Monday, April 8, 2024 I Vol. 120 Iss. 24
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STUDENT GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION ELECTIONS GUIDE Gender disparities reflect sexist incidents in SGA, female students say
The war in Gaza defines campus politics. It’s absent from SGA elections
HANNAH MARR
ZACH BLACKBURN EDITOR IN CHIEF
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t the end of this year’s term, less than a third of the senators in the Student Government Association were female. Of the 25 students running for a senate seat in this year’s election, nine identify as women. In contrast, almost 62 percent of students at the University identify as female. And in the SGA’s 115year lifespan, the first woman was elected president just 25 years ago in 1998. Since then, nine presidents have been women. Women in the SGA said the organization’s members and the public often doubt their leadership capabilities and question their authority — an experience that dissuades women from joining the body and pushes existing female leaders out. “Being a queer woman in this position for an entire year, I have felt the full brunt of sexism, which has been extremely difficult,” SGA President Arielle Geismar said. Geismar said she is questioned, interrupted and patronized on a “daily basis” by some of her male colleagues, who she said assume that they are the best person to speak on a matter, despite her position as the head of the institution. “The amount of times
SAGE RUSSELL | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2024 Student Government Association elections pose for a portrait.
I have felt belittled, or spoken over or patronized by men in the senate is embarrassing for them,” Geismar said. She said the standard of excellence for people who aren’t men is “impossible” to achieve, which has trickled down to the SGA. Women in SGA leadership, she said, have to work twice as hard as men, and when factoring in other intersectional identities, the
burden can triple or quadruple. Geismar said the entire SGA must educate men who are patronizing toward female members of the governing body instead of siloing the responsibility to female members. “It’s not the women who have been impacted by their behavior’s job to educate them,” she said. See COLLEAGUES Page 4
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he rumbles of protest and discontent have filled Foggy Bottom since October. The effects of the war in Gaza — clashes over campus free speech, incidents of Islamophobia and antisemitism, and the suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine at GWU — have defined campus politics since the war’s outbreak. Yet these issues have been largely absent from
Student Government Association presidential and vice presidential campaigns this year. Platforms posted online rarely acknowledged the tension, often doing so indirectly. As elections approach, candidates find themselves toeing a line between discussing issues they believe are imperative and evading on-campus controversy. “I don’t think candidates, in their eyes, want to say ‘the wrong thing,’”
said SGA Sen. Dan Saleem (CCAS-U), a presidential candidate. “But I think if someone is running for president, especially at this point, especially at this time and moment, they need to be ready to confront and address and handle situations like this,” he added. Three of the six top-ofticket candidates — Saleem, presidential candidate Lauren K. Harris and vice presidential candidate Aly McCormick — agreed to participate in interviews about why campaigns have not proactively discussed campus issues related to the war in Gaza. Presidential candidate Ethan Fitzgerald and vice presidential candidate Ethan Lynne answered questions over email. Presidential candidate Nicky Beruashvili did not return a request for an interview. The candidates offered a variety of reasons for not mentioning the tempestuous subjects, ranging from discomfort in or fear of publicly discussing the war to not wanting to further sow division between students for the purposes of a campaign. Multiple candidates said the arrival of a doxxing truck that displayed the names and faces of students supposedly involved in a pro-Palestinian student coalition spurred trepidation in speaking out. See ELECTIONS Page 4
The following isn’t breaking news, but local news is breaking down. Since 2005, a third of United States newspapers have shut down. Others have been gutted, losing staff members and resources. Now, even local online publications are being eliminated, with the District’s own DCist becoming the latest victim of this trend in February. Even the Washington Post trimmed its local metro section last fall. There’s a lot of coverage that gets lost in this shuffling — lo-
cal politics, sports and human interest all dissipate without local papers. But what’s also lost is coverage of local culture, writing about the area’s best food to eat, best areas to visit and best bizarre attractions. Nothing better exemplified this than the “Best Of” guides, a tradition supposedly invented by the San Francisco Bay Guardian in the 1970s. The issues involved a newspaper or magazine, especially alternative weekly papers notable for their spunky arts and culture coverage, rounding up the very best of everything in a city. In D.C., you can see this in Washingtonian and the City Paper, both
guides we’d recommend. With The Hatchet’s annual Best of Northwest guide, we have an exceedingly rare chance to look all around the Northwest quadrant and put to writing everything that makes D.C. and GW, well, D.C. and GW — the museum dates, the illegal lizards and the controversial delis. My mom, who edited New Haven’s alt-weekly, the New Haven Advocate, in the 1990s and 2000s, told me the week she’d work on the “Best Of” guide was the worst week of her year due to the sheer quantity of pieces she’d have to edit. After weeks of stress-induced dreams about empty Google Docs,
I sympathize with her. But for her, the finished product was something really one of a kind, a collection of fun, well-written articles memorializing everything that mattered in the city that year. Though, these guides don’t really exist anymore. The Bay Guardian still publishes their Best of the Bay roundup, but just as an online poll of readers, without any writing about that year’s winners. The Advocate shut down years ago, and its successor, the New Haven Independent, has never done such a collection of pieces. Here at The Hatchet, though, the “Best Of” guide is still alive and well, the culmination of the
culture section’s 0-12 work for the year. Each award recipient is tied to GW, be it a story about a student or based off a pitch from a member of the University. People say journalism is meant to be the first draft of history. The Hatchet’s culture section — where, rather than covering breaking news, we write about oncampus weddings — might not always achieve that lofty status. But through the Best of Northwest guide, we get to write a manuscript for all that has made living in D.C. and attending GW for the past 12 months remarkable.
