Monday, October 10, 2022 I Vol. 119 Iss. 9
WWW.GWHATCHET.COM
INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904
Opinions
The editorial board argues that GW should pick the more inclusive and mighty Hippopotamus as its next moniker. Page 6
Culture
Read our rundown of gluten-friendly restaurants in the District. Page 7
What’s inside
Sports
Meet Liv Womble, a junior standout on the volleyball team pushing the Colonials to a playoff run. Page 8
Students process ‘surreal’ devastation of Hurricanes Ian, Fiona in hometowns FAITH WARDWELL
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
OLIVIA EMERSON REPORTER
When junior Edy Koenigs first saw pictures of her family’s garage ripped away from its foundation and friends’ homes strewn with debris in the wake of Hurricane Ian, she knew her hometown would “not be the same.” Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, slammed into Florida and tore through Koenig’s neighborhood and dozens more in Lee County late last month. While she pored over photos and videos sent from her hometown, she said childhood memories of cross-country meets and beach trips flooded back when she saw aerial footage of Fort Myers Beach showing ravaged buildings and knocked-down trees. “You can’t even comprehend it,” Koenigs said. “And I haven’t even been home. I can’t even imagine the effects on my friends who are home, my friends who have seen it.” As the death toll climbs past 100 and thousands remain without power, students native to the coastal areas ravaged by the hurricane in the Southeast said they have faced stress and anxiety about their loved ones’ safety as communities recover from the storm’s devastation. Koenigs, a native of Cape Coral, Florida, said the high winds of the hurricane tore away her parent’s garage, caused a power outage for more than a week and damaged the gutter and shingles of her sister’s home . She said the “hardest part” of dealing with the storm’s aftermath was seeing pictures of the homes of friends and family in Cape Coral that endured flooding and interior insulation dam-
COURTESY OF KYLE ANDERSON Category 4 storm Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida late last month after first making landfall in Cuba.
age after Hurricane Ian passed through. “Seeing and knowing people impacted, and it actually being a part of your life, and some of those not being rebuilt, some of those being gone forever, is probably the hardest part,” Koenigs said. Koenigs said her hometown suffered minor damage in comparison to neighboring areas like Fort Myers and Sanibel Island, which were “pounded” by the storm, destroying the Sanibel Causeway that connected Sanibel Island to mainland Florida. She said seeing aerial footage of the devastation in Florida brought
her to tears and left her reflecting on the sentimental value of a town home to childhood trips to Dairy Queen, which was likely demolished by the hurricane. Koenigs said the “surreal” impact of Hurricane Ian has caused additional stress within her daily life after seeing the pictures of damage and speaking to loved ones recovering from the storm – prompting her to skip class, reach out to professors for accommodations and prioritize “being kind” to herself. She said she’s struggled to separate herself from the news of the hurricane’s destruction and heal from the storm’s impact on her hometown
due to buzz on campus about the storm. “With everybody talking about it, and it being something that impacted me, you couldn’t really get away from it,” Koenigs said. “Even if people were doing it with good intentions, it was just the mental impact of your hometown being destroyed by itself and then the impact of you not being able to escape the discussion of it.” Elizabeth Brown, a junior from Sarasota, Florida, said her mind continued to wander back to her hometown throughout the day of the hurricane’s Florida landfall, worrying about her
loved ones who sat in the path of a Category 4 storm despite trying to focus on her Capitol Hill internship. “The day of, I was a wreck,” Brown said. “I was at work – I intern for a Michigan senator – and I’m supposed to be worrying about Michigan, but all I kept doing was tracking the hurricane in Florida and seeing the most recent updates.” Brown said she has grown accustomed to the “panic” of hurricane warnings after years of living in Florida, so she initially didn’t view Hurricane Ian as a cause for concern until she learned of the severity of the storm and her parents’ choice to not evacuate. Brown said her parents decided to stay in their home located on the coastal island of Siesta Key instead of crossing the bridge to evacuate inland. She said her parents opted to remain in their house, freshly renovated with a generator, a 12-foot foundation and specialized hurricane glass following 2017’s Hurricane Irma. “I did feel a bit better knowing our house was a hurricane fortress,” Brown said. Brown said her family was fortunate to not suffer damage to their home, but buildings and homes in neighboring towns were destroyed. She said the nearby Venice Little Theater on Venice Island, about 15 miles south of Siesta Key – which had sentimental value for Brown, who frequently visited as a child to watch friends perform – was “completely wrecked.” “It was bare bones,” Brown said. “You could see the light gaffing, and the catwalks were all exposed because the exterior of the building was completely gone. That was one of the more sad updates that I got.” See STUDENTS Page 5
Donor base shrinks amid unpopular administrative decision making
GW net assets declined, MFA debt grew in last fiscal year: report
DANIEL PATRICK GALGANO
DANIEL PATRICK GALGANO
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
GW’s donations have increased by more than $1 million during 2022, but the numbers of donors has shrunk, Alumni Association President Will Alexander III announced at the Board of Trustees meeting Friday. Alexander III said GW has started to rely on a smaller group of high-yield donors who have helped maintain fundraising levels to meet the University’s financial goals during the past three to five years. He attributed the loss of some of those donors to personal disagreements with University issues, like aversion to the removal of the Colonials moniker in favor of a University rebrand. He said officials hope to address concerns from disgruntled donors about administrative decisions through community events to revive GW’s donor base. “One of the things that has been kind of a concerning trend, even as we’ve come out of the pandemic, is some of the overall value of what’s been donated has either kept steady or had a slight bump,” he said at the Board meeting. “We’re getting more from the people who are donating – but there has been over the past maybe three to five years, a noticeable contraction in the number of donors.” “Is there perhaps a more constructive outlet for you to be able to voice your dissent?” he said of community members who have stopped donating because of University issues. “You’re not necessarily hurting the administrator or the part of the University that maybe did a thing that you didn’t agree with, you’re hurting the students and the vision of what we’re trying to accomplish here.” Speights declined to sit down with The Hatchet after the meeting, marking a year since she has agreed
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
IANNE SALVOSA
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
SAGE RUSSELL | PHOTOGRAPHER At the Board of Trustees meeting Friday, Alumni Association President Will Alexander III said officials hope to revive GW’s donor base through community events.
