of its workforce for global economic success, this trend should be particularly worrisome.

During the 2012-2013 academic year, after deferring my admission to Georgetown, I served with City Year,

LEILA LEBRETON

Failing grades? No worries! Jon Hamm will teach half of your children math.

a non-profit organization operating through AmeriCorps. Founded in Boston in 1988, City Year has sites in 25 cities across the country as well as London, England and Johannesburg, South Africa. Corps members are typically college graduates or people taking gap years. In the course of our service, my teammates and I regularly pulled 12-hour days manning morning- and after-school programs, tutoring fourth- and seventh-graders in English literacy, assisting teachers with classroom lesson plans, mentoring students about their behavior, planning school-wide events, and working to improve students’ attendance.

City Year derives its validity— and its necessity—from the positive impact its members have on the students in the most chronically underperforming schools in our country. By focusing its service primarily in thirdthrough eighth-grade classrooms, the program addresses those factors that increase the likelihood that a student will fail to acquire a secondary education degree. In doing so, it provides one of the most effective models of education our nation has available.

City Year’s methodology has already helped ameliorate the issues that confront our nation’s education system. In Boston alone, students from schools in which City Year corps

members served last year saw unprecedented improvement in their standardized test scores, which, for better or worse, are the metric by which school performance is measured.

The organization has been nationally recognized as a leader in the movement to improve the nation’s educational standards by figures such as President Obama, Stanley McChrystal, Barbara Bush, and Jon Hamm.

Perhaps most significant, however, is the impact City Year’s system has on the students themselves, many of whom come from single-parent households, are minorities, and experience disproportionately fewer educational opportunities in their communities.

For me, the relationships I made with my students were mutually beneficial.

My students’ energy revitalized my interest in becoming a student again after high school and provided emotional depth to our interactions. City Year’s mandate to provide students with additional adults in the classroom who serve as role models, give advice, generate enthusiasm for education, and empathize with students’ daily struggles provides a critically needed human element in contrast to standardization, testing, and rote learning.

The ability to engage with issues that have a clear and immediate impact on our nation should serve as a call to

action for college students who intend to grapple with the macrocosmic challenges that confront our world in their future endeavors. City Year’s focus on education should make it equally attractive to those looking to pursue a career in the field and those who aren’t. In the case of our nation’s educational future, everyone has a stake.

City Year is an example of what our educational system could be.

While it has benefitted many students and school systems across the nation and the world already, it has yet to be taken seriously as a legitimate model for our educational system.

Georgetown students with their educational credentials and social consciousness are the ideal candidates to serve as the next generation of City Year corps members, whether they do so prior to matriculation or after their graduation ceremonies. The opportunity to acquire skills useful to both an academic and professional career, while simultaneously rendering a desperately needed service to the country, proves that a year “off” doesn’t have to be anything of the sort.

Ian Philbrick is a freshman in the College. This is his cover story. He really spent his gap year in the Bahamas sipping appletinis.

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the georgetown voice 15

It’s time for industrialized nations to reject neocolonialism

by Shalina Chatlani We trekked through the Amazon Rainforest, kicking up the mud with our boots, wielding our machetes, and avoiding the danger in our path.

Don Gregario, an Ecuadorean farmer and my service group’s host for the week, led us on the journey into the forest where he tended a small cocoa farm. Sweating from the terrible heat, we helped Don Gregario with his work: clearing waist-high weeds, collecting cocoa plants, and carrying seed-filled buckets on our backs. While I was exhausted at the end of the day from both the heat and the strenuous labor, I appreciated seeing the reality of working at the

other end of a neocolonial system.

Despite his arduous labor, Don Gregario, like thousands of other farmers in developing countries, cannot send his children to school, take a small vacation, or afford anything other than basic necessities. He is a victim of an unfair system enforced by industrial nations like the United States.

After only experiencing his life for a week, I realized how much of a global issue the lack of freedom in a free market is as the rich get richer and the poor only get poorer.

While our collective notion of colonialism may evoke images of bygone days, neocolonialism, a capitalistic form of imperialism,

LEILA LEBRETON

Neocolonialism: Possible side effects are poverty, despair, and occasionally, smallpox.