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CULTURE EDITOR
Inside GWPD’s armed crisis simulation training
Jumpstart employees left confused after abrupt removal from program
ERIKA FILTER
DYLAN EBS
GW Police Department Chief James Tate aimed a Glock 17 at the projection of a man waving a knife. Tate stood with one foot forward, arms grasping the firearm as he spoke sternly to the simulation cast on the wall before him. “Put the knife down,” Tate barked. “Drop the knife. That’s all I need you to do, is drop the knife.” The man in the pre-recorded video yelled back, “There’s no talking!” But Tate continued to talk, insisting the man drop the knife until the suspect finally obeyed. In a dark room in the labyrinthine basement of Rome Hall, which houses GWPD’s campus headquarters, Tate practiced shooting a Glock 17 with a modified laser barrel in front of GW’s virtual training simulator — an approximately $50,000 piece of equipment made by military and police training company VirTra. Captain Ian Greenlee, one of two officers who run the simulator, said the Glock 17 was modified to feel and
Student workers for Jumpstart at GW spent up to five months in D.C. preschool classrooms, helping kids read and prep for kindergarten. But last month, for a handful of student volunteers, their work came to an abrupt end. GW Jumpstart officials said students who exceeded 300 hours and ran out of Federal Work-Study funds would be involuntarily removed from the education outreach program and barred from working in the public schools for the final two months of the D.C. school year. But some students said they were shocked by their sudden removal from the program, saying that in prior years they could continue to work at Jumpstart even if they passed the 300hour threshold. “For those of us who have put in a certain amount of hours, you get to the point where it’s like, you expect to be in the classroom and you get a lot of fun doing it,” said
NEWS EDITOR
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NICK PERKINS
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Welcome to The Hatchet’s 2024 Best of Northwest Guide
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ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
STAFF WRITER
DANIEL HEUER | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER GW Police Department Chief James Tate stands in the dark basement of Rome Hall, which houses GW’s virtual training simulator.
weigh about the same as the firearms seven officers currently carry on campus as part of a plan launched by the Board of Trustees nearly a year ago to arm 22 officers with 9 mm handguns. The first phase of the program — which consisted of the arming of Tate and Captain Gabe Mullinax — concluded in September and the second phase began with the arming of five additional officers in February. GWPD firearm training includes two hours of monthly training with the simulator, a requirement
the department announced last May. In a walk-through with The Hatchet last week, Tate first calibrated the simulator by firing the training gun at animated targets on the screen, then shot a warmup round, knocking down eight black, human-shaped silhouettes against the backdrop of a 3-D animated field. He then demonstrated the mock scenarios that GWPD officers undergo to train before receiving their firearms. See CHIEF Page 7
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JENNIFER IGBONOBA A Jumpstart sticker placed underneath the Honey W. Nashman Center sign
Thomas Lane, a sophomore who was forced from the program. “So it really kind of sucks that they’re like, ‘Yeah, you just can’t do it anymore.’” 14 of Jumpstart’s 72 student members have exceeded the 300-hour requirement, according to an April 3 spreadsheet of students’ logged hours obtained by The Hatchet. In a March 22 meeting with team leaders, led by Jumpstart Senior Site Manager Rochelle Yancey, officials said that if a student had run out
of FWS funding but had not reached their 300-hour cap, they would volunteer until they hit 300 hours and then subsequently be exited, according to meeting minutes obtained by The Hatchet. GW allocates upward of $375,000 each year in FWS funding to support more than 80 student Jumpstart workers who work an average of 10-12 hours a week, according to the National Partnership for Student Success. See WORKERS Page 7