to answer questions about the state of the University – breaking from a yearslong precedent for chairs of the Board. Trustee Roslyn Brock, the chair of the Presidential Search Committee, said the committee will be ready to release its presidential profile – which describes the qualifications and attributes officials are looking for in potential candidates – in the next week. The committee hosted a series of community forums about the search last month with students, staff, faculty and alumni who called for an increased commitment to diversity and sustainability and wider community involvement in major decisions from GW’s next president. “Following the forums, the committee held a successful, two-day retreat to digest the feedback provided in the forums and further consider and refine the types of candidates they hope to meet,” Brock said. Trustee Charles Bendit, who chairs the Board’s Audit and Compliance Committee, said officials should try to raise the number of faculty and staff who complete GW’s Title IX training plan. He said the Board has asked officials to incentivize more employees to complete the training courses, but they have not been able to do so.
The University’s requirements for faculty and staff Title IX training is not listed on its Title IX education and training webpage. At the Board’s May meeting, Bendit said the number of employees who had completed the training was “unacceptable,” with a 20 percent faculty completion rate of the courses. “The quarterly enterprise risk management report included the report on the Title IX training plan, which remains a great concern for the committee,” he said Friday. “The provost and chief administrative officer were charged with providing the committee a status of completion rates for both faculty and staff in November.” Bendit, who also is the vice chair for the Board’s Finance and Investments Committee and delivered the committee’s report, said GW’s endowment has reached about $2.3 billion, a nearly $100 million decline from where it stood in April. He also said officials are on track to meet GW’s goal of divesting its endowment from companies that focus on fossil fuel extraction by 2025. “Despite the recent downturn in the market, GW’s pooled endowment – which is separate from its real estate holdings – has outperformed the benchmarks,” he said.
GW’s net assets declined by more than $130 million dollars during fiscal year 2022, according to the University’s audited financial statements from June 2021 to June 2022, which officials released last month. The University’s more than $2 billion in net assets declined by about $58 million, and the Medical Faculty Associates – a group of physicians and faculty from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and physicians at the GW Hospital – lost nearly $80 million by the end of the fiscal year in June. The statements show the MFA owes GW more than $120 million, bringing the nonprofit’s total debt to nearly $200 million, while the University also paid off more than $130,000 of its nearly $2 million long-term debt from “financing activities.” The document states that much of the decline in GW’s net assets – which include more than $1 billion in real estate holdings – came as officials spent nearly $160 million of its cash reserves and another $170 million of its investments in items like stocks and government bonds, while the University continued in-person operations during the last academic year. “GW’s strong financial position and balance sheet will allow the University to continue to invest in faculty, initiatives and programs across the academic enterprise, in alignment with the University’s mission and priorities,” officials said in a statement accompanying the report. GW’s net assets increased by about $300 million at the end of 2021 as they bolstered the amount of pooled investments, like the University’s endowment. University spokespeople Tim Pierce and Josh Gross-
KIM COURTNEY | PHOTOGRAPHER The documents show the MFA has about $73 million in outstanding debt from outside lenders, including a national bank, a health record company and the GW Hospital.
man declined multiple requests for comment on the size of the MFA’s debt and whether officials are confident in the organization’s ability to repay it. Joe Cordes, a professor of economics and the co-chair of the Faculty Senate’s Fiscal Planning and Budget Committee, said the drop in net assets is in line with trends across much of the higher education industry. He said colleges and universities including GW dealt with financial constraints coming back from COVID-19, but the MFA’s financial decline makes the University’s financial position look worse. “The 78 million negative change in net assets experienced by the MFA is not parfor-the-course, it’s a matter of concern, and people have said it is a matter of concern.” Faculty senators expressed concerns in May about the MFA’s more than $40 million deficit during the 2021 fiscal year and its consistently low revenue during the last few fiscal years. The documents show the MFA has about $73 million in outstanding debt from lenders, including a national bank, a health record company and the GW Hospital. The MFA has also borrowed $42 million out of a maximum $50 million from a revolving credit facility – a type of loan that allows an institution to take and repay
smaller amounts of funds from a pool of credit over a longer period. The documents state the University has extended a “temporary loan” to the MFA but did not specify how much money the University lent the MFA. Cordes said GW has lent the MFA about $70 million over the past year, potentially draining the University’s budget for campus spending. He said GW has guaranteed most of the MFA’s roughly $73 million in outside debt, which means GW is responsible for paying off the debt if the MFA is unable to do so. Cordes said officials have started negotiations with some of the MFA’s outside lenders to fix the interest rate on its loans. He said as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, the amount the MFA would have to pay back could increase, but most of the University’s debt is already fixed, meaning rising interest rates wouldn’t have a large impact on non-MFA finances. “On the one hand, it may increase the University’s borrowing costs for some things, but it doesn’t increase them for the large chunks of debt that we have outstanding, which are all fixed,” he said. “It does give the University the opportunity to earn a somewhat higher income.”