Give me some privacy, please There’s nothing more exciting than when an old institution learns new tricks. Georgetown has recently made a number of strides in integrating modern technology into University life—GUTS and SafeRides now have tracking features, Blackboard has finally been updated, UIS has instituted a password reset function, and the University recently paired with EmergenSee to allow DPS to locate students in trouble. However, with all of these technological changes, there is reason to believe Georgetown isn’t doing all that it can when it comes to safeguarding our privacy.

We entrust Georgetown with large amounts of personally identifiable information. In their databases, they have our full names, our birthdays, our Social Security numbers, our emails, and our financial information. The last is particularly true

for those who receive financial aid, and thus have had to fill out forms with detailed financial information.

With all of this data sitting in Georgetown’s servers, it’s safe to assume that the school has it under lock and key, right? Wrong.

In 2006 a University server containing the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of over 40,000 elderly residents who were being researched was attacked, exposing these individuals to the threat of identity theft. Then in 2008, a hard drive was stolen from the Office of Student Affairs that contained the Social Security numbers of nearly 40,000 students, alumni, faculty, and staff. While the office has certainly instituted more safety precautions, this breach not only evidenced the vulnerability of the data, but also how much data Georgetown has on both

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still pervades the global market.

Our failure to recognize the negative consequences of this system has allowed several industrialized nations to maintain their economic dominance over developing societies, whose resources and populations are being unfairly exploited despite advances in technology, a greater range of diversity in economic practices, and an overflow of resources. Although many conservatives refuse to recognize these facts, self-determination can actually come at a very high price.

Since the 1960’s, foreign companies have invested in Ecuador’s large oil deposits. Instead of helping the middle and lower classes, these corporations have stripped Ecuador of its resources, destroyed the Amazon rainforest, and taken away homes from some of the most hard-working people I have ever met.

The struggle persists, and the rights of populations in developing nations continue to take a backseat to capitalistic concerns. In September, the United States denied visas to five Ecuadorian nationals who needed them in order to travel to the UN General Assembly,

where they would have presented a case against Chevron-Texaco, one of the largest oil companies in the world. As a result of this multi-billion dollar company’s actions in Ecuador, 16 to 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater have been dumped into the rainforest.

Thanks to companies like Chevron-Texaco, the local population has been exposed to a wave of cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects over the past three decades.

Although we have the technology to drill oil ethically, we still allow mammoth companies to bully and exploit developing nations.

Because their land has been destroyed, many citizens become dependent upon industrialized nations for their livelihood, and they have no other option but to work for the very companies that infringed upon their rights. The nation’s water supplies are polluted, farmers like Don Gregario are scrambling to find new land, and young Ecuadorians are denied a future as they are cast into a never-ending cycle of poverty.

The effects of neocolonialist practices extend across the globe. All along the ivory coast of Africa, cocoa

current and former students. The data that is given to the school doesn’t just disappear upon graduation—it is saved for later use by the alumni association. That’s not to say that this data remains in Georgetown’s servers in perpetuity, but it does demonstrate that the information given to Georgetown isn’t as safe as we think.

The sheer amount of data that the University has is also threatened by our one entry point: our NetIDs. Our NetIDs give us access to Student

of ways in which a cunning hacker could use the data that Georgetown has on its servers.

The question, of course, is how would they get my password? Well, luckily, UIS has just recently instituted a password recovery program.

While seemingly meant to safeguard your ability to access your email, the recovery program is predicated on the use of security questions, which are notoriously easy to crack. The answer to questions such as “What is your father’s middle name?” or “Where were you born?” are easily accessible through social media or a simple Google search. As stated before, once a malicious individual has access to your NetID, he or she can do a lot more than withdraw you from all of your classes.

Perhaps the most egregious breach of privacy is the new EmergenSee app, which uses geolocation services for students in trouble. The University’s desire for us to all have this on our phones is commendable, until you read the terms of use. After opening the app, it prompts you with a message stating that the app “records video, audio, and takes photos without indicating that… [they] are being recorded.” This data is then uploaded to their servers. Not only

Carrying On

by Sara Ainsworth A rotating column by senior Voice staffers

Accounts Services with our financial information, all of our academic information, our health insurance information, our immunization records, and our biographical information.

On top of that, our NetIDs access our email, where many students store information related to online banking, social media sites, or online shopping.

This means that if someone was able to gain access to a NetID and password, he or she would be essentially given the keys to the digital kingdom.

Identity theft is just one of a number

farmers often resort to child labor because they have no other way to compete against companies like Nestlé, which has had a history of human rights violations in this area.

Failing to address this issue allows for both environmental destruction and human rights violations throughout the world. Before my trip to Ecuador, where I talked to families that had lost loved ones to the environmental destruction caused by companies like Chevron-Texaco, I did not realize neocolonialism was still alive. Despite conservative efforts to draw attention away from the issue, the consequences of neocolonialism—poverty, unfair labor, and discrimination—are still problems that they have to face everyday.

I hope that one day I can visit Don Gregario again. I hope he’s living the life he deserves. Until we collectively address the issue, developing nations will inevitably become victims of this harmful system.

Shalina Chatlani is a freshman in the SFS. Her opinion of Nestlé and cocoa farming will change when her time of the month rolls around again. is it illegal to record someone without their knowledge, but it is also a massive invasion of privacy. The app gives no indication of when these recordings would take place, how secure their servers are, or for how long they store this data. Basically, this app turns your phone into the ultimate tracking device, and it’s University sanctioned.

Clearly, the University’s foray into modern technology has a number of flaws. However, many of these are easily rectifiable. First, students should be required to sign up for double authentication for their NetID. This means that they can either download an app that gives them a randomly generated number or be given a SecurID that does the same whenever they sign into their account. That makes it harder for outsiders to access a student’s information. Second, the school should consider separating a student’s financial information from their NetID, which again safeguards against abuse. Finally, the University needs to work with EmergenSee to rectify this huge oversight in their terms of use.

If the University is going to continue to digitalize, then it needs to ensure that potential threats to privacy are reduced.

Artist Spotlight Contact Tiff at tdl25@georgetown.edu with your suggestions!

To start—what’s your art?

Well I consider myself to be a poet and a writer, but I consider those two separate things.

How did you get started?

As a kid, I always loved poetry and my family was so supportive—they always tried having my elementary school poetry published. Then I went through a rapper phase. I idolized Eve—blond hair, paw prints, and all. Eventually I found my way back to poetry and writing. The summer before coming to Georgetown, I had a lot of creative flows and started writing spoken-word poetry. I would write for myself, and perform for myself—it was like an elevated form of a diary. Everything I thought but never said to myself would go into my poetry. Writing kind of fell into the pot as well.

You said that there is a distinction between writing and poetry, how do you figure?

Well, I saw poetry as a more creative outlet, I thought it was a more free-form approach versus how I viewed academic writing—more regimented, formulaic, with a certain order to it. In my mind, writing had a more negative connotation up until I started to really explore the art form. I never considered it a feasible career. Now I’m starting to look into playwriting, screen writing, speech writing, and ways to include my poetry in that space.

Where does Georgetown fit into your art?

I’m the general manager for The Fire This Time—Georgetown’s online multicultural newsmagazine—I contribute to the creative section too. I’m also in a writing class that works to adapt literature into one-act plays. Also, I am a creative director for The Corpus Collective—Georgetown’s on-campus spoken-word community and slam team. The Corpus is an opportunity for creative students to get more involved in their writing with their peers.

Is there anything particular about your Georgetown Experience so far that has influenced your art?

It was when Obama came to speak about environmental issues at Georgetown this summer. Obama said the word “sexy,” twice. In that moment, I was like, “you know, I think I could be a speech writer.” I want to be the person who tells people like Obama what to say and how to say it. It helped me to recognize that writing was something I could really do. So thank you Georgetown.

Claytia

Gonsalves Class of 2015 Brooklyn, NY SFS, CULP ity t Immig n e d ration and I Excerpt from Rapunzel Rapunzel, girl, let your hair down. scratch off the peeling paint of your pride you wore under arched eyebrows. your smoke screen will fade.

And they will see you, their tired eyes a search party pursuing you for years.

I know you never noticed sunlight creeping through the cracks of your foundation. the neighborhood children stealing sneak peeks.

You placed all your strength into the tips of your fingers, so that you could have an impact but still keep your distance.

Move closer.

Rapunzel, You don’t need to build walls around you in order to feel safe.

Rapunzel, let down your hair.