The GW Hatchet

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.

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.

The Hatchet’s monthly wrap-up of GW’s ups and downs.

Thumbs Up: Basketball season starting —
Not everybody is hopeful about this basketball season, largely due to the inexperience of a good part of both the men’s and women’s rosters this year. But even with younger teams, we are excited about the start of the season. Win or lose, we encourage everybody to get out and attend the games to support the team.

Sophomore Thomas Braslavsky, a Hatchet columnist, looks at the reprehensible choice D.C. must make between gaining Congressional representation and allowing more guns in the District.

The one thing holding D.C. back from having Congressional representation seems to be a debate on gun rights. The D.C. Voting Rights Act, which would give our city an official representative in the House, has stalled for the past nine months. In February, it passed in the Senate – but only after being stamped with additional language that would abolish many of Washington’s already depleted gun laws. The House seems unsure of what to do, with an influential pro-gun lobby splitting the Democrats while D.C. residents wait. Thank you for helping the nation’s capital, National Rifle Association.