The Hatchet’s editorial board is looking for new members.
The Hatchet’s editorial board has long strived to be an important outlet for critical thought and representative of student voice on campus. Our goal is to identify, analyze and provide solutions to major issues affecting the GW community. With that goal in mind, we hope to further the effectiveness and capabilities of our staff editorials by accepting two new members to the editorial board.
The application can be found here.
The Hatchet’s editorial board calls on the SA to either find a new DSC chair or step up involvement.
Ask students what their concerns are with the University, and many will put dining options at the top of their list. As the key liaison between the student body and the University dining program, much of the responsibility of addressing complaints falls on the Student Association’s Dining Services Commission.
But this year, the DSC has made little to no progress toward achieving the same amount of success it has in the past, indicating that it is time to revaluate the current situation and possibly move a different student into the role of DSC chair.
Sophomore Bradley Dlatt, a Hatchet columnist, examines the GWeb failures during this year’s registration and offers some solutions to GW’s continued registration complaints.
For many GW students, these past few weeks have included meeting with advisers and spending hours scouring the schedule of classes to fulfill the seemingly endless GCR requirements. All this while still aiming for that three-day weekend – not to mention the endless searching on Rate My Professor for ‘the easy guy.’ After the stress of planning yet another semester of our college career, thousands of students pulled themselves out of bed and logged on to GW’s online registration system, anxiously waiting for 7:00 a.m. to strike, hoping to get those precious few remaining slots in the courses they need. Finally, at 7:00 a.m., that same, already stressed out, group of students clicked on the icon to add classes, and many found: “HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable.”
Freshman Kelsey Rohwer argues that GW should take steps toward becoming a smoke free campus.
Starting today, the University of Kentucky is a tobacco-free place.
Members of the UK community aren’t alone. In 2007, 43 college campuses were smoke-free. Now that number is closer to 60. It’s time for GW to follow suit.
Smoking cigarettes is unlike any other vice. Most vices are exclusive to the perpetrator, but smoking is forced upon others through second-hand smoke, which has become the third leading cause of preventable death, according to studies from the Center for Tobacco Policy Research.
Freshman Annu Subramanian, a Hatchet columnist, discusses why GW students are positioned to be particularly effective when it comes to philanthropy.
Every charity prides itself on accomplishments, innovations and sweeping successes. Yet poverty, education and hunger statistics remain startling. In this country alone, the number of nonprofits exceed 1.2 million, and globally that number clocks in at around 5 million. Like some metaphysical puzzle that contains the seeds of its own solution, the reasons for this lie largely in the nature of creating and running nonprofits. Whether it is the Ivy City part in Northeast D.C. – long an area of industrial decay and blighted blocks – or Ibadan, Nigeria, in the hub of the global AIDS epidemic, nonprofits are often ineffective due to the application of outdated aid methods or insufficient funds.
It’s somewhat surprising that GW has a long history of gun debate on campus, especially when you consider that our campus has a strict no-firearm policy in the Student Code of Conduct, and even the repeal on the D.C. gun ban had little to no effect on our campus. The latest spark in the debate came from a column by Tom Braslavsky discussing D.C.’s horrendous choice between gaining representation and implementing laws pushed by the pro-gun lobby. In addition, the College Republicans made a trip out of the District this past week to test their hands at shooting, something they can trace back at least to 2001.
Last year, the arguments about guns focused on whether or not UPD officers would be armed. After very intense scrutiny, and a review by an outside consultant, it was decided that GW would not be giving firearms to its police officers. Many were quick to take sides, but few if any of those vocal on the topic had access to the data necessary to make that decision; most important of which was the reaction time of the Metropolitan Police Department versus that of UPD.
Digging a little bit further into GW’s history, one finds the efforts of a few enterprising students to start a pro-gun ownership group. Ironically, this a few months after the killings happened just a few hours away at Virginia Tech.
Sadly, as of Sunday, we have another reminder about the dangers of gun violence. A 9-year-old boy was killed in Columbia Heights during an attempted robbery. The boy was apparently fleeing into his apartment after shots rang out, but was killed attempting to reach safety. There will be those who use the twisted logic that if more people had guns this situation would never have happened (if everybody had a gun ready nobody would ever use them, right?). But the argument can’t be applied in this case, there were officers already in the area and still the tragedy occurred.
The gun ownership advocates and opponents can argue the second amendment all they want, but forcing D.C. to choose between representation and relaxing its gun laws is immoral. Personally, I’m just sad to say that we have lost a fellow Northwest resident to a gun in a city, that for the most part, doesn’t want them.
Those who signed onto Facebook or Twitter around 7 a.m. on Friday may have encountered of frustration that many GW students felt over registration. According to statuses and tweets filled with expletives, a number of students faced a downed GWeb registration site.
For those Colonials with more than 30 but less than 55 credit hours, Friday’s registration for Spring semester classes was what some could call an epic fail. For whatever reason, when everyone clicked “Add Classes” at exactly 6:59 a.m., the system went into overload and jammed. Students were greeted with messages saying “System error” or were forced to go back and sign into the Web site again, and then flocked to Facebook to commiserate with others about the uncertainty of their futures.
When the site was finally up and running again, some students were able to access the classes they wanted and others, as is the case every year, were not. But the site’s shutdown further aggravated the situation.
This incident has merely highlighted the flaws surrounding registration. Though students raise concerns every semester, the system overload some sophomores faced on Friday is something that the University can address in the future. The University should be the figure GW students turn to with their registration issues, because no college student should have to update their Facebook status at 7 a.m. Friday morning.
Associate vice president of Student Academic Support Services Peter Konwerski describes living on a food stamp budget for a week.
For the past 15 years, I have taught a course, titled Empowerment for Social Change, in the GW Human Services Program. This year, as students planning Hunger Week worked to apply Saul Alinsky’s practical primer, Rules for Radicals, to their campus and community organizing, they encouraged me to take the Food Stamp Challenge. The concept sounded simple enough: eat for a week on a budget of $28.75, the rate set for an individual on food stamps.
Sophomore Corey Jacobson argues that banning laptops is not a solution for the larger problem of teacher engagement.
I’ll never forget the first piece of gum I chewed in high school. For the first time in my education, school policy allowed me to chew gum in the middle of my Spanish class without getting a detention. Since that day of liberation, I have entered college and gained even more freedoms in the classroom, not the least of which is the ability to use my laptop.
The Hatchet’s editorial board calls on GW to start a trial program for gender neutral housing.
GW is known for its progressive nature, and gender-related issues are well represented by active groups such as Allied in Pride. Gender-neutral housing would be a natural development for such a progressive university. To that end, GW should establish a trial-basis gender-neutral residence hall to understand all of the issues and challenges that gender-neutral housing would present.
Commentary from the opinions editors, op-ed columnists and The Hatchet's Editorial Board and its members.
We are expanding the membership of our editorial board to include two non-Hatchet individuals who will focus solely on the staff editorial process.
Ask students what their concerns are with the University, and many will put dining options at the top of their list.
Of the many frustrations felt by GW students, none is more universal then the malice directed toward registration.
As GW students, we can do our unique part to streamline efficacy.
Starting today, the University of Kentucky is a tobacco-free place. It's time for GW to follow suit.
Vol. 106
An Independent Student Newspaper
Serving The George Washington University Community Since 1